The Spoons That Are My Ears!

The Lamblake Heinz spoof horror ebook now contains 50,000 words of fiction, poetry, novel extracts and musings. I want this collection to total at least 65,000 words, so it's not quite ready yet. But I feel confident it will appear before the end of June.

The charity to which all profits will be donated is Animal Aid. If the ebook makes more than £100 for them, there will be other spoof ebook collections to follow in other genres. One will be a collection of bad 'Romance' stories by Victoria Plum, or as she became known after her marriage to Dominic Job -- Victoria Plumjob.

While talking about 'lampoons' in a tone of reverence recently, I was overheard by the artist Chris Harrendence, who rejoined that a lampoon wasn't what most people thought it was, but a weapon used to hunt light-fittings. A blink of an eye later he produced this illustration to add force to his argument. And the fact that it's a lampoon of the actual concept 'lampoon' makes it even more convincing.

Chris has the endearing and constantly surprising habit of taking an offhand remark, going away for a few hours and returning with an illustration that captures the spirit of the concept better than the original remark did. I muttered something along the lines of, "Squinty the cyclops was short-sighted and had to wear a monocle; he was upset when the other cyclops kids called him, 'Two Eyes!'" and Chris came back not long afterwards with this excellent cartoon.

Publishers! Yes, you out there! Why not consider giving this fellow some paid work if you need a cover artist or interior illustrator? I have publishers all over the place, not only in Britain and the United States but in France, Russia, Italy, Spain, Portugal... Surely someone needs an artist? Harrendence's best work seems to combine the visionary irony of Edward Gorey, Gary Larson and Jože Tisnikar; and that can't be bad. And it isn't. In fact it's downright brilliant...