It's a weird feeling taking time off from your day gig. It takes a long time to acclimatise to it and then, just when you're really into it, it's over again. Luckily the day gig is something I still love, but still, downtime is invaluable for figuring out what's a tree and what's the wood.

Downtime does not mean days on end of box-sets though. Around here it means a clear runway at chipping away at the big pile of ideas that need wrapping up for my own sanity. First out of the blocks was Cities of the Dead and now, I've turned my attention back to my first love of music to hopefully wrap up a thick old thing that will probably be known as HOWL. I'm determined to get it at least finished by the end of the year - it's been the red-headed stepchild kept under the stairs for far too long.

I also unearthed an unfinished project I had 'put to one side' and then accidentally buried under a big pile of paper. I've mentioned it here before and that would be the Black Dye White Noise photo-book I was working on with my hyper-talented friend Chiaki Nozu. From only the initial few pages of design proofs, I can see it's way too good to leave lying at the side of the road, so let's see if we can't make some serious advances over the next few months. The cover looks a lot like this:

And because I think it's cool as the breeze, here's the first spread from the tour with Backyard Babies:

There will be words along the way too. This simply needs doing!

There's also a lot of Bear action going on today. I decided to bring the bigbearrescue.com concept back here to run as a blog instead of leaving it as some two bit site that didn't do anything by itself. Mostly on that front though, a new shirt designed by WolfSkullJack goes on sale in the morning - just check out the Bears tab above for that. It's a peach - here's an extreme close-up of the initial sketch just for the record: