Dare I say it, things are moving along pretty well here. Tattoo Dynamite is off the desk - I hope it's as good as I think it is. There's a lot of competition out there at the moment, but this is a newsagents bookazine affair rather than a "book book", so distribution will be totally different.

Meanwhile, back in the sunny office upstairs, have begun making some solid inroads into my spoken word project. At the moment, it's going under the title of The Company of Liars and will kind of be a companion piece to The Language of Thieves and Vagabonds - but without any repetition of material (for that would be a bad thing). Headed towards mid-August with both of those but there's a fair old whack of work to get through.

Having mastered the technicalities of home recording, getting it to sound good and taking it as close to pro-studio production as possible, I need to figure out which is better - podcasting kit or GarageBand. If the plan doesn't fall apart and I haven't miscalculated how much material you can get on a CD, it should tip in at around 30 tracks and I'll make maybe four to five freely available as samplers to get it rolling.

Not even looked at the download options for this instead of knocking up hundreds of discs but the bigger plan is to start getting out to perform at some regional shows along the south coast here. My (well educated) guess is that it's probably tough to sell people the idea of paying for download material once they have left the venue and the odds of them picking up a spur of the moment CD are reasonably high - assuming they were going to buy anything in the first place.

Anyway, I made a couple of prototype tracks available online earlier this week to get some initial feedback on the concept itself and was met with much positiveness from trusted sources who I know would say it was shitty if it was. This is known globally as a "good start".

It's back to Ballad of the Goat Faced Boy later this week - which will probably surprise Mark a little. He probably thinks I'm dead at the moment...

Footnote: As I write this, there's some biblical scholar on the radio talking about Nephilim - using them as an analogy for challenges in life - biblical scholars should not misquote shit and know their bloody history else they will look very stupid.