Ham Meet Rye. Rye, Meet Ham

There's nothing quite like a great literary tattoo to start the week with a bang. This Bukowski comes from the hand of a friend of a friend - Lea Nahon who you can find here in all her unfettered glory. 

Lea is one of my personal top ten favourite artists in the world - proper feature type thing of many words coming your way in the next issue (#264) of the mag if you're looking for more. People can be quite vocal about Bukowski's right to be called 'literary', but you don't see many Thomas Hardy tattoos around, so I rest my case.

---

Out here in Lonely-Land, I'm just coming up to the end of a final draft of The Really Important Thing I've been working on these last few weeks. I'm pretty excited about it. It's some of the best work I've done - and I don't say that lightly. I'm my own harshest critic every single day of the week - and this is standing its ground on all fronts. I'll post updates when it gets where I think it's going and then... we wait.

THE DAYS RUN AWAY LIKE WILD HORSES

Thought I would share this with you in isolation here. I don't often see great tattoos of writers - maybe most writers don't have the sort of faces you would want on you permanently.

Now there's a thought. If you want to be remembered, cultivate your face.

Anyway, this is from the fair hand of my friend Veronika who works alongside Henrik Gallon - the man who has the sole rights to tattooing my arms.

You can find the pair of them right here.

WRITE YOUR HEART OUT

This week I've been making a road map of where it is I'm going right now. It's good to take stock of what you've got going on whatever it is you're doing - sometimes the results of such a meeting with yourself are pretty good and sometimes they can be shitty as hell. Either way, a meeting with yourself is usually pretty short and constructive unless you're careless and can't help but distract yourself with umm... a distraction.

If you're about to enter such a meeting with yourself, don't forget - not every day can be an all-time high. All that matters in the end is the work because one day you'll be dust in the wind and you don't want to leave behind a memory of being a miserable bastard your whole life just because things didn't go your way.

Anyway, to begin, I got grilled last week (or was it the week before?) by the guys at Infected Books for the release of The Family Of Noise and you can find the results of that right here. It's tempting for me to ramble on about what I actually talk about there but I'm learning to simply shut the hell up sometimes. Thanks for your time guys. It was emotional.

•••

Also before I forget, on my travels, I unearthed this gem from Emil at Old London Road tattoo studio. I've seen a few Bukowski nuggets over the last few years but this is great:

•••

While I was sticking pins in a map, (it's not a real map obviously, but now I think about it, there might something quite neat about hanging one on the wall. It's almost as cool as having one of those glass walls they use on crime shows for pinning up evidence), I came across some great images of St. Mark's Bookshop from when they moved premises last year. Take a look at these because all bookshops should damn well be like this (or at least variations thereof):

That's a thing of beauty right there. The whole shop was worked on by Clouds Architecture Office - if you hit that link, you'll also find some explanations behind the images along with some other great work - even if architecture is not your bag, you've got to hand it to them, that's one happening store.

•••

It just dawned on me that it's only a week until we do Publish & Be Damned at Waterstones. I actually have my shit together - or at least enough of it that I'm not concerned it will fall around my ankles like a pair of pants with no belt. I'm sad to say, there will be no pyro. I did ask but health and safety in the coffee shop absolutely forbids pyro of any kind. There are a whole bunch of flyers that look like this in store:

Help yourself to a handful and distribute them amongst your friends and neighbours - probably best if they are planning on writing a book but then again, I'll drink coffee with anybody so it's not a prerequisite.

•••

Currently reading:

...and it's really damn good.