Hello and welcome to Sofa Snippets, a weekly roundup of bits and bobs from my life and work.
If you’re reading this in your email inbox, it might be too long and you might be prompted to read it on the website. Sorry!
1. Morning Ink
This section is mostly about what my Morning Ink practice has shown me this week, and sometimes other general sketchbook insights.
This week’s Morning Ink has had a lot of table-top objects. Four cats (if you include a lion). Three fountain pens and a pencil. Five bottles of flowers and one bottle of ink. Three cups, a glass and a fruit bowl. Two notebooks. One grid day. And one landscapey scene.
The words included a fairly common theme of ‘I want to be busy’ and ‘I’m too busy’, with a smattering of deeper days, including a wish for a room of my own, some parental wistfulness on our youngest’s 16th birthday and, this morning, some ponderings on imagination - and limiting phrases that sit with you for decades.
In other sketchbooks, I think I was going all in with colour, but also digging into some of the texture that has come out within the Morning Ink pages and leaning into the visibility of the marks. For years I wanted only smooth flat colour, and pencils or crayons or felt tip pens that showed the marks of how I was colouring in blocks would annoy me. But now I see that these visible marks are actually part and parcel of my voice, or hand and are therefore to be embraced.
(Morning Ink is a section of my publication that goes out daily. You can toggle these daily posts on or off, via Manage Subscription.)
2. Illustration Business
This section is what I’ve been doing illustration business wise - drawing, outreach, and so on.
I did finish the folksy forest pieces I was doing, bringing a bit more texture into the pattern and producing these two placements.
And I made some colour tweaks to the bird post collection, so that they do now all feel like they go together.
I did some little bits and pieces on the website update, including having some breakthroughs in how to structure it, but still nothing to show you.
I uploaded a bunch of sell sheets to the agency, for outreach and pitch decks.
And I am semi-deep-diving into picture books at the moment, having joined Steph Fizer Coleman’s Let’s Make Picture Books membership. I’ve done her courses quite a lot and she’s very good. I’ve been rereading and rewatching some things from earlier course iterations, and enjoying the new material, too.
I bought a couple of beautiful picture books when I was in Cheltenham yesterday. The Woman Who Turned Children Into Birds, illustrated by Laura Carlin and written by David Almond, and My Self, Your Self, illustrated and written by Esmé Shapiro.
And I’ve been flicking through both picture books that we have on the shelves, and books about making picture books. I’ll also go dig back into The Good Ship Illustration Picture Book course and try some of the activities and rewatch some of the videos there.
For the first time (I think), I am doing this not as a pivot that is disguising a need to run away from the direction I’m already going in. This is in addition to and alongside the licensing work I’m doing through the agency and the marketing and outreach and admin. This is not a pivot, but creative growth and learning, which is essential.
3. Freelancing Work
This section is about freelancing life, including what I’ve been working on with my educational publishing hat on and just general bits about working from home in a self-employed capacity.
Bit of a weird week, really. Some quiet time and admin bits, with some extra work that we slotted in at short notice and that will mean I need to do some work today, too. I have a bit more of that to do next week, as well, plus some development editing work and then some proofreading following that. I’ve also booked in some more development work for November (for just before I go away and possibly might need to do a tiny bit on it while away) and a couple of blocks next year. Waiting to hear about a few other possible projects, too and very much appreciating the buffer that we have been building up, which means we are not trying to chase badly paid work to squeeze into quite periods - instead, we are embracing the quiet periods and accepting work that pays well and that we will enjoy working on, when it comes in.
I cannot express strongly enough what an important thing a good buffer is and how all freelancers should prioritise building one up. I think it will be the end of next year and possibly into 2027 before we hit the amount that I am aiming for for this buffer - depending on how much we need to dig into it.
4. Culture
This is the culture section - mostly what I’ve been reading, but might also include TV and film and wider culture, too.
I finished reading Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and started reading Come and Get It by Kiley Reid. I just finished listening to Andrea Levy’s Small Island this morning and got back to
’s We Need Your Art which I think may have contributed somewhat to my introspection in this morning’s Morning Ink post about my feelings about my imagination and its existence or otherwise.I enjoyed a good wander around two bookshops yesterday, as well as seeing some street art (I somehow forgot to photograph it). I spent the vast bulk of my time in the children’s sections (see above about deep-diving into picture books at the moment), but also had a wander round the other sections (including checking to see if List Happy was still on the shelves in Cheltenham Waterstones (there was one copy). Oh, and I also spotted
’s new book on display in the children’s section.
I love spotting books by people I know in bookshops - possibly more than spotting my own.
5. Substack
This is the Substack section - Substack posts or publications that I’ve particularly enjoyed over the past week.
Some of the Substack articles that have particularly moved me this week:
And some pretty or fun Notes I’ve noticed this week:
6. Food
This is the food section - meals I cooked, new food I tried, places I ate out, and other food-related bits and pieces.
The linguine was not the vegan version, it had cream cheese, cheddar and parmesan in it. Chris made the avocado and egg on toast. Yum. And then I heated up a tub of minestrone from the freezer. I am really loving putting extra food in the freezer and then actually remembering to use it. As well as these I did some eating out. Curio Lounge on Wednesday with friends, where I had the Dan Dan Noodles with Crispy Cauliflower and Soy Mushroom, which was very good, along with a Moretti Zero and some sparkling water. And Pizza Express yesterday, where I had Leggere Padana Pizza with some sparkling water. I have also had tofu and kimchi fried rice (last night, with some leftover for lunch today), some spinach and ricotta tortellini and on Thursday I ate my daughter’s food that she hadn’t been able to finish - halloumi burger and fries.
Still happily sticking with Sober October. Having a Drop Bear Beer when I feel like a beer (mostly that’s with a meal, especially a spicy one). Drinking fizzy water. Probably drinking a little bit too much Coke Zero (well, honestly, any coke is probably too much!). And embracing herbal and normal teas in the evenings.
7. Kitchen Table Chat
This last section is for general other stuff - things you might talk about over a cuppa at the kitchen table.
There has been a lot of thinking about death this week, with Jilly Cooper and my great uncle dying last Sunday and then Diane Keaton yesterday and both meetups with friends had a fair bit of talk of death. And I’ve been finding myself thinking about my parents quite a bit this week. I do think about them quite a lot all the time, but birthdays tend to bring them to the forefront of my mind, because we would get together on most of our birthdays (my sister and my mother had birthdays a day apart so almost always had to share) and share delicious food and play board games. Social Media and photo storage ‘memories’ also show me photos of birthdays with my mum there - not with my dad, generally, because he missed out on social media, though my sister and I do both often share photos of them on their birthdays.
I keep having a desire to write a Substack post about something. Sometimes I’ll even throw some ideas into a draft, but then the desire to write about it disappears and it the idea just fades away somewhere. Maybe I need to just dive straight in and write it next time this happens. On Monday, I had an idea for a piece about how Jilly Cooper’s death will now be forever linked to my Great Uncle’s and I was going to share about the impact each of them had had on my life and how meaningful that juxtaposition was. But, while I feel I still could write this, I don’t feel so strongly that I need to anymore and the motivation has almost gone. I also have a draft with a few notes about a piece entitled ‘A Room of My Own’ (no, it’s not an especially original title!) with my feelings and thoughts about why I need my own space (along with some deep apologies for the privilege of even being able to consider that possibility). But the feelings and urge to write that one is fading now, too. I know some people thrown notes into their drafts, or a notes file somewhere, whenever they have ideas for something to write and then they have a bank of ideas that they can just pull from when it’s time to write something.
Perhaps if I added a schedule for separate essays in addition to the weekly Sofa Snippets and the daily Morning Ink, I might feel more pull to write these. I am really loving these daily and weekly posts, but I do also miss the deeper dives that I have done in the past, like these:
Maybe aiming for one of those a month would provide motivation.
I hope you enjoy this weekly roundup format. I will still be writing some ‘proper’ posts on individual topics, but I enjoy reading these and it will keep me regularly showing up in your inbox (it has a section of its own, though, so you can untoggle it if you prefer, by going to Manage subscription).
Thank you for the pic of my book! It’s always exciting to see it in the wild. So many lovely things in this newsletter, thank you! X