I'm at a bit of an impasse with a few projects. Maybe it's because I'm overtired, or getting a bit depressed, I dunno.

Anyway, I dug out a bunch of scripts for a strip series I wrote some years ago and I think they're really quite good and have plenty of potential. I'd like to draw 8 of them as part of my submission to Operation Funnybone, but I just can't seem to select ones that work that way. As a series of nearly 40 strips, they're funny, with the humour growing out of the characters and situations, but that's exactly the problem: taken in isolation there's very few of them that work. The fact that the peripheral characters are the really funny ones compounds the problem, as I need to feature the main characters in such a short selection.

I'm also trying to do some short pieces. The first one, I just can't get the wording of the last panel right! Jill thinks one idea works better, and J thinks another. I'm not sure either of them is really funny, but overall the piece works, it's just the ending that bugs me!

I have a lot of projects on the go, but am too tired most evenings to work on them. It probably doesn't help that I spent a big part of today at an industrial rally, which is unfortunately already looking like a completely lost cause. We seem to be headed towards an era of absolute conservatism - I find that depressing!

I've started reading The Magician's Nephew to J and L, marvelling as ever at Pauline Bayne's illustrations. There are themes and elements in the early chapters that recall Till We Have Faces, but maybe that's not surprising considering Lewis wrote both.