Launch of ‘The Exciting World of Churchgoing’

My new book, The Exciting World of Churchgoing will be available at the Greenbelt Festival and quite possibly in the shops this week. Hooray!

It is the third book of my Church Times ‘Guide to the Church’ cartoons. There’s no launch party planned. Perhaps I should organise one. Bit late really as people won’t have time to hire all of the formal kit etc.

[Aside: You can (when it becomes available) get the book via your local Christian bookshop, or via Amazon, Church House Bookshop, Waterstones or the publishers, Canterbury Press.]

Nightly appearance at Last Orders

This is the most exciting but most terrifying thing in the world for me at the moment. I will be showing some cartoons and doing some very limited talking in ‘Last Orders‘ on each night, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Last Orders starts at 11pm and is in the 2000 seater ‘Centaur’ venue, and other people on the bill include proper comedians like Milton Jones. Oh dear, what have I got myself into? On the plus side, whenever I have done these things before I have loved doing them and people have found them quite enjoyable and there has been some polite applause at the end.

No, I haven’t prepared it yet.

Cartoon Exhibition in the Church Times Tent

Some of my latest diagrams and some from the book will be on display in the Church Times tent. These will include ones like ‘The Periodic Table of Churchgoers’ which have thus far not been widely available beyond the newspaper.

The Church Times tent is in front of the grandstand. This year the tent has swapped places with the ‘Hub’ Literature venue as the Church Times was found to be on dodgy ground. By implication this means that the Literature is now on dodgy ground. This is a conundrum I haven’t yet got to the bottom of.

Map of Greenbelt in the ‘Church Times Guide to Greenbelt’

Every year I do a map of the festival site and moan about how difficult it is to draw for weeks on end to anyone who will listen. You can get hold of it in the free Church Times Guide to Greenbelt, available from the Church Times tent or from touts (ie me) who will be handing it out.

Loitering

When not doing other things I’ll generally be hanging around in the Church Times tent pretending to help. Do come and say hello, and perhaps we can meet up for a cup of tea or beer. Not too much beer though, as I must be alert during the evenings.

Other

I think I might be part of some comics thing. I don’t really know about that.

[This post is mainly written so that when people ask me things I have something to point them to.]

Why I’m not taking on freelance cartoon commissions

1) Nearly all of my time is taken up with ongoing work. I’m now doing two days a week in London in an ‘acting web editor’ role for the Church Times, and the rest of my time is spent on paid blogging, doing my regular cartoons for publications, admin, you name it.

2) I’m really not that good at them. By that I mean that commissions take me a huge amount of time, far more than I could ever charge for, and cause a lot of stress, far more than it would be acceptable to publicly moan about.

3) My best work happens when I’m free to choose the subject, captions and pictures. Ideally it is best if I have some knowledge of the topic in question. Recently I’ve had commissions where none of these have been the case, and they haven’t worked terribly well. I don’t like doing work that I do not think is really good.

In future I might go back do doing freelance work, but for now this is the situation. I do have one or two jobs still to finish, but these will be the last. I’m hoping that you’ll see the results in terms of more and better cartoons done just for the fun of it, better blogging, better filing of pieces of paper into numerical order, etc etc.

ENDS

(No idea what the point of ‘ENDS’ is. Just seen other people do it.)

On Wednesdays and Thursdays I go on the train with my collapsing bicycle to the offices of the Church Times newspaper in the Barbican area of London. I’m doing web editing there on a temporary basis.

This marks a bit of a change. In summary I’m cutting down on the cartoon work that I do as I’m not very good at it. By this I mean that all such jobs take me more time and cause more sleepless nights than I can charge for. I charge by the sleepless night.

I’ll still be doing the regular cartoons: Church Times, Youthwork, Quadrant. I hope to spend more time on this website and in sorting out the shambolic state of things such as my licence renewals (in summary: keep using the cartoons). It is still worth contacting me about new opportunities if you can offer a good £ per sleepless night rate.

I’m pleased to be able to announce that a third book of my diagrams has just been published. It is called ‘The Exciting World of Churchgoing’.

The book contains 90 cartoons from my Church Times ‘Guide to the Church’ series, and costs £6.99. The publisher is Canterbury Press – their page about the book is here: Dave Walker – The Exciting World of Churchgoing. There are also webpages on Church House Bookshop, Waterstones and Amazon. You can of course be able to buy it from a local Christian bookshop. If you wanted to ask them to stock it that would of course be marvellous.

Click here to see all of my cartoon books and calendars.

Above: Empty office. Note heater and powerpoints. The computing department will be on the left I think, and the drawing department on the right. The location of the filing department is still to be determined. It looks a bit dark – that is because the lights aren’t on, it was cloudy and the windows are tinted a bit.

(Click ‘read the rest of this entry’ for more of this kind of thing.)


Above: Office seen from other end. I think this end would look nice with a sofa. Note the intercom. (Apologies to those who now have a piece of paper saying ‘heater, powerpoints, intercom’ that will confuse them in coming days.)

Above: View from the window looking to the right. Note dual carriageway, allowing traffic to travel in either direction. The cranes in the background are building Basildon’s Olympic stadium or somesuch. The sign is advertising Safestore, my landlords. My address will be Suite 14, Safestore, Basildon. Prestigious or what.

Above: View from the window looking the other way. I will use this view to inspire entries for ‘the dullest blog in the world’.

Thank you for taking the time to look at these pictures. You may now continue with your activities.

So, what have I been up to? Well, in the last few weeks every hour of every day (more or less) has been taken up completing my 2011 calendar. Here’s a tiny preview, which will probably make very little sense out of context:

I have to say that this calendar has been more effort than any of the others, but is the one I am most pleased with. I’d almost go as far as to say it could be the best set of diagrams I’ve ever done, but that might sound rather big-headed.

More information will be appearing at some point before too long. The calendar will be published by Canterbury Press in July – the official page is here – that isn’t the actual cover, they just have to put something there whilst waiting me to get my act together.

I’ll be back on this blog properly next week, when there should be some updates to the site and things like that. In the meantime please forgive a lack of response to e-mails and suchlike as I am busy being an enthusiastic Christian etc.

I’m pleased to be able to announce the Dave Walker / CartoonChurch app, enabling you to look at my cartoons on the iPhone and iPod Touch. If that link doesn’t work type ‘CartoonChurch’ or ‘Dave Walker’ into the search box on iTunes and you’ll find it. The app is free, and there are no advertisements. It was originally going to be called ‘CartoonChurch’, but that word is too long to fit under an iPhone icon so it shows up on the screen as ‘DaveWalker’. it is compatible with iPhone and iPod touch (2nd generation) and requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later if that means anything to you.

So, what is on this app? Essentially it is the latest updates from five of my various projects, namely:

1. The 10 latest posts from this blog
2. The 10 latest CartoonChurch.com cartoons
3. The 10 latest We Blog Cartoons cartoons
4. The 10 latest Dullest blog in the world entries
5. And, just to fill up the space, my latest Twitter posts (I’d say about 10). How interesting.

Good things about the app: I’m generally really pleased with the way the cartoons display. You can resize them, but if you tilt the screen 90 degrees into a landscape view you generally don’t have to. You can look at the sites in your browser, e-mail cartoons or post them to Twitter by clicking the icon in the top right hand corner. All marvellous innovations. When looking at an individual cartoon the up/down buttons make moving on to the next one really easy. Touch the screen to make the navigation bar at the top appear and disappear.
Not quite so good: There is an occasional bug when using the app in landscape mode and using the back button – it sometimes remains at the wrong width. If at any point you’re not getting the full width turning the app back into portrait mode and then back again into landscape always rectifies it. Clicking one of the other five categories sometimes does.

So, how did this app-making business come about? Well, I tend not to like to write about electronic purchases too often as it makes me sound rather materialistic (which I am, but no-one must know), but since Christmas we’ve been rather getting into the world of the iPod Touch. In the New Year a couple of well-known blogs (Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki) were offering special codes for discounted apps on AppMakr, so I thought I’d give it a go.

The process has not been without considerable complications – if anyone else is interested in making an app via this route please ask me and I will share some of the pitfalls in another post. I also have a discount code (not as good as the one I used I’m afraid) to post, but I think I should write more before posting it so you know what you’re letting yourselves in for. [Update: Have noticed that the code I was sent yesterday expired at the end of January. have asked for another. Will write more about the process of making the app later this afternoon.]

In the meantime I hope those of you with the technology to do so enjoy the app. If you like it and felt like rating it favourably and/or writing a review that would of course help me. Apologies to those without iPhones or iPods – this is, I’m sure, a deeply irritating blog post.

Update: There is a FAQ page here: Dave Walker / CartoonChurch iPhone app

Below: Page in iTunes.

People who notice these sorts of things might notice that I’ve recently done a few cartoons for Youthwork the Conference and also some (about this time last year) for the National Charter for Youthworkers (example above). The series will be a bit like my ‘Guide to the Church’ ones, except about youth work, hence the name.

With this in mind I am desperately in need of cartoon ideas. I will therefore being going to Youthwork the Conference in the fair town of Eastbourne the weekend after next, (I’ll be there Saturday 21st / Sunday 22nd November), to loiter and hopefully talk to some youth workers to find out what they do these days. If you are going to the conference I will buy you a coffee or a small fruit juice if you will talk to me about such things. And indeed, it would be great to meet anyone else who is there, cartoon ideas or not. If you’re going do get in touch.

Just for information: I’m not stopping any of the things I currently do (except possibly being grumpy at cats who get in my way around the house and drivers who don’t indicate).

A post outlining my hopes for this blog, going forward.

I have encountered some difficulties recently, so it has been quite quiet here. I’m sorry about that. I hope to do rather more posting here though as I do rather enjoy writing this blog. I also plan to put up a whole load of new downloadable cartoon material on the site for subscribers as there hasn’t been any for a while. I might also scan some diagrams from the ‘to scan’ pile.

Thanks for your patience anyway. Feel free to repost this cartoon elsewhere.

Hello everyone. Happy Christmas! (I had planned to post this before now, but was prevented from doing so by a glitch – see diagram above, which has little to do with to do with the topic of this post, but it is one of my favourites from the year which I don’t think I’ve made public anywhere.)

Anyway, this is my end of year blog post, which I have a tradition of doing (I did one last year).

2008, brief review of

• It hasn’t really been a very good year on this blog, has it? Looking back at my list of blog posts show that things have declined somewhat.
• In February I started to write the Church Times blog, which has meant that I’ve had less time to devote to this one, but this site has, if truth be told, suffered rather more than I had intended.
• I will remember 2008 as the year of the Lambeth Conference. I was immensely privileged to be asked to be part of it doing my drawings in my medium-sized tent. I still have, if the truth be told, not really recovered.
• Canterbury Press very kindly published My Pew: Things I have seen from it in the summer. Other projects during the year included cartoons for the What am I doing here? book, the Autism and Asperger syndrome guidelines for churches and the Youthwork cartoon series which I hope will be fully revealed shortly.

2009, plans for

• I intend to spend most of January worrying about my tax return.
• The end of February is my deadline for the 2010 Dave Walker Guide to the Church Calendar, so if last year is anything to go by the month will be spent looking out of the window trying to think of ideas for it. (Aside: This years is still available).
• In April we’re going back to Spring Harvest… I know, who would have thought it? Purely as an in-depth reporter you understand, not because I’m turning Evangelical on a closet basis.
• 2009 might turn out to be the year of cartoon canvasses, new greetings cards and the sorting out of shambleses. We shall see. (I’m fully aware that ‘shambleses’ isn’t valid English in most places by the way, but here in my computing office it is a well-understood and appropriate term).
• I’ve no other plans as yet. I think the Bible advises not to make too many. We live in uncertain times, so who knows what will happen, but if I have one resolution it is to try and enjoy myself a bit more doing what I am so fortunate to be doing rather than being so continually anxious about it all.

All best wishes to everyone reading – Happy New Year.

(Posted this time last year, but I doubt anyone will have really noticed.)