My failure to update Odd-Fish, as mentioned on the update on the 5th May 2009, is blamed squarely on events in ‘real life’ that have conspired to keep me away from biros and Photoshop.
Where to start?
Not least has been how busy we are at work. As some of you may know, I work for the British National Heath Service (The NHS) as a health advisor taking calls from people with health problems, assessing their need and directing them to the appropriate level of care. (anything from an emergency ambulance down to ‘take a couple of aspirin and see your doctor in a week if it doesn’t improve.’) Usually we’re pretty busy but I sometimes get time between calls and in breaks to think of ideas for Odd-Fish and sometimes if we’re unusually quiet (like during something ‘good’ on telly) even get a few minutes to jot down some sketches.
Not any more.
Since the arrival of Swine Flu our phones have been virtually melting under the onslaught of incoming calls from people with a huge range of symptoms, real and imagined, all convinced that they are Swine Flu’s equivalent of Typhoid Mary. There’s no longer any time to even take a mouthful of water or to glance out of the window (if our office had windows) between calls let alone think about pink octopuses or pick up a biro. The additional consequence of being so busy is that when I do get home at somewhere between eleven and night to two in the morning my head is spinning and I just want to veg out.
On top of all that Mrs Nobody and I started making plans to move house. We’re are heartily sick of living in the centre of a busy town like Ipswich with other people living so close by that you can practically hear their thoughts. Or you would be able to hear their thoughts if the sound of their music didn’t drown it out along with your own thoughts, your TV and the sound of the chavmum swearing at her children ten doors down. We’ve GOT to get out of here and move to a nice quite village location or better still somewhere in the countryside or even better an uninhabited planet on the other side of the universe. Quiet apart from our own sanity, we’d rather like to start thinking about producing some mini-Nobodys. At nearly forty-two I’m not getting any younger, I don’t want to be an Old Dad and Mrs Nobody’s body-clock is ticking so loudly you can hear it on the moon. (as long as the neighbours don’t have their music on) We’re absolutely not-never no-way no-how going to have any sprogs living here. I can’t think of a worse place to bring up kids.
So anyway, we started preparing our house to receive potential buyers. We de-cluttered it ruthlessly, we sold a load of stuff we hadn’t used in years and we redecorated every room in the house. I never EVER want to paint another artex ceiling again. I don’t like artex ceilings at the best of times but they were here when I moved in and I’ve never gotten around to doing anything about them. The week leave I had off work when I should have been relaxing and drawing cephalopods we were working intensive dawn-to-dusk and beyond sanding, painting, scrubbing, gardening, repairing, sorting, grouting and scraping until the house is shiny, spotless and decorated in a fresh neutral palette (Thanks House Doctor!)
We booked a valuation, an interview with a mortgage advisor and started looking around local estate agents for something within our budget in a suitably remote location.
Lo! and behold! Almost immediately we found something that seemed ideal. With no time to waste and even though it was rather jumping the gun because our house wasn’t yet on the market and we hadn’t spoken to the bank we arranged to go and see this wonderful three bed house in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere.
It was exactly the right sort of house in every way. Three bedrooms, upstairs bathroom, small but roomy garden, gas heating and even a little mini-study for me to use as a studio to work on Odd-Fish in. What made it especially perfect was that its location in a village I lived in as a teenager which I knew very well and had loved living there. Not only that it but the house was in the same street I had lived in. Couldn’t be more perfect.
The house had been on the market for more than a year and a half with little interest despite it’s excellent price. The agent said the lack of interest was down to its location in the middle of nowhere but that doesn’t bother me. I’ll happily take an hour’s drive to work along winding country roads over living in the fetid hole that is Ipswich. So no interest in the house for eighteen months… until the day we went to view it of course when someone who’d viewed it six months earlier suddenly put in an offer and had it accepted. Arse.
Never mind, we reasoned, if it was so easy to find one house that so perfectly fits our needs there’ll be others, right?
Next was the visit to the bank to speak to the mortgage advisor and this is where it all goes pair-shaped. Sure, in principle, once we sell our house, the proceeds will be plenty enough to pay off the existing mortgage and still leave enough equity to put down a healthy deposit on a new house. The resulting shortfall on price we’ve been looking at houses for is well within the scope of the amount we can borrow based on my NHS wage and still be (just about) affordable. No problem there. But.
But. and it’s a bigger BUT than an elephant addicted to Big Macs, there are two small outstanding debts on my credit history left over from a failed attempt seven years ago to set up my own business. The debts have defaulted and been left forgotten and disregarded festering on my credit file. Together they’re for about £600 and the creditors who own them have neglected to tell me about it for a very long time. We’d thought that the legacy of those very bad times when we were living on nothing, paying off credit cards with credit cards and hiding behind the furniture when there’s a knock on the door were long gone. We thought we’d settled all the debts and were just beginning to enjoy the daylight at the top of the long, hard, slow climb from the pit of debt. But no. These two small debts, the result of a bank closing our account while overdrawn were still sitting there at the bottom of the pit like some kind of financial Sarlacc waiting to drag us down into its maw once again.
“So pay them!” I hear you cry.
Ok. yes. That’s sensible. If we tighten our belts we should be able to scrape enough together in a few months and pay off those last lingering ties to our incautious past. But that’s not the problem. Oh no. The mortgage lender will not touch us until we have had a clean credit file for three years. THREE YEARS! That means even if we paid the debts tomorrow we are still stuck in this hole, listening to other people’s home made speedcore and Vauxhall Corsa street racing for another THREE YEARS.
Sod that for a game of soldiers.
The way I see it we’ve got four options.

1. Stay here until I lose the plot, buy a gun and climb a clock tower
2. Win the lottery and buy my own island somewhere
3. Buy a gun, rob a bank and buy my own island somewhere
4. Sell this house, invest the equity and rent for three years

I’m leaning towards option four but I’m concerned that it still puts our plans to spawn on hold and what of our pets? Will we be able to find a nice rental house that allows pets?.
Of course there’s always option five: Become a famous illustrator and get rich on the proceeds but if it hasn’t happened yet, it seems unlikely that I’ll get ‘discovered’ any time soon. I’m not holding my breath.
Can anyone think of an option six? Better yet, can anyone give/lend me a hundred grand?

So there you are. The reasons why Odd-Fish hasn’t been updated in a month. Not excuses, just real life.
Sorry about the blog being a bit of a downer, it’s all been a bit trying lately. On the plus side though, at least we’ve now got a tidy, clutter-free and freshly painted home! Ooh! Silver lining!
Back to Odd-Fish

Several people have asked to see the design for the new Zebra Queen Button badge a little more clearly, so, just for them, here it is.
Enjoy.

Work is still ongoing with the Odd-Fish playing card deck.
I’ve now done the back design, plus all four Kings, two Queens and one Joker. Just two more queens, four Jacks and one Joker to go (plus the un-illustrated number cards of course) and it’s done. That make me just under half way through this project.
The difficulty I have with completing this and other projects is time. Ah yes, time, that finite resource that dogs our heels and limits our progress.
Time is poisonous, you know. Too much of it will kill you and yet we always seem to want more

Well that’s it, Odd-Fish is committed to the UK Web & Mini Comix thing 2009 in March next year.
My table is booked and paid for and now I have just five months to prepare for my first ever convention appearance. Nervous? you betcha!

I’ve booked an end table against the wall, near and in a clockwise direction from the entrance.
When I went earlier this year as a punter rather that exhibitor I made notes on how I felt about positioning within the exhibition hall and what my thoughts were. It seemed to me that it’s instinctual to turn left as you come in the entrance and move clockwise around the room, taking in the edges of the room first before moving to the rows of tables in the middle of the room.
By the time I reached the tables on the far right of the entrance, or those up on the stage at the back, I was beginning to lose concentration and perhaps didn’t give them as much attention as I did the first few tables I saw.
I also noticed that many of those webcomics I am familiar with and think of as ‘high profile’ were to the left of the entrance in the first area as you go clockwise. Weebl, Ali Graham (Afterstrife & Housed), Dr McNinja, James Turner (Beaver & Steve), Scary Go Round for example.
See you there!

Today we learned that our lovely sleek tabby tomcat, Ziggy has cancer.
He has a large lump on his right shoulder that seemed to come up pretty much overnight so we took him to the vets who did x-rays and took a biopsy sample of the lump (Hence him being shaven & stitched in the photo)
Then today we got a call from the vet with his biopsy results and confirmed that Ziggy has a malignant fibrosarcoma. That’s a cancer of the connective tissue in his shoulder and right ‘arm’.
The vet has tentatively offered the following options (she won’t be totally sure until after consulting with her colleagues tomorrow):

1) Do nothing and enjoy Ziggy for however long he has left. The type of tumour is apparently slow-growing and so he might have several months or even years left. It’s also possible the tumour will stop growing. The downside is that if the tumour does grow, we may lose the chance to operate. I’m also concerned as the tumour appeared very quickly and I don’t trust that it will slow down or stop.

2) Full chemotherapy, regular MRI scans, bloodwork etc until the cancer goes into remission. This has the highest chance of complete recovery, but is likely to cost several thousand pounds and we’re very worried about Ziggy’s quality of life while undergoing this type of treatment.

3) Remove as much of the tumour as possible. However, there is a 70% chance the cancer will return in the near future.

4) Amputate the leg and shoulder. This would offer a more complete removal of the cancerous tissues as it’s on and around the shoulder blade and the cancer is much less likely to return.

After much discussion this evening and assuming these options are going to be valid, we’re leaning towards option 4. We’ll find out more tomorrow, including detailed costs and such.
I hate to be mercenary but we have to be realistic the final decision is going to boil down to what we can afford which is why I am appealing for donations towards the prohibative cost of this surgery. I hate to beg, but poor Ziggy cannot ask for himself and it is my duty to help him if I can.