i played the shape game!

It’s not a bad little set of online tools, really. You, too, can play the shape game! I wish there was an online gallery to see other people’s shapes, but a whole bunch of famous illutstrators have painstakingly transferred the game to real paper on sale on Ebay in support of the Rainbow Trust Children’s Charity. (You can see pictures by the likes of Anthony Browne, Axel Scheffler, Jane Ray, Rob Ryan, Lucy Cousins, and even non-illustrator people such as Philip Pullman, Anthony Horowitz and Jo Brand. (Thanks to Booktrust for Tweeting it.)

And you can now see the timetable for this weekend’s Caption comics festival! It’s going to be fabulous! Come along and hear talks by Melinda Gebbie, P.J. Holden, Sydney Padua, David O’Connell, Dino-Saw-Us, Paul Duffield, John Miers, Paul Cornell and Sydney Padua, plus workshops by Jeremy Day and Al Davison. And I’ll be talking on a DFC Library panel with Oxford-based Kate Brown (Spider Moon) and Neill Cameron (Mo-Bot High), and interviewing Darryl Cunningham about his latest book Psychiatric Tales. Come along, it’s a great place to mix with comics creators, buy small-press comics and generally feel chilled out and happy.

And for kids, I’m doing a picture book Space Hop event at the Paddington Children’s Library from 2:30-3:30 this Thursday, 29 July. It’ll be full of space adventures, tentacles and more googly eyes than you can count.