When I decided to take a break to write, I really should have been stricter with myself and only started one book. Instead, I started three. While multitasking and context-switching may be a good thing in the fast-paced, high tech world of the Internets (and I'm not convinced it is), there's a chance it's really unhelpful when you're trying to write a book.

That said, I have at least finished one of the books:

How to Catch a Cold

It's a pencil and watercolour illustrated story about a boy's attempts to avoid school by catching a cold.

Now to move onto the second stage of book writing: wallpapering my bedroom with rejection letters.

Really, it looks worse than it is.

For reasons of top-secret international security, I can't go into details but I'm back in hospital. pic.twitter.com/wWgaU100vJ

— Simon Madine (@thingsinjars) April 27, 2014

I'm actually just getting my tonsils out but seeing as it's only really teenagers that get their tonsils out, I'm trying my best to pretend there's a parasitic fungus attacking the planet rendering everyone helpless and my blood is the only cure.

Yes I'm bored.

Things will be quiet here for the next few months. I'm taking a break from tech writing for a while to see if I can write something else.

You might remember the last time I did this when I wrote Explanating and tried the (admittedly, not very successful) read-then-buy experiment.

I'll update again when I've got something to show for myself.

Regular readers will have noticed there hasn't been anything much to read regularly here for a while. That's because I occasionally like to remind myself I'm not actually a geek, I just play one on TV. The rest of the time, I have totally different hobbies, one of which is drawing. The last time I seriously sat down and devoted several hours to drawing anything besides cartoons and application diagrams was in 2011 when I drew Oskar. Seeing as he grows pretty fast, it was about time for another.

Here are some shots of the progress:

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And the finished drawing:

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Of course, this isn't drawn from a live posing session. There is no way Oskar would sit still for even 2 minutes, never mind the 10 hours it took to draw this. Jenni took an amazing photo of Oskar in the Westberlin coffee shop which provided the perfect reference.