I’ve been struggling with writing this blogpost for the last few weeks. I want to start properly posting on the blog again (sure, I’ve postedsometopicalposts, but it’s been nothing like my old routine), but I do want to catch folks up on what I’ve been up to, and that’s been … a whole lot of stuff.
This one’s coming to you folks much later than I’d intended, but it’s been a busy month.
Nearly a month ago, Goats Flying Press launched a Kickstarter campaign for the original graphic novel The Fables of Erlking Wood, by Juni Ba and myself.
I’d hoped to be back to blogging for a bit before this post happened, so it’d feel less like it came out of nowhere, but … for the last few months I’ve been teasing something big happening with work, and this Wednesday, it was announced –
Along with colourist/writer Jordie Bellaire, I will be part of the inaugural class of Tiny Onion’s brand new Artists in Residence program.
Hello, the Internet! It’s Saturday afternoon, and K has forbidden me from humming “Voodoo Mama” from the Babylon soundtrack because it’ll inevitably get stuck in her head and she’ll keep wracking her brain about where it’s from. So instead, you can listen to it:
I’m writing this from my other favourite café – the one where I’m friends with the owners. One of them had just come back from a coffee conference, and gave me a packet of coffee to take home, and made me a delicious pourover of an as-yet-unlaunched coffee.
When I last did one of these – sheesh, three months ago – I was writing them to figure out how I wanted to use the blog.
I feel closer to having it sorted out – it’s a good place to do series of posts about the samethought, for example, and post half-formed thoughts that you don’t particularly feel like following up on.
But once I stopped doing these updates, I realised they can fulfil a function other posts won’t. I don’t want to do dedicated posts with publishing updates – social media is better for that, since it’s far more “real time”, and a blog post on those lines would be instantly dated – and I have no place to self-indulgently talk about what I’ve been up to in life.
So that’s going to be the purpose of these going forward.
Due to many factors, including some physical ones, I’ve had to step away from doing much work in June – particularly in the back half.
In that time, I’ve been working on this outline for a comics mini-series (a four-issue horror story that I’ve codenamed SEASIDE). As I’ve written before, I finished around 80% of this before I stopped working on it, and only started back up in the last week of June.
In the meantime, I wrote two comics scripts and several blog posts and essays, so it’s not like I haven’t been writing. It’s more that I haven’t wanted to … take up space.
I have a habit of thinking back on my life twice a year – towards the end of the year, and in July, around my birthday. These are both arbitrary times to do this – I suppose ideally one should be thinking deeply about one’s life all the time – but it’s good to have mile markers where you can check if you’re headed in the right direction and if you need to make any adjustments.
It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m on my second cup of coffee. I usually drink only two cups of coffee a day – at noon and 6 p.m. – because historically, my body has had a low tolerance for caffeine, but I just like coffee so much that I decided to experiment with adding one more cup at 3 p.m. Doing this might turn me into a jittery, overemotional mess, but we’ll get through it together, won’t we?