It’s been a while since I sent one of these. Two months, to be precise, but I needed the break.
Nothing spectacularly off about these few months, but my back pain kept returning, and April saw my dad falling sick again, so I figured that my health and real life were more important. I wasn’t happy that I wasn’t posting my status updates (turns out I really like having them as a catalogue of what I was thinking about at any given time – because otherwise I just forget), but it was a necessary casualty of the strange fact that typing causes me back pain. Basically anything I have to sit in front of a computer for. And if there’s more work, then writing has to take a pause. I’ve also not drawn since January, if you’re wondering how seriously I’m taking it this time.
It’s odd to have a mundane activity like sitting and typing affect your health. They say sitting is the new smoking, and I don’t think you get how true that is until you’re in your late 30s and you can feel every day of sedentary work having an adverse effect on you.
Anyway, that’s why I’ve been gone for a bit (if you’re reading this via newsletter). I’ve still been blogging, and I’ll post a list of stuff I’ve blogged about below.
I’m writing this one on the phone, so I can do this with some elbow support (keeps the upper back muscles from hurting) or lying in bed.
A couple of months ago, I made a new friend and we were chatting about modes of creation, and he mentioned that when he travels, he walks around with a dictaphone-style voice recorder to record his observations to note them down later.
I’ve tried the dictation feature on both the phone and the computer, but it doesn’t work with the way I think about writing, but this gave me the idea to record rough first drafts as voice notes and then use an automated transcription service to get them in the form of text that I can rewrite.1 It’s not perfect, particularly with my Indian accent, but it’s quick, and I can usually tell what I was saying at any point. (For example, in this post, the name “Rom” got identified as anything from “ram” to “romp”, but it did surprisingly well with “Spaceknight” every time.)
I started doing this last month, and I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, or if they “sound” different, but the last several blogposts were originally dictated to a voice recorder and then rewritten. I did this so I have to sit and type less, but I’ve also enjoyed having a rough draft to rewrite rather than starting every post from scratch on a blank screen.
This is the voice recorder I’ve been using. It’s a bit expensive, but it’s really well-designed and well-thought-out, the reviewers all seem to love it, and it’s one of the few on the market that has a USB-C connector.
On the blog since we last spoke:
- Dune Part 2
- Autopilot Scheduling – I’ll be writing more posts about my work organisation, but this is something I’ve always found useful.
- Reading the X-Men Krakoa Era Part 1 and Part 2 – the first two posts of a readalong-style blog series in which I want to work out some thoughts on superhero fantasy, science fiction and comics.
A lot of books I lettered came out since we last spoke. Here’s a list of them, as complete as I could make it, though I’m sure I missed a couple:
- Hellblazer: Dead in America #2-4 with Si Spurrier, Aaron Campbell and Jordie Bellaire (DC Comics)
- The One Hand #2-3 with Ram V, Laurence Campbell, Lee Loughridge and Tom Muller (Image Comics)
- The Six Fingers #1-2 with Dan Watters, Sumit Kumar, Lee Loughridge and Tom Muller (Image Comics)
- Dawnrunner #1 with Ram V, Evan Cagle and Dave Stewart (Dark Horse)
- w0rldtr33 #8 with James Tynion IV, Fernando Blanco, Jordie Bellaire and Dylan Todd (Image Comics)
- The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #8 with James Tynion IV, Tate Brombal, Soo Lee and Patricio Delpeche (Dark Horse)
- True Weird backups in Blue Book: 1947 #2-3 (Dark Horse)
Upcoming this week (in case I miss the next update) are w0rldtr33 #9 and The Six Fingers #3.
Also, of special note, the True Weird backup in Blue Book: 1947 #2 was “The Monkey Man of Delhi” which, apart from being lettered by me as usual, was also written by me and drawn by Anand Radhakrishnan. It was lovely seeing it in print. It was originally published digitally on James’s Substack, and here’s what I wrote about it back when it came out.
I’ve worked a lot over February to April – around 220 pages per month, which is more than I’d like. This year, I had decided to re-emerge from semi-retirement, and make my presence felt. I know I said at the beginning of the year that I wanted to land at around the same number of pages as I did last year, but I was cautiously hoping to do a bit more than that – I kinda missed lettering.
By the end of March, though, I began feeling that this was too much – my back pain increased steadily, and I found much less time to write, read and watch movies.
Now, for most letterers, 220 pages a month wouldn’t be a lot of work, but I’m slow, I do a lot of actual drawing in my lettering rather than using templates, and I’ve never made speed a measure of my work. In any case, this wasn’t a whole lot of work every day – about 4-5 hours – but it was every day.
I could manage a few months of this, but the rest of 2024 looked about the same, which became a problem. My friend and colleague Ram pointed out that you only find your hard limit once you cross it, and I realised that I had been much happier with my work-life balance last year, when I was doing around 100 pages per month. I’d done a lot of work, and now I needed things to be mostly life. That was my hard limit, and I’d crossed it.
I was still prepared to white-knuckle it for the rest of the year and fix this for 2025, but then my dad fell sick, and I realised that what this workload really took away from me was flexibility – it was so much more difficult to drop everything and be there for my family, because dropping work now meant double-duty later, unlike last year, when I had enough free days that anything I needed to postpone had somewhere to go.
So at the start of April, I decided to go back into “semi-retirement”. I’d taken on a few projects for May onwards that I backed out of – those teams were all very gracious about it. And I took the particularly difficult decision to leave Hellblazer: Dead in America after #5, the issue I was already working on.
Like I wrote in my farewell email to the team, our original run on Hellblazer was not just my first work for DC Comics, it was also the only corporate book I’d wanted to make a mark on. Both as a writer (as is inevitable for anyone whose formative comics were Vertigo and Alan Moore) and as a letterer, I wanted to work on Constantine. So that’s been a huge item checked off of my bucket list, and it was why I said yes instantly when editor Chris Conroy asked me about lettering Dead in America with the rest of the same team – the incredible Si Spurrier, Aaron Campbell and Jordie Bellaire – even though my page count at the time was already creeping towards “a bit too much”. I’m going to miss this team, but I’m delighted that the new run has been successful enough to get an extension from 8 issues first to 9, and now to 11 issues. I can’t wait to find out what they do for the rest of the story.
I’m still at around 200 pages for the next couple of months, but after that, it drops off to around 150 till September, then to 100 per month, which works for me. I’m going to take this one seriously, like I took my break in 2022 – no more fucking around. I mean, I keep saying that, but it’s very difficult to keep to a promise like that when you really love your work. Ah, well. We live and learn.
No reading/watching updates this week – I’m planning to do a big roundup of capsule reviews mid-week for everything I’ve read and watched but not blogged about, so that I can still keep a count for the end of the year, after which I’ll go back to the usual format.
See you folks next week!
- I am, to be clear, very ambivalent about the current AI hype, partly because much of what is being talked about isn’t really “AI” in any identifiable way, and the term is being used to sell you plagiarism engines when it comes to creative applications of text, images and video. However, algorithmic models based on machine learning have been around for decades, and they have their uses, particularly in cases where using human labour would be a waste of everyone’s time (we see examples of this in the simulation software used in CGI animation to animate water, hair and light – you wouldn’t want those things to be done by people). In regular life, I feel speech-to-text is one of these “good” use cases, as we see with digital assistants (which would, mind you, be highly improved by “AI”, if anything). For me, paying someone to transcribe diary entries and rough drafts of blogposts is a non-starter – too private or too trivial – so AI transcription makes sense. What it helps me with is allowing me to type less, and it saves me from having to listen to my own breathy, pause-infested voice recordings. ↩︎