It is very late, and I won’t get very much sleep tonight. I really, really don’t care. It’s done. It is done. IT is DONE.

The Emerald City ComiCon is on Saturday. I’ve got things to do, oh yes, but for the next two days? Nothing! Nothing, I say. I will play with my cat and watch some movies and talk to my boyfriend about something that isn’t comics or Photoshop and, oh yes, sleep. I am terribly excited about these things.

But not as excited as I am the upload finishing in the background of my overtaxed computer. Yes yes.

More previews to come in the next few days – oh, the pretty pictures I have to show you.

This is both super cool and a little unnerving.

Aaaaand I should get back to drawing my cover and such. You know – the smaller details. I have an inked version sitting in front of me, but I think I like everything on it but my heroine’s face. Whoops.

And so much is left to be done! For instance:

• The cover: penciling, inking, painting.
• Try to finish this cat zine of mine so I can have it at the convention
• See if I have a good night to devote to doing the drunk zine
• Decide what on earth I want my booth to look like
• See about getting paintings printed

And so on. I could make this list 40 items long, if I felt so inclined, but these are the things I’m actually thinking about. There’s also a larger item, entitled “Do not make yourself insane,” which includes things like exercise, reading, and not shorting myself of sleep. However, I know me, and adding such an item would only make me unhappy that I managed to do no such thing.

I’m at a good place; T-minus 13 days, and the bulk of everything is done. It’s just hard to see that right here, and it will be until I’m sitting happily in my living room atop boxes of printed books.

I didn’t help myself tonight; I spent a weird amount of time (like an hour!) reading old Questionable Content strips. I’ve gotten a vague impression, from the small amount of webcomics-related criticism/bitchery I read, that it’s kind of popular or trendy to slag QC, but I really like it.

I like that if you read the whole of the archives, which I did in three nights when I first found it, you get a very specific picture of one person’s artistic education. I like the banter and the swearing and that the characters are just far enough away from regular life to be fun to watch, but not so far that you’re drawn out of the story. I like that it’s about half a universe away from ours, so you can get some really wonderfully strange “And now for something completely different” moments now and then. It’s also nice to read a graphic story about (mostly) regular people doing regular things. As those are the kinds of comic stories I tend to write, it’s reassuring to see that kind of story being told and to see that it’s not made boring by its generally domestic setting. I even enjoy its glacial pace. I think there’s an honesty to it about the pace of graphic storytelling.

*I got this term from Dan Clowes, who used it in a derogatory way about the stories in Twentieth-Century Eightball. However, I usually use it in a complimentary way. The stories in that book are my favorites of his, and I like pretty much all of his work anyway.

Why am I thinking of this? Because:

Because that’s 23 inked pages in my hands (two pages per sheet of bristol), and I feel toward them the way many people seem to feel toward their children. This stack feels like an artifact I’ll be carrying around for the rest of my life. The longest graphic work I’ve completed so far.

This is only a step. Here’s what I have to do still:

• Scan
• Fix fucked-up panels (there are a few – I’m looking at you, crab-handed main character)
• Letter
• Lay out
• Get printing quotes
• Print this thing
• Sell it to an unsuspecting public

It’s enough to make a person want to go to bed.

Oh, in the interest of being honest in media and not giving the children misleading ideas about what ladies actually look like, I’m TOTALLY Photoshopped in that picture.*

*True – I’ve got a really painful zit an inch above the spot between my eyebrows, and it’s been bugging me so much that the idea of preserving it in any way bugged me too much to allow. Smoke and mirrors!

Here’s what’s on my little drawing pedestal thing right now.

As my gaps get smaller, I’m finishing whole pages more; I think I’ll finish this pair tonight. Along with others.

Yesterday, I went to an Artful Investigation class at my friend Jenna’s studio. It was a lovely break – I’ve been mostly alone with my art lately, and mostly following a pretty strict process. Yesterday, I got to be elbow-deep in sequins, paint, glitter, collage material, china markers (my new favorite), tape, and all manner of other supplies. There were six of us plus Jenna; I forget sometimes (but try to remind myself) of what a lovely, nourishing experience it is to be around a table with other women and just create. There’s a feedback to it that’s completely friendly and not at all competitive – oh, how did you get that effect? How did you make that bird? That’s just amazing, I’m so glad to be here while you’re making such a beautiful thing. There’s an intoxicating gentleness to it. I came home and slept four hours last night, just because I’d used this very specific muscle for a good eight hours.

Here’s a peek at what I made.

Here’s my stack o’ bristol on my lovely handy drawing pedestal device.

12 pieces of paper, 23 half-size pages.

I’ve scanned them, and I’m going to back up the files online, because I’m so paranoid I might as well add a nice tinfoil chapeau to my collection. This is partially because I realize that if anything went awry tonight, I would, as the kids say, cut a bitch if anyone tried to hurt my pages in any way, shape, or form. I have no desire to do this. Hence, I will be placing them out of reach of the cat.

My head hurts, but I’m jittery excited right now. Man, this is fun. Wednesday: inking. Tomorrow, however, I have different plans:

I’ve read this one for quite some time, but this particular strip sums up so much of what makes me cackle. I love the media she uses – characters can be bobby pins or Band-Aids or foil or other bits of cut-out paper and fabric scraps, often as unexpected as they are appropriate. At first glance, this makes the strip seem deceptively folksy and cute. Then, suddenly: voodoo head-shaped pancakes, and fork-inflicted wounds! Or any other number of sly jokes tinged heavily with cruelty and cleverness. Think about it: the second most twisted line in this strip is “Now eat your own face, Colin!” That’s some potent shit.

I’m a long-form person; panel-panel-punchline is not the form for me. Consequently, when someone does it so very well, in such a deceptively casual way, they get my instant admiration. My Cardboard Life gets it consistently and always in a new and surprising way.

“Why,” I asked myself, “is this proving to be so damned hard? I’ve been writing stories since I was 12, I’ve written a metric fuckton in the last decade, so I shouldn’t be so stuck on a 20-page comic script for a four-issue comic.” (That’s my current estimate, incidentally.)

Well, I figured it out. Yes, I have written a metric fuckton. What I haven’t done oodles of is, um, finishing things. Finishing them and taking them through the editing process and watching it necessarily mutate as you show it to other people and hammer out dents and make it into something real that can survive daylight. Workshopping? My degree might as well be in that. But finishing something and making it right? No.

I’m there now. I thumbnailed the entire first issue, and I penciled the first three pages tonight. That’s the vicious, thrilling schedule: three pages penciled or inked each day through March 7. Why March 7? Because the Emerald City Comicon is March 13th, and I will have a completed issue of Furlough for it, if I have to draw til my fingers bleed and stay at my desk until my eyes dry out. So: three pages per day. OR BUST. Lookit:

From page two.

Amy Martin told me that a convention would make me get things done. She should’ve cackled maniacally afterward, like a movie gypsy delivering a prophecy.

I also posted more zines on my Etsy store. I had to refresh my inventory of the Creativity Zine and the Surreal Moments zine (exciting!), so I added a couple other smaller ones I made for swaps, but with an eye to other people as well. One’s just text, which is funny to me; it feels so weird to make a zine entirely on the computer. Like I faked it or something. The other is, um, the opposite of that. Wholly handwritten, done in one draft, and possibly done while being influenced by a fair and welcome amount of tequila. It’s a screed, make no mistake, but it’s a screed that looked just fine to me the next morning.

At my parents’ high school, everyone was required to take a class that was basically Everyday Life Skills. Checkbook balancing, banking, budgeting, getting licenses, owning things: this class wasn’t home ec, but it did teach basic everyday skills that one might not learn at home. It’s the class my mom remembers most fondly, the one she felt proved more useful more often than anything else.

I wish my college had a similar class, a kind of cap for four years of sheltered life and abundant time. My last semester, I did a creative thesis, wherein I wrote a 75-odd page draft of a novel.* It was an incredibly fruitful time for me – I met my advisor once a fortnight, and in between visits, I wrote my little 20-year-old ass off. A friend said she had a hard time getting two or three pages done every two weeks; I was handing in 10 or 14 pages at a go. I had a beautiful room on Beacon Street in Boston with a picture window as long as my bed and taller than me (I’m not short) that overlooked the frozen waves of the Charles River. I miss that room. I sat at my computer, spent most of my days alone, and wrote and wrote. I’m not sure I’ve come close to being that generally satisfied since then, which is both sad and heartening.

That winter, I graduated, and after that… nothing. Almost nothing at all for several years; it’s taken some shaking up in the last 12-18 months to get me to a place where I consider myself creatively worthwhile, to shake that underpinning of self-loathing for not doing what I’m designed to do.

I’ve given some thought about what I would have liked to know. What should they have told me about bringing that hothoused college-based creativity into daily life? What hot tip might have kept me from being mostly creatively dormant for the better part of three years? What could the academic establishment have told me about matching a day job with your creative dreams and needs?

In the meantime, I put it to you, internets: what would you have liked to learn in your last formal education that might have brought you closer to what you actually wanted to do, and more quickly? A class, a suggestion, a mantra? What would have sorted you out earlier? Or if you’re one of those lucky people who managed to do it right, what were you told? How did you approach it?

*This novel has suddenly been showing up prominently in my thoughts, which is weird. Maybe I’ll finish it properly one day after all.

Before I learned to knit, I didn’t get cables and bobbles, and I found overly complicated colorwork to be more distracting than impressive. After knitting for a few years, I realized why these things are attractive to a certain sector of knitters: it keeps things interesting.

Now that I can knit-purl-knit-purl with no problem, slip stitches and twist cables and make lovely seamless hats with robotically perfect ribbed brims, I find myself looking at patterns with an eye for a challenge. I find myself looking at things that might be considered grandma-esque sweater patterns by the average observer. (No link for that one, as I’m not going to be a dink and link even to an anonymous online sweater picture for ridicule. Picture sailboats and ducks and crazy stitches; you know what I mean.)

It was a crazy realization, made somewhere in my interminable knitting of dishcloths with more and more garish colorways. The weirder, the better. Leaves? Bats? Boobs? Owls made of cables? Yarn that goes green-orange-blue-yellow-grey-green? Bring it on. If you just knit basic top-down stockinette sweaters for the rest of your life… well, I don’t think you could, really. I can’t. And it is, of course, enormously satisfying to feel like you’ve tamed one of these deliberately difficult patterns. Fortunately, even sweaters are relatively small mountains to climb.

I went to the Grand Canyon today for the first time with Kimberly, one of my nearest and dearest. We drove through south central, central, and northern Arizona on the way. The terrain varied so much I felt like I drove across three separate planets: saguaro cactus-laden Scottsdale, striped mesa-filled Sedona, and finally the scrubby plains and hills of northern Arizona, so abrasive they look like they’d bring the shine out of anyone if given long enough. It’s the mesas that got to me, and the canyon itself. There were infinite stripes of infinitely subtle colors that have been brought to the surface by the Colorado River and rain and tectonic movement, so many that my meager rods and cones weren’t quite up to the challenge. My circa-2004 digital camera sure as hell wasn’t. I took a few pictures, but mostly I just stared, amazed that my depth perception seemed to stop – I knew I wasn’t taking in true distances after a point.

And suddenly, I understood something. I’ve long wondered why artists would paint what I’ve considered boring-ass landscapes – amateurish (or not) oils trying to capture Southwestern vistas but forever falling far short, usually ending up in the bland, revoltingly neutral realm of motel art. And yes, probably that’s why a lot of it exists: the world has a sad, unquenchable need for inoffensive art. However, I think many artists make these places into their white whales. Most photographs will never capture it; instead, they tilt at their canvases, trying to reproduce it.

The paintings are still, in my opinion, heinous, and will forever remind me of those ORIGINAL ART BLOWOUT SALE WHOA ads I see on TV when I visit my grandma in St. Louis. But I’ll be a little more understanding about them now.

See? Hopeless.