Life is too short to be miserable and too wide to stay in one place.
OOF - I definitely missed that spring update!
When you're not sure where to call home, things like website maintenance can slip through the cracks, BUT the road to this blog post was paved with a lot of good intentions!
First things first - How are you? What's happening? I hope you've been well. ❤️
For months I put off adding the signed copies of A Lit Wick and Sylacauga to the store on my site, thinking it would take days, but it took roughly an hour. OOPS. I have them up in the SHOP now, so check them out! They are LIMITED STOCK and I can't say how long it will be before they're replenished. Incidentally, LOTS OF THINGS ARE ON SALE to clear out some of my stock and make my life more mobile, so take a look around a find a great deal!
Absent Stars finished over at Amazon with some surprisingly good results, and my first YA book, Welcome to Dahmerville wrapped up in February! Both will be in paperback later this year! Aside from traveling, (which I am regularly now), I've been focused on a variety of new projects that I'm very excited about!
While visual storytelling will always be my first love, I am stepping away from the comics medium more permanently. I think life finds a way to balance things out and it took some time for me to examine and release some unhealthy expectations I'd put on myself.
On the heels of the success of Black of Heart, I had high hopes and worked hard to complete three additional series that year. (Not issues - FULL SERIES.) I was getting really excited for what I felt were, not only three very different types of stories, but stories with some big personal lessons in them - something I wanted my work to be associated with going forward. Stories about growth, equality, empowerment and finding yourself. As I took up my own journey, uncovering who I am, who I've been, and who I want to be, this all felt right, like a natural progression. Not only that, but it felt like I was stepping into a very powerful space, creatively.
Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, every project I started to put together, fell apart. There were a series of failures with multiple publishers, trouble finding artists, or artists committing to projects, only to drop out months later, leaving me with time and money wasted and nothing to show for my investment. This is the sad reality of working in comics as a writer, but they all came at such a fast clip, like a line of dominoes falling one after the other, that it felt more like a deliberate message and I got the sense that it was time to move on. The industry, to me, was starting to feel more like an abusive relationship where I kept getting smacked, blaming myself, and going back for more.
So, as you may have noticed, I'm focusing in other mediums of writing. Releasing those old (unhelpful) expectations has been a great way to bridge that gap, and while there is always a level of heartbreak when things don't go as you'd hoped they would, I'm much happier now -- being able to focus on telling stories and living in that creative space rather than dealing with the project management side of the business, worrying about deadlines and money.
I spent the last year exploring the high desert and I'm traveling the east coast this year with some larger plans on the horizon. It's an interesting time in my life and I'm grateful to be in this place, but while I've been busy documenting it for myself, I forgot all about sharing it here. Around the holidays I put together a book of my travel photography for friends and family and it sparked something in me that I'm still exploring.
I didn't realize until I added the new books to the site, that my little "BIO" on the home page was all about how I work all day at a job I hate and write all night. I'm proud to say that I walked away from that situation and now I make my own schedule, which is primarily dominated by writing.
Life is too short to be miserable and too wide to stay in one place.
I don't consider any of these changes to be failures or sacrifices, just like I don't consider it quitting to expand creatively from one medium to another. If we're not challenging ourselves with new adventures and experiences, then we will stagnate and be unhappy, and before we know it, we're picking at our co-workers or spouses because we want to share that misery and HEY HEY HEY... Do something for yourself before you're too old to do it physically or too broken to appreciate it mentally/emotionally/spiritually.
You have to give yourself a gift. <--- that's a link to my shop, which is a SOLID joke that only undercuts the important message SLIGHTLY.
Thank you for reading and living and being in the world. I promise it won't be as long between updates. ❤️ Find me on social media if you're curious what I'm up to and where I'm at from week to week.
SIDE NOTE: I'm considering offering scripts for my unwritten work (either PDF copies or bound, signed physical copies of screenplays, short films and comic scripts.) If you have ANY interest in that, leave a like or drop me a line so I can see if it's worth putting in the work to make it happen. I hate that my unpublished work is just sitting until I have time to write them as novels, and some of them are just better as visual work.
Stay safe, stay tuned, and keep reading!
Chris
