I feel good about how I have been working lately. (The last three days.) It's probably not possible for a person to be everything they hope they could be, and it's hard to forgive myself for not reaching certain benchmarks I tell myself I want to hit. But I still get to do a lot of cool things. I am in the middle of finishing up some work on Please Keep Warm #3 and another project for Lion Forge. Both super cool things that are exactly what I want to be doing. I have been trying to remind myself that I like what I am doing. It is hard to remember some days.
It's been weird since I stopped publishing and selling Lion's Teeth stuff myself. I had a large source of personal accomplishment in having stacks of different books with my name on the cover. It felt like I had really built something. I could show random people them and say "Hey, I did this thing." Even though I am making more money now and and more and more people are being exposed to my work, I don't get the day to day feeling of interacting with people interested in the work, even though the only interaction I may have had was stuffing an envelope. It has me feeling detached from the people reading the books. Maybe I don't just want to focus on the comics like I always thought I would. This is a big help because I honestly can't fulfill shipping on my own without murdering someone, but there has been something missing since I switched over. God bless Silver Sprocket and the people giving me freelance work though.
I want to find something else a little less stressful to fill that void, but I am coming up empty. I used to bike around and try to get stores to carry Lion's Teeth on my own and I don't know why I stopped doing that. Maybe I just got stressed out or overworked one week and forgot about it. Conventions are really nice too, but every time we do them everything goes to shit on my workflow for a few weeks. We always make a profit and have a really good time, but when we get home I feel like the rock is at the bottom the mountain and I have to start pushing up from the bottom all over again.
Having a story up on Vice was really pleasant. It was cool that I was able to use one of my Please Keep Warm characters for it. If the next few months go well I hope I can try to do something else. I am always over whelmed by my to do list, but I should be grateful for the opportunity to be doing or trying to do so many things.
We might be able to go to our work space at The Top Secret South in January. I have some new projects I would like to be working on, and it would be nice to clear away all of my current projects to make a little room for them. I have some pitches for new monthly books I am putting together, so hopefully I can start one of those next year. If I can just get enough of this Please Keep Warm stuff done, it would be no problem to be doing a strip of that every weekday and a monthly or bi-monthly traditional comic book.
Okay back to work!
I love you,
Michael Sweater<3
