The Grind no longer wears me down.

Happy news, all. I haven't been blogging very much this month, but the reason for that has changed. Instead of being too depressed to write about my sorry life, I'm actually doing quite well - I'm just too busy DRAWING COMICS to sit and bang out blog posts! Whoo hoo!

I'm about halfway through what I would consider a "grueling" schedule for an intensive and lucrative comics job for the Girl Scouts of America. I've been working on this for the last few months, but they've got me on a week-to-week schedule of work due, and this is the closest I've ever come to working full time on art projects (not counting the crunch time right before a show when I'm trying to wrap up a chapter). So far I've been (barely) keeping up with it, but I start coloring next week, and that'll be a fun little experiment. I am predicting I'll learn some tricks by the time this is over that'll help with streamlining the way I work.

So, in the interest of sharing things I've been pondering that have helped me out in the short AND long term, let me just say this: I've come to see recently that one of the biggest stumbling blocks in my life, in many arenas, is my unwillingness to try and fail. Or try and not super-succeed. Basically, if I don't think I can do something perfectly, I'm not willing to attempt it. And that, my friends, is the quickest way to stagnate, and not learn, and not improve. Last week I went to my friends Jesse and Andrice's to have a comics jam and then rock out in the basement on a variety of instruments, and I realized that that may have been the first time I've ever let myself just improvise with others in a casual setting. Not even as a teenager, when my friends and I all sucked at everything together, would I let myself play the wrong notes and mess up the beats. I just couldn't "sound like a fool." And wow, what a hang-up, man.

Doing the 24-Hour Comic opened my eyes to this self-inhibiting tendency. I wasn't able to cast off the restraints that day and just let things fall where they may, but I'm starting to now. Let's hope some new horizons appear this way. In the meantime, I've been training my chickens, and filming the results. Hilarious!