October Newsletter

It Happened in October

HIATUS, BURN-OUT, IDENTITY CRISIS - I know, newsletters are supposed to be all positive and talk about ~the journey~ and how accomplished I am now and you can be too if you pay for my course in creative self fulfilment. The truth of the matter is, the past four years have been rough and not for the reasons you might think.

This is probably better dealt with in a longer blog post so I’m going to keep it short: I’m burnt the heck out on my day job. I love art - doing kinktober and artfyunk proved that without a doubt - and I literally think about nothing else but all the projects I want to write, draw, film and eventually code. It’s what keeps me going. Problem is, I’m coming up on nine years of making comics for a paywalled site where I 1) can’t show my work anywhere else or even really know if people like it and 2) am slowly being drained of creative energy because of the pace. When I say nine years, I mean nine years non-stop. No vacation, no breaks. 6-10 pages, full color, every month.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved doing the work but it’s time to do something else. Dadvice has given me something I’ve been sorely lacking my entire art career — feedback. You don’t get that behind a paywall, or doing print anthologies. You just get silence and a pay check that gets you from one month to the other, sort of.

In the world of computers, they talk about tech-debt, my partner tells me. The kind of tasks that need to be done eventually but they’re not prioritised and so they drag along, accumulating more and more until it’s insurmountable and need to be dealt with. That’s where I’m at: business debt. Art debt. Creative debt. I’m working on it, I promise.

Plans for November

Digging myself out of this hole - I have a plan and I’m going to try to work through it. I’ll write updates here once a month as usual, let you know where I’m at, but other than that I’ll keep my head down and do the work so I can actually… do the work. 

Oh, and also take a couple of weeks of actual vacation in December. I have not had vacation since 2016 and that doesn’t really count for reasons I’m not getting into here.

Tim Hutchings Newsletter Tax

A simple one this month - Drawing My Dog Every Day. I stumbled on it several weeks ago and it did something to me. I hope it does something to you.

Oh boy we’re heading into winter. Stay warm/cold, depending on where you are in the world!

xoxo/Rowan