So, every excuse imaginable for me to not work on this particular series of strips seems to have cropped up, and it’s starting to drive me a little bit crazy. I think I’m partly looking for excuses not to work on it because talking about my experiences working retail jobs is much more depressing to me than talking about any of my breakups or ex boyfriends, and now I’m looking for a job because I could use the cash and I think I’m filled with dread about working someplace like this again.
The thing is the whole Morbid Obsession bit of the story is meant as kind of a prelude before Capitalist Pig comes back and a new character is introduced and shit starts to go down, and now I feel like I’ve been writing it for 20 years. The stuff that’s coming up next, I’ve been planning forever, and so I’ve had the vague shape of these strips in the prelude already sorted out in my head for quite a while, and when I’m wanting to work on comics I’m more inclined to be planning other stuff, or working on things that come farther down the line in this storyline, rather than return to a part that I’ve mostly already written and is unpleasant for me. I think I underestimated just how unpleasant it would be for me to write so much about fear of being a failure as an artist and not having the time to do the things I want to do. I guess that’s a good thing that it’s felt so unpleasant, because that means I’ve struck right at the root of the things that preoccupy me.
The trick is not to let the fear of failure become a self-fulfilling prophesy, I guess, because once I start to worry about what will happen if these comics bomb, that makes it easy to put off working on them and work on something else that seems less foreboding to me. I should remind myself that the comics I’m uncomfortable with are probably my best material, otherwise they wouldn’t make me so uncomfortable. But trying to tell that to all the crazy parts of my brain at once is like trying to make a class full of preschool students all sit down and simultaneously be engaged by a silent film.
There was the fact that the website was down for a week, so not posting then wasn’t my fault. And then there was the fact that I was getting paid to do a commissioned story, so drawing that seemed like a priority, and I was, after all, still drawing a lot. Like I said, a lot of excuses. There were less concrete reasons why, for the last couple months of my last relationship, I hardly drew anything. It was weird because on the one hand I thought things were happy, but now I’m wondering about the extent of my ability to lie to myself, because I think part of me knew that something was wrong, and me not drawing was symptomatic of that. In a good relationship, you should have a feeling of security, right? I think instead I had a feeling of tenuousness, like it could slip away at any time, and thus it became my priority to manage that. I think what I saw as myself being attentive, spending a lot of time with my boyfriend, and etc. was actually me clinging to something I thought might be disappearing. The priority seemed to be maintaining that from one encounter to the next, rather than that being a constant and a backdrop for other endeavors.
Anyway, I’m not too sure what the point of the rambling is, but I suppose I felt like expressing that I’m frustrated that I’m not further along in the storyline already than I am. I’ve also resolved several times to blog more, and done that inconsistently, so I suppose it’s multi-tasking to blog about my frustration, because then at least I get some productivity out of it. The original idea for this blog was to talk about my job at a bookstore and complain about the little petty dictators I had to deal with there like the one I drew in this comic, but what’s aggravating about those people thinking they have power is that they’re trying to assert power from a place of being so pathetically unimportant, and so now, at the distance of over a year from having worked in that bookstore, those people seem more like jokes than something that’s actually worth getting angry about, so I don’t have all that much to say about them.
So, now that I sound incredibly bitter and disenfranchised, I bet you really can’t wait to come back on Monday and read the next hilarious installment of my webcomic, can you? It’s a phase, I promise, I’m not like this all the time. Just like 16 hours a day. The rest of the time I’m sleeping, which means I’m thinking about sex and probably happier.
