A few days ago I took a look at my blog post from last January on my goals for 2013. A year ago my main goals where to start treating my work more professionally, to update and streamline the way I present it to the world, and to make more deliberate choices about where I spend my time and energy.
To that end, I reworked and updated portions of my website, submitted work to a couple of publishers and researched submission guidelines for many more, attended a couple of conventions, contributed to an anthology, decided to stop wasting time with an online store where my work wasn’t selling and focus my energy designing products for a company that I’m excited about, got several of my comics from the previous few years back into print, and made some decisions about the work I’m going to be doing through the end of my time at CCS.
But mostly what I did this year was make comics.
I started off January co-writing and editing Agents of C.O.N.D.O.R: Canada’s Finest in the style of a silver age spy comic and putting together my one-man anthology Break. In February I made a dummy for my children’s story Take Care Kittens, then set to work on Uncompromising, a low-fi action comic you can read here on my website. That took up most of the spring. Over the summer I wrote and drew a Rapunzel-inspired scarf comic and my Summer Anthology comic The Waiting Game, drew a bunch of dinosaurs drinking tea, updated and reprinted Barriers, Every Snowman Dies, Simpler and Allergic, and started scripting Wit’s End, the medieval fantasy comic series I’ve spent most of the fall working on, save the brief break I took to create the four page dream comic Books.
I have grown so much as an artist and storyteller in the past year. It is exciting and intimidating to me to look back on the work I was making just last spring and compare it to the work I’m making now.
And so the new year starts. Next week I’ll be working on a second draft of thumbnails for Issue 2 of Wit’s End, and by the end of the month, all having gone well, I’ll be deep into penciling. There’s so much to do, and I know that the next few months are going to fly. 2014 will be a year of growth and transformation–In May, for the first time since I was five years old, I’ll be looking out at a summer that does not end with the return to school. For years teachers have been preparing me for the “real world” and as of May that’s where I’ll be.
I have no idea where I will be a year from today.
My goals for this year are much like the ones from last year. I will continue to work to be more deliberate about the use of my time and energy both in my work and in my free time, to be clear with myself about my priorities, to think through the ways in which I put my work out into the world, and to aim high even if that means missing sometimes.
Mostly I have to do the work and see where that takes me. It’s going to be an exciting year.