A month on and my comic languishes. There are many reasons for this, but I must say it has been discouraging for me to face up to it.
Someone had asked that I post regular updates just so there would be a sense of knowing what was going to happen. I said I would, but I didn’t.
A month and a half later and the burden is weighing on me. I feel terrible about it really and I owe an explanation to whatever passers-by and audience I have left. If there were any.
First, some history.
I used to teach. I taught for 10 years at a private school and watched the internet grow into the force in our lives it has become today. I also watched as kids I knew would exploit it as much as they could to troll their friends, cheat on assignments, get some lulz. Ultimately, those lulz extended to teachers. It was not something I wanted to be a part of because I knew that as their educator my hands were tied if they did anything to me. It happened all too often in the classroom and in day to day disciplinary actions, I knew my online rep could be screwed up if I didn’t watch myself.
So I limited my exposure on the internet to what I could control to avoid any of that. Facebook was (and is) private. I didn’t try to post anything remotely findable by the little nose-miners I taught because I didn’t want them contacting me outside school. Google+ was private for a while.
When I left teaching last year, I had an idea to work on a webcomic as well as pursue writing. This, Transmitting Strange, is one of the things that came of it. Graciously hosted by a friend and set up as a gift, I began working on it, publishing updates weekly for a good part of 3 or 4 months.
I had no work during that time, though I was looking for freelancing gigs, and still was a bit shy about being up front with who I was as the author. I was more concerned with trying to tell a story, rather than engage folks with who I am. I didn’t want to give too much up of who I was and tried to make it all about the comic. I think that was okay at first, but now I’m at a point where I’ve got lost behind this and, in some ways, the comic has got lost, too…
Which brings me to this year. I had a job at a coffee shop and the early mornings were rough. I did my best to keep up with the weekly posts and that lasted until March.
So what happend in March? I got a freelance job writing. One job. It was through one of those bidding sites and I made $50 on about 15-20 hours of work. I thought it might be good to get myself out there, right? We all need to start somewhere, and I was desperate… Looking back, I see how big of a mistake selling myself out like that can be. There was too much work and stress in my home and too little pay-off.
Then my grandmother started losing her fight against cancer, right at the end of March. And the big waiting game started. We kept hearing she could pass at any time… mid-May she did. So there was travel and a funeral. From March until June those were emotionally draining times. Times when drawing and writing and publishing a comic in such an ephemeral form as the internet seemed so trite.
I got an internship soon after the funeral and quit coffee. Thankfully it’s been a paid internship, but I’m making way less than the full-time hours would make it appear. This means I work a full day, and come home, and during work I have little time for my personal projects. With other time commitments in life, the comic has taken a back seat. Like way in the back. Like it’s in the towed-behind-my-car-in-a-crate-drilled-with-air-holes-so-I-know-it-is-at-least-alive back.
So, I’m sorry crickets. I’m sorry spam-bots. I’m sorry my genuine readers who check the site (is that anyone?… ). I will do a better job. I need to do a better job. For my own sake and the sake of this thing I created and languishes with maybe a third done. I still have at least two-thirds to go.
And I already have another idea… but if I can’t finish this, that one will never see the light of day. And I can’t let that happen. Hang in there with me. I’ll make it happen.
