Broken Frontier

I’m sitting here listening to old music at a vendor my company does business with.  It’s that horrible 70’s/80’s faux-soul, the stuff that is essentially muzak with someone singing.  The irony is that this, generally one of the most irritating things a person has to suffer through, is actually a moment of calm.  There’s nothing else I can do while this music is playing but wait.  And god, does it feel good.

I’ve written about my hectic days, from six in the morning till two in the morning, almost every day.  So that’s an old rant.  But, here’s the thing about the life I lead.  When things happen, they miraculously happen at five or six different places at once.  So, life tends to throw curve balls.  No big surprise.  But how do you cope with it? How do you find some sort of calmness in the storm?

More importantly, how do you find the will to write?  That’s what’s been dogging me the past few weeks.  I’ve been blessed to have never really suffered writer’s block. Let me tell you, though that having your economic future decided by the quality of the writing you do is one helluva a way to get a set of nerves.  My life has become a bit of a juggling game, trying to find a balance between a day job, the nuts and bolts of running a comic company and being a writer with the creative responsibility to deliver the best damn product possible.

It’s scary having something out there.  It’s even scarier knowing your business’ future rests on its shoulders.  It’s even scarier when you realize that people have big expectations for the project. 

Shouldn’t all of this stuff make me feel better?

That’s really the catch, you see. You do all the work to make a quality product and yet it is very much possible that it doesn’t catch on, or the distributor is not behind it, or you lose an artist, or your house catches on fire, or your wife leaves you. There’s just no way that everything will always go as planned.  So, it’s about plate-spinning.  The more plates you can effectively spin, the longer you can keep at it.  Sometimes, that leads to bigger things, but sometimes it leads to more of the same.

That’s the uncertainty. That’s the feeling of “Well, I’m doing everything right, but still, I can’t pay rent.”  I’ve got lots of friends who are all more or less where I am in my career right now, and we’re all almost beset on all sides by this malaise.  This feeling that we’re fighting against the current of the ocean and nobody’s bothering to notice.  So, we tell ourselves that’s not why we do it, that we’re here because we love the art form. Yet, it’s a shame that in an industry as small as comics, getting people to read something sans X, Spider, or Bat in the title, is like a feat of Sisyphus.

So what am I saying? What’s my point? Is everything hopeless?

No. It’s not.  I’m lucky enough to work in a medium I love, and have a small but loyal following, that seems to be growing by the day.  And, having my own company, despite the hardships of it, means that I get to do whatever I want, and I don’t have executives or suits telling me what to do.

So, yeah, I’ll do a bit of plate-spinning for at least a little while longer.