Does anything cool ever happen in the second week of December…?

Let’s see, I have nothing. Somewhere in the last week, I worked on drawings for people who need some drawings and got all of the flat files up and running… and that’s about it. I have no idea where the week went but I’m pretty exhausted. I must have gone xmas shopping at some point because there’s a pile of gifts, all wrapped and pretty, in the corner of the room but I barely remember that as well. At this point, you could tell me that Santa brought them and I couldn’t really deny it.

The Salem Witch dummy book continues to prowl the world at large. The punk book continues to become ever more real as the clock counts down to an April release date. My graphic novella still sticks its tongue out at me when I try to make it work. And I’m slowly, very slowly putting together stuff for the 2012 MoCCA Fest, fearing that I’m either making the lamest of stuff or too little stuff or too much stuff. I’m sure it will all work out, but not before the 17th, when I traipse off to Pennsylvania for my holiday vacation with the family. Not that I won’t get something accomplished there, I’ll have access to my dad’s dark room, but it will be a break from my desk and all the assorted ephemera of my artistic career.

Thank heavens I have my drawing box to carry with me…

My nephew chimed in that my blogging tends to be inversely proportionate to my focus on the project at hand, meaning, that the more work I have to do, the less verbose I tend to be when I type away about nothing. If that is the case, this post should be well over ten pages long and Proust or Tolstoy would weep and beg for mercy from my unrelenting wave of asides, tangents and run-on sentences.

I probably lost so much time this week, when I say “lost” I mean time spent at the desk doing something important I’m sure, while my mind is a thousand miles away contemplating something that is certainly unimportant, wondering about my eternal battle with Art. 2011, for me, has been the year of stupid artistic ideas. And apparently, it will continue to be until the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.

We all know that making books is my thing. However, we all know that being a boring person who never tries anything new, even if no one else ever gets to see it, will eventually leads to madness and lame ideas. So I figure that I’m either damned if I do and damned if I don’t with this messing around with other media and other means of expression beyond writing and drawing. Until this year, I was fairly satisfied with being damned that I didn’t try my hand at other skilz that I’d let grow rusty and weed choked, like painting, watercolor and photography. My thinking was how bad could being damned be if I had some pretty cool books to show for it?

I think it was easier to maintain that puritanical focus on writing and drawing before I fully understood the reality of the publishing world… that you’re far more likely to vanish in the vast sea of unread, newly printed books, than be “successful”. Not that I expected to grow all rich and such, but whatever I thought was a barely formed illusion. The reality is you work because you have to work to stay sane. If something comes of it, the reward is very likely to be small, though I don’t mean to discount the profound value of the small gifts that the universe can supply. Last week, I received a small reward when I got a call from a friend who told me that his nephew was overheard, while drawing at a table with his siblings, that he was going to make drawings in Timothy Decker style. That sort of perfect moment can keep me going for months. Stuff like that is awesome, but it is rare. As for large, more culturally-understandable, acceptable and desired rewards, I know nothing about them.

And all that learning about how the world really functions led me to a year of wondering just what it is I’m doing. Some stuff, I’ve figured out. I’ve gotten over the idea of throwing in the towel and pretending that I’ll never write or draw anything ever again. That simply isn’t me. And I know that I will continue to make stories and get them out there, regardless of how the industry changes or how technology prances along since neither affect me as I spend day after day dipping a steel pen point into a jar of ink like Bob Cratchit. I’ll just plow right on with my ideas.

But as for all the paint and art materials laying about the room, unused, and staring at me like that freaked-out squirrel that Tom let into the apartment yesterday afternoon… What happens with them remains to be seen. Maybe something awesome, perhaps something terrible or, then again, maybe nothing at all.