The simple question, the meta-question, the obvious question is how do you organize your life and your schedule and your thinking and your process such that you not only continue making comics but improve the quality of those comics.
I’ve detected a small shift in my thinking around these issues, which I’ve struggled to articulate even to myself. Part of it is the pain of context switching, the fact that formatting a book for print requires a very different mindset (patient, detail-oriented) from deciding what will happen next in a story (contemplative, active mind). You want to flow smoothly from one stage to the next. You want to minimize the periods of sitting down and thinking, “Wait, what should I be working on?” Ah, but even those moments of stumbling and questioning can be useful, if they don’t last too long and you handle them correctly! I’ve landed on some great ideas after a few weeks of frustrated dead ends.
Therefore one wonders, I wonder, about the optimal system for cycling between these activities. I like plans and list and programs of activity, probably to a fault, so this sort of systems thinking is appealing. Even pleasurable.
You need to be present, you need to be observant and reflective. You need to not only notice it was a good week, a week where you drew lots of pages or one great page or solved a difficult story problem but also recognize what conditions led to that good week. Careful! Are the conditions of the optimal draw-many-pages week different from the conditions of the solve-a-story-problem week? Probably.
I’m not driving myself crazy thinking about all this, really. I’m just more aware of this aspect of the comics making process than I once was. Maybe that’s the shift I’m trying to explain to you and to myself here. It’s progress, I suppose, in the sense that making good comics feels very doable (I’ve done it before, at least once or twice) if only I can create the optimal circumstances in which to make them.
Or maybe I’m simply more annoyed than I’ve been in the past about the tedium, the steps that seem avoidable — scanning and cleaning pages, setting up a perfect file, deciding where to print and how many copies and taking them to the post office and maybe it’s time for a website redesign because this WordPress template doesn’t really work on mobile…
I ask myself, isn’t there a better way? A system or a schedule that would minimize all the nonsense and allow me to focus as much as possible on actually making comics? I’m still trying to figure that out. I’ll let you know if I do.