For being a comic artist, I haven’t been so good at actually making comic pages lately. I’ve been in a state of pretty bad burnout for a while, and everything that was 2020 certainly didn’t help. I’ve been post-surgery for five months now. Yet, my body is still adjusting to its new normal, which hasn’t helped my general exhaustion surrounding art (it may, in fact, take several years to fully adjust due to the nature of the surgery; it’s made a lot of changes to my entire system).

I haven’t been sitting on my hands, however, and because of many different factors that have made me feel unfulfilled by comics lately, I have been focusing more and more on writing prose. I wanted to be a novelist and illustrator long before I wanted to be a comic artist. In my late teens, my art and scripting abilities far exceeded my prose, so I chose to tell stories in the only way I was capable at the time. Fifteen years later, my prose has reached an acceptable level of competency, and so for the past six months, I’ve been practising and polishing and studying and practising some more. I’ve completed one novelette, one short story and have numerous works-in-progress.

One such WIP is very near completion and has been my primary focus for months now. Titled Sarah’s Journal (very exciting, I know), it takes place right after the prologue of my comic, Dark Wings: Eryl, and bridges a narrative gap my readers have been asking me to fill for many years now. I have been finding it easier to write side-stories for practise since I already have an established world, cast, and plot to work with. That allows me to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of writing rather than using my time and energy to conceptualise. Writing short asides also lets me play with different writing styles and formats without a significant commitment.

This particular book, Sarah’s Journal, has been an uphill battle from start to finish. It’s written in diary format, which ended up being far more challenging than I thought. I outlined it in June, began writing it in July — where I got about halfway through my outline — and put it away in disgust at the end of the month. I spent November writing Rava’s Awful, Amazing Day, which is about half as long and in a much more comfortable style. I then picked Sarah’s Journal up again in December and pushed out the second half of the first draft. I let it sit during January to get some distance and started the editing process in February. In April, I wrote another (very) short story for a collaborative zine while also rewriting sections of Sarah’s Journal. It’s now the first of May, and I’m on the home stretch. It’s been proofread, edited, illustrated, laid out in Affinity Publisher, and I’m researching a promising printer. The last step is having some trusted writing friends read through the latest version and make sure everything is in good shape before I send a few questions to the printer. It was a long journey for a book that is just under 15K words – a count that most of my writing friends could knock out in a week or less. I may work slowly, but I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished, and I eagerly await being able to hold the finished book in my hands.