Category: Uncategorized

P.S. I got to Halifax on the 24th by plane, then caught a bus to Charlottetown, where my boys met me and took me home.

A few weeks ago, we went to the Maud Whitmore Benefit Concert, a variety show to help select members of the Charlottetown Festival company pay for training that will advance their craft.

That night got me thinking back to my theatre days and realizing how woefully uncurious and ill-informed I was about the people I was auditioning for, and what was happening in the theatre in Canada — or in general.
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​That Chorus Line/Fame/Reality TV line of thinking (“I’m gonna get what’s mine! I deserve it ‘cuz I’m great!”) was a terrible mind-poison. I applied for the Maud scholarship and wasn’t chosen, and I see now that the panel were absolutely right in that decision: I honestly didn’t know what the hell to do with it, and that must have been plain to see. I was just a selfish kid looking for opportunities; I had no vision for the theatre or for myself as a practitioner in it.
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​(“Let the ground open and swallow me now” moment: After an audition for the Grand Theatre’s summer season, I wrote a thank-you note to Artistic Director Martha Henry… and addressed her as “Martha Graham”. To my credit, I did have the good humour to follow it up with another note to apologize and say, “I guess I didn’t add enough postage to reach Martha Graham”. I just Googled Ms. Henry and discovered that she’s passed away — which gave me a feeling of sadness but also a sigh of relief that this gaffe would be forgotten.)
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Likewise when I was a little kid drawing cartoons: I just drew made-up characters over and over against a blank background, trying to get them “right” and thinking about my future career as a famous cartoonist — yet I never actually put the characters into the settings or stories that would make them worth sharing.

There’s no do-over for that, and I guess that practice did give me a strength in that one particular category — greatly amplified over the past few years since my work asked me to draw a cartoon of every new team member as they pass their probationary period, so I’ve drawn about 230 of them!

But now, as an adult, I have more ideas for comics, zines, and interactive stories than I could possibly act on. Maybe that’s the difference that tells me I’m in the right career, that I deserve the opportunities I have — because I’m curious, hungry to learn, and willing to put in the work.

I’m unreasonably happy about this drawing — because it glows in the dark!

I stuck it on the little notebook I always carry, and now it shines from my bedside table at night, keeping me safe.

Okay, admittedly the glowy paint markers I used look patchy and uneven in the dark…

…but looking at this still makes me happy.

I’ve started work on my story for the next Charlottetown Comics Club publication, which has a hard deadline, since we want to launch it at this year’s local zine fair. So I’m feeling a lot of pressure to work on that, which is squishing out diary comic and Marsholes strips.

I realize I don’t have to participate in this, but I like the story I’ve come up with and it’s something a little different for me, so… I just need to crank it out for a bit. With the time constraint, I’m just going to draw it in pencil, which is different and scary, but I hope will be quite expressive in the end. In high school I did all kinds of little doodles for friends*, and I loved the variable lines and shades that are possible with a pencil.

*Through the years, folks have often said to me, “Remember that drawing you did for me of…?” No, no I do not. Sorry. But I’m sure I loved doing it for you at the time.

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A work colleague pointed out a glitch in one of my illustrations for our latest book, which has gone to press and can’t be fixed.

(If you’re a reader and catch it… I dunno, I owe you a prize or something.)

Needless to say, I am dying a death.

All I can do is commit to checking over the PDF preview next time. (Details are a challenge for me. I should also enlist extra eyes.)

Is feeling bad about this mistake required? It won’t help anything and certainly isn’t good for me. And yet it feels like skipping that step would suggest that I don’t care. (I do care.)

I know that regularly feeling mortified about my public self is an ADHD thing (Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria). But maybe I could… just not.

Do I have your permission?

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Our car lease is up soon, so Craig and I are off to a dealership later this morning.

We both hate this kind of life administration stuff, and I dread high-pressure sales situations. So this should be fun.

Tyler shared a lot of helpful ideas and refocused my thinking about comix — making it conscious, versus “Just plough through, get it done, meet the deadline”.

And the experience of being around other creative people, plus the joy of seeing all that original, physical artwork in real space, was a great reminder to get my head and self out of the computer. Being on the computer, ingesting news, ideas, and content, doing endless problem-solving (because computers are still so damned janky) is so easy and compelling, but so, so little that matters ever gets done there.