The last of our houseguests have left. Each of the visits was lovely, and I’m so happy we got to spend that time with friends and family, and to share our little holiday island with them.

(One of our most recent guests is from Japan, and not only did she get to see Anne of Green Gables: The Musical, she met Japan’s Princess Takamado during the intermission! Not that we arranged that, but…)

At last week’s Comics Club I inflicted my holiday photos on the gang, and as usual we talked about things both inspired and profane. During the conversation, I had a realization of what I think art is:

Every idea, experience, interaction, memory has a feeling to it. Each day that goes by, I feel like I’m standing in a river, and all that feeling is rushing past me. When I create a piece of art I think is good, it’s like I’ve managed to capture one clear little drop of that pure essence, and it isn’t lost.

Sure, my little activities don’t matter: everything we love and know will pass away, and at some point the sun will expand and burn all trace of humanity and our art from the face of the planet (if we don’t manage to delete ourselves some other way first). But still, that act of catching still feels like the most important thing I can do.

So when I go a long time without getting to at least try to catch a little life on paper, I feel stressed to the bone. And being in constant company, making beds and meals and conversation morning and night every day, even for people I love — it wears me out. Doug’s been crashed out for days, and Craig’s been pulling long days at work in-between hosting, so it’s high time for a rest-stop.

Meanwhile, I’ve been in-between quarterly books for Strategic Coach, which has given me time to do lots of little jobs for some of the other teams in the company, like the Client Contact Team for the new client website:

I don’t think of likenesses as being something I’m good at, and I find it very socially awkward (“What if they hate it?”), but after drawing about 150 people in the company… I guess I’m finally getting the hang of capturing folks in lines.

And the revision of Dan’s quotes book has finally been published:

I did my work on this early in the year — the last time I was between books — and, knowing that it would be hard to do something on this scale when I got busy again, I did all the work at once, drawing 200 illustrations in five days!

Our designer, Jennifer Bhatthal, designed the book itself, and I think she did a wonderful job.

I’m going to visit my brother in the Yukon, and I intend to be fully there while I’m there, so I’ll be offline the whole time.

See you when I get back!

We had a team meeting at work recently (I joined by videoconference), and on one of the worksheets we used to review our annual goals, I doodled a little picture for each of my projects.

The little icons spoke to me far more than a title or description, so I decided to revise my little project pad. I figure the visual will make me much more likely to review these and remember the original intention of the project.

I’ve also been using a program and app called Keep Everything to save articles for reading later (versus darting from thing to thing in the moment like a hummingbird). It saves them as plain-text Markdown files (so they’re future-proof and not locked into any particular system) and backs them up to Dropbox.

I can’t trust myself to read these on the computer, though, and not be lured into looking up this and that, answering e-mails, or browsing pointlessly, so I’ve started taking these saved articles and printing them out as a ‘magazine’ for me to read offline:

(Sorry, the card I used for the cover had a *#$@ing price sticker on it that I coloured over in Sharpie, making for that weird reflection.)

I’m very close to finishing the first issue of my comic, and what I want to work on next is a guide to balancing our digital and analogue lives.

I’ve hardly solved the problem, but I’ve worked out a few things, and I want to create a fun, interactive book/cards/zine/journal/pad kit — to take things further than the books and articles that say “Social media makes you sad”, give you a bunch of studies, then don’t really give you much guidance beyond “Just stop using the thing” or “Use an app” (like interacting with the device in yet another way is going to help).