Strange Animals / 2022 / #2: Atomic
Funny story. After I got my first newsletter of the year out on the 8th, I – quite optimistically – made a private resolution to send one of these out every two weeks. But even for the second one, that plan went off the rails. I had most of this written last week, and I was going to give it a spit-and-polish on Saturday and send it off, but then, early Saturday morning, my father’s health took a turn for the worse (temporarily, thankfully), and the family spent the day at the hospital with him. He’s now back at my parents’ house, and doing about okay, but, well, that was my Saturday, and I spent Sunday recovering from all the stress and the running around.
So here we are, a few days late, and having learnt the lesson to not be too optimistic about things staying on track for the rest of the year.
///
Speaking of staying on track, I have been climbing a hill five days a week, and it’s been … surprisingly fun. It started when one of my closest friends was over from the US, where he has become one of those outdoorsy types who spends every weekend hiking, camping, cycling or skiing. So while he was here, going hill-climbing was a great way to hang out, and I discovered that it’s a form of exercise I actually enjoy. So after he went back home, I managed to track down a hill close to my house (right across the road, in fact), which had lain filthy for years but had finally been cleaned up during the pandemic, and decided to go climbing by myself as many days as I possibly could.
It’s a pretty short hill – my phone tells me it’s about a hundred feet elevation – but once you get up there, there’s miles and miles of track to walk or run. Plus, it’s really pretty from up there.
This made me think of a piece of advice from Atomic Habits that’s stayed with me over the last few years (it’s a good book, generally, but this bit really applied to me). Sometimes, creating a desired habit isn’t about doing the thing regularly, but creating the space for the thing. So, if you have difficulties working out everyday, designate your habit as getting out of the house and going to gym everyday – and once you’re there, you’ll work out if you feel like it. It gets much easier if you’re there.
So these days, my habit isn’t “going for a run”, but “climb that hill near your house”. Once I get up there, it’s nice enough to go for a run if I feel like it!
///
Around the time I sent my last newsletter, I tweeted about having said one of the most difficult “no”s of my career recently, and that led to a few private conversations. In one of those, I wrote this:
A big part of my burnout in 2020 was the fact that I was still saying yes to books as if I was just starting out (partly because I was getting offers I’d only dreamed about before), but the more you evolve, the more you have to become your own caretaker, because at some point everything you’re offered is stuff you want, and you have to figure out how to say no to all the 80-90% stuff and stick to the 100% stuff.
As it happens, I was listening to a recent episode of Scriptnotes, and John and Craig get to talking about “Mistakes of Yes”. Basically, the idea is that you rarely regret saying “no”, but you can regret saying “yes”. Craig expands on it thus (and I liked this bit enough that I immediately had to write it down):
The Mistakes of Yes that I’ve made tended to come on the heels of somebody wooing me and making me feel really good about myself. They were also “sexy” projects. They were big titles, there were fancy actors involved, and that’s exciting! And then you get into it and you start to realise you just … didn’t have the great passion for this that you would’ve hoped you would have. That you think you ought to have had. Because all the pieces are in place. You would think this is a dream come true – I’m getting a chance to write blankety-blank. And then you actually have to do it and it’s not as much fun.
And this is exactly it! It’s the “sexy” projects that are the 80-90% projects I’m talking about – the things you think you should want. The ones that it would feel really nice to say yes to. And you say that yes, and then you’re sitting at your desk six months later, actually doing the work, wondering why you said yes to this.
The thing I said no to was precisely one of those – something that, in the first few years of my career, would’ve absolutely been a 100% thing. But now, I have some priorities, and I already don’t have quite enough time to cover all of those, so it just didn’t make sense to take this on however good it would’ve made me feel in the moment, because I had a very clear vision of myself, six months later, doing that thing and wanting to do something else entirely.
So now, for one thing, I consult my rigorously organised annual worksheet to see if I in fact have the time for something, but I also have to think about whether by accepting this, I’ll be denying myself a later project (or a non-work activity) that I might really want.
I try to think not just about how good it might feel to say yes to, but about how good it’ll actually feel to do the work.
///
Lettering-wise, Home Sick Pilots is back for its final arc with #11 out this week. Blue Book 01: Betty & Barney Hill Chapter 7 went out this Monday. I think Detective Comics #1050 is also out today, which contains the prelude to the upcoming World’s Finest ongoing series. I’ve been lettering over Dan Mora’s art for a year now, and I feel like I’m hitting a stride with this book.
Oh, and The Department of Truth #15 came out a couple of weeks ago. I’m really proud of this one – James and David did a wonderful job creating this “found document” issue (which, just as a reader, is an idea I love), and I had a great time laying out the text over David’s art. One of those issues that, in ten years, I’ll either be real proud of, or I’ll think I fucked it up entirely. It starts thus, and begins as it means to go on:
Also, here’s a teaser image from The Swamp Thing, which will be back in a couple of months for its final set of issues.
The 33rd Annual GLAAD Media Award Nominations were announced a week ago, and four books I worked on were nominated. Barbalien: Red Planet and Wynd were nominated in the Outstanding Comic Book category, while DC Pride and I Am Not Starfire were nominated in the Outstanding Original Graphic Novel/Anthology category. I’m immensely proud of all these books and the teams I got to work with on them. That was a good day.
///
I like keyboards. A lot. I think most people will tell you that a reasonable number of keyboards is perhaps three. (Or, maybe, most people will tell you it’s one – the one that comes with your computer.) I have … an unreasonable number of keyboards.
And I just added a keyboard to my collection that might be one of my favourites yet. I’d been seeing people on YouTube talk about how much they liked the MX Keys Mini keyboard, but since it’s quite expensive – it costs about the same as an Apple Magic Keyboard, and that’s not a cheap keyboard, by any means – I’d avoided it. But recently I got a little bit extra on a project than I expected, and I thought I’d treat myself. And here’s the thing – I bloody love it!
I got the Mac variant (which is even more expensive than the standard one, which was part of my hesitation), and first of all, it’s just thoroughly compatible with the Mac in a way few keyboards are. Second, it types like the keyboard that I think was the best MacBook keyboard ever – the 2012 pre-Retina MacBook Pro, which had the last keyboard that Apple wasn’t trying to optimise for size. After this point, MacBook keyboards were always compromised, first just in terms of key travel, and then because of the butterfly mechanism. The first Magic Keyboard was still scissor-switch, and typed beautifully, so when I got my next MacBook Pro, I started using those (in fact, I went through two of those over the last eight years – they’re well-built, but I type a lot), but they stopped making those, and while the current Magic Keyboard is fine, it feels like a different kind of keyboard.
The MX Keys Mini feels like I have my favourite keyboard back. Its key travel feels just slightly more gummy than the wonderfully crisp keyboards of old, but it’s a very minor quibble. Otherwise, it’s perfect. Plus, unlike the Magic Keyboards, this one has a backlight. Not something I need most of the time, but it’s nice when I want to write on the iPad in the dark. And in one of those “nice-to-have”s that’s always a nice surprise, the backlight turns on automatically when you rest your fingers on the keys, and goes off when you move your hand away.
Of course, I still love my Keychron K8 mechanical keyboard, and I plan to regularly switch between the MX Keys, the Keychron, and the current-generation Magic Keyboard. The thing about keyboards is, you want different feels at different times, and this one represents a keyboard style for me that I’ve been missing for the last year or so.
///
I think that’s about enough for this time – this is nearing 2,000 words despite there being no central essay. So let me end on another little bit.
I’ve been reading the excellent Tree of Souls, which is a layman’s encyclopaedia of Jewish myths, and I came across this in the introduction (emphasis mine):
Many of the myths of Gehenna simply enumerate the punishments found there. Others attempt to map out the dimensions of Gehenna, and to point out where its entrances can be found. Over time, an elaborate mythology about Gehenna accrued, much as did the mythology about heaven. Many new details emerged, such as the role of Duma, the angel in charge of Gehenna, or the presence of a guard outside Gehenna who only admits those for whom punishment has been decreed.
Duma, you might recall from Neil Gaiman and co.’s The Sandman, is the angel who, along with Remiel, takes over the governance of Hell when Lucifer abdicates.
I tweeted about this, and Gaiman quote-tweeted it with a rather cool comment: “It was the joy of making it.”