Strange Animals / 2022 / #3: Yeses and Nos
One of those lovely Twitter bots tells me that more than 10% of the year is already done. It’s been an interesting couple of months. I’ve actually managed to get work down to a point where it’s not in command of my time. But other real-life stuff has popped up that needs attention. The result is that I’m more stressed out than I’d like, but at least now I can go on walks and sit at cafes and be stressed, rather than being cooped up at home.
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I continue to have some very interesting conversations about “yes”s and “no”s.
My fellow letterer Ariana Maher was moved by a particular part of my last post:
I try to think not just about how good it might feel to say yes to [a new project], but about how good it’ll actually feel to do the work.
So much so that she wrote a Twitter thread inspired by it, which she’s kindly allowed me to quote here:
This past week I had to turn down three very tempting projects. Cool art to letter, fascinating stories to tell – but I saw myself juggling it against my upcoming workload, pushing until late when I could be hanging out with my husband, resting, learning new recipes, and such.
It’s a tough balance to hit and I still can’t quite get it down – I’m still working more hours than I should. But saying “no” has been healthier for me than saying “yes.”
I’m coming from a very privileged moment in my career. I won’t always be in this much demand in the future and I’m aware that a quiet inbox will eventually come. But that day will come faster if I break my body to meet current demand.
If you’re currently hungry to get more lettering gigs, I recognize that saying “no” is a luxury. But if you find yourself pushing your body and using up precious quality time to meet deadlines, then trust me: you won’t regret saying no to opportunities.
Don't forget the talent and drive you see in your fellow letterers. If you get a chance at a gig that you can't give your 100% for, know that someone else would devour that work with relish -- and recommend them instead. Help creators meet the best letterer for their project.
Reading Aditya’s newsletter made me reflect on the projects I said no to and the ones I said yes to in the past year… and I realize that I don’t regret saying no, but I have regretted saying yes when it meant later missing out on moments I really needed in my life.
I really appreciate my partner. Wanting to spend more time with him has helped motivate me to turn down work I would later find myself overwhelmed by.
Ariana hits exactly what I’ve been grappling with. It’s a privilege to be able to say “no”, and it might not be a permanent one. Then there are all the fears – you might worry that a prospective client might feel rejected by your “no”, or that they’d find someone else who works just as well and they wouldn’t ask again. Or that your personal relationship with a professional friend might suffer.
All of these are questions that Greg McKeown grapples with in his book Essentialism, which is one of those books whose thesis can be boiled down to a couple of pages, but which spends the rest of the time convincing you why it’s necessary (that sounds mean, but isn’t meant to be – there’s a good reason those books are written like that).
There are two things I’m trying my best to do right now, the first of which McKeown talks about in this podcast episode about saying “no” gracefully:
Separate the relationship from the decision. This gets to the literal heart of why I have trouble saying “no” in my professional and personal life. This is my current “work in progress”, let us say. All of my closer collaborators have assured me that they’d rather I live a happy life than overwork myself doing their next book, but I still struggle with the idea that people I like will not want to work with me if I say too many “no”s.
The second thing is a personal learning:
Visualise the essential thing that you’ll preserve by saying no. I talked last time about visualising my life if I said yes to the thing I shouldn’t be doing. The corollary is: visualise the thing you’re saying no for. Saying no to new lettering assignments gets much easier if I can look at that Thursday on my calendar and think about the time I could spend with my partner, my friends, or reading, or sitting in cafés writing.
Finally, in a private conversation, Ariana talked about learning to do something that I still have a lot of trouble with, and that I wish I’d done more in the last few years – quit.
Here’s what Ariana said (quoted with permission):
And that’s when I learned that the power of “no” wasn't enough. There’s also immense power in “I quit.”
I feared “I quit” because I didn’t want collaborators to hate me, I didn’t want to shut doors to possibilities I had open to me. But after making it clear that the decision was for my betterment, everyone was very understanding. I was surprised and touched by that response.
And here’s the thing, just like with saying “no” I'm surprised that I don’t feel regret from saying “I quit.”
After a stress-filled week, once I quit two of the books on my place, I found so much time available to me this week. I'm caught up and on top of things again. I have space to prioritize myself.
I’m not going to make as much money, but I’m going to have more time. And with that, if another high-paying gig comes my way (and I acknowledge this is a privilege at this point in my life), I can accept it without it stressing my schedule.
When I was dealing with my physical issues at the end of 2020, and I pruned my 2021 schedule, I restricted myself to dropping books that hadn’t started, or I stepped off books that were ending a volume. Looking back, I wish I’d been more aggressive and quit at least a few books I was already working on. I mean, I know people would’ve understood. I know nobody would’ve hated me for it. But just … I couldn’t get myself to do it.
I lettered 2,800 pages last year, and finally equipped with a complete organisation system, it was still a less stressful experience than 2020’s 2,600 pages. But I look back and imagine a 2021 with, say, 1,800 pages, and how much more I could’ve taken care of myself if I just knew how to quit.
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Writing-wise – first of all, I have an announcement:
My prose short story “Unrighteous Instruments” will be published next month as a backup in The Silver Coin #10, which is written and drawn by Michael Walsh. Michael let me play in his rich shared universe (which I already have a connection with, having designed the main lettering font for it based on Michael’s hand-lettering), and I like to think I came up with an angle that the Silver Coin hadn’t seen before.
I also got to design the entire double spread on which it’s published, which was fun. I’ll write more about this closer to publication.
Other than that, I’ve taken a page from Antony Johnston’s The Organised Writer, and started writing 500 words a day every weekday (or as many weekdays as I can, basically). It’s a simple enough thing – set a minimum for yourself, and every day, before you do anything else that will capture your cognition (like emails, work or social media), write at least that much. It’s been eight days (well, two weeks, but I skipped a day each week), and I’ve already written 4,500 words of a story.
It was originally intended to be about 6,000 words, and I came up with it in late 2020, as a reaction to the pandemic’s early days of isolation, but somehow I couldn’t actually write it back then – I think I was too close. Now, I’m putting in 500 words at a time, and it feels like it opened up to me. Because the task is “write 500 words” and not “write as much of this story as you can”, I could let the story open up and get bigger, and tell itself at the pace it needs. My estimate right now is that it’ll end up around 15,000 words long, and when I finish it, I’ll probably have no idea what to do with. But I’m fine with that. More than anything, it’s a story that needs out.
When I read about this in Johnston’s book, it immediately made sense to me as a “right thing heard at the right time”. I’m finally down from the last two frenetic years to working about 4 days a week, 4-6 hours a day, rather than the old 5 days a week, anything from 10-14 hours a day, and it’s time to prioritise the things I did this for. They need to become non-optional – writing being the main priority.
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Lots of lettering stuff too, since we last talked.
Arkham City: The Order of the World #5 came out last week.
Suicide Squad: Blaze #1, by the entire Hellblazer team, is out this week.
.self #4 and Batman: Urban Legends #12 (containing the second instalment of our Wight Witch story) were also released this week, as was the print copy of Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, which was originally released digitally last year.
The All-Nighter #5 came out at the end of January, so you can now read the whole first arc of the series if you have an Amazon Prime or Comixology Unlimited membership.
Finally, James announced The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos, a new series that will be co-plotted by James and Tate Brombal, and Tate will be writing it. Nick Robles will be providing covers and character designs, with art by Isaac Goodhart, colours by Kurt Michael Russell, letters by me, design by Dylan Todd, and edited by Greg Lockard.
This one’s quite close to my heart. I jumped at the chance to work with Tate, my cohort on Barbalian: Red Planet, and to do more books with James. Plus it’s exciting to be back working with Nick, whom I last collaborated with on Euthanauts for Black Crown. And finally, the concept itself is something that excites me, having toyed with similar ideas as a writer in the past.
The first instalment will be out in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!
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I think we got a lot done in this one, so I won’t do a big recommendation/sidenote here. But. I’ve been reading Andy Martin’s Reacher Said Nothing, a process book about Lee Child writing the 20th Reacher novel, Make Me. And even though I’ve never read a Reacher book or been interested in them, it’s been a really fun read from a process point of view, watching someone with an entirely unstructured process navigate the act of getting things done on a regular basis while genuinely caring about the craft of it. I’m about halfway through it, but it’s already a book I rather like, and would be happy to recommend to people who like reading about the writing process, whether or not you’re a crime fiction reader. Plus, I might end up picking up a Reacher book based on this.
And we’re out!