Something something hope confirmed something something I had no faith but kept going only to succeed in the most unexpected moment something something I was about to continue anyway but if I lose both the faith and the hope in the future, I should remember this one time it worked
This is a post about my creative process and it is very personal to me but it might be difficult to understand because I am not good with words and it is basically the very point here
So yeah many of the comics I make come from my need to communicate certain messages, and I am very bad at communication so it usually doesn't work.
I look at the "failed" stories and save them for later, hoping to perfect them when I have more skill, but in the meantime I recycle the same motif in a new story.
New fandom, new characters, new setting, new tone, new genre, same heart, same me.
And I keep adding them, rows of iterations of the same message dressed in new clothes like character skins in video games. And I keep thinking: I will return to you all and complete you all in the future, and this way my message will be heard, it will be heard in many voices until it maybe gets to someone.
Then something unexpected happened with giant K series. I explained it somewhere, this series is based on a kind of motif I have been using for years, every few years a new retelling, new layout, new skin, but at core always the same.
(How to explain it? It is a silly comedy series, but at the same time it can be a reflection of a strained mind, silenced heart, confused soul. I don't have the right words yet.)
And this time, for the first time ever, it worked. I managed to start posting it, I managed to complete the plot, I managed to make it consistent, whole, harmonic.
And I almost dropped the series soon after it started, ready to put it among its ancestors to wait forever for a revival. But a friend encouraged me to keep going, and after The Post I managed to regain faith in it myself. And then, just recently, I realized that I did in fact manage to tell the story. I alreay told it. This did not change much in the world, but it changed a lot in myself.
And I started to think that maybe I couldn't complete the message before because I didn't have the right material, not enough building bricks that could fit together to form the shape of my thought. And maybe I will never get to complete the other variants of this motif, because the tools I have used constructing them were not the right ones. It was always trial and error, and I am lucky to have somehow landed a way that worked.
(I can still use the plots built around the older takes to tell stories to entertain so it's not like they are useless or something. Also I love them dearly and will never leave them)
I don't know, I am just so happy this lil series got to exist, and that it brings people joy. It brings something else to me too, something I cannot exactly express with words. I might make another comic about it one day lol
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today was exhausting - my friend was here for about 7 hours and I just. oh man I love her and all but it's just a lot sometimes. it's probably for the best that we only meet up like 2-4 times a year now (gives me enough time to forget how draining it is so I look forward to it, and recover afterwards)
I don't talk to anyone but my husband most days, and he doesn't really talk. so that's maybe 15 minutes total of talking. and today it was literally. 7 hours. no breaks except when we were eating (but no even then someone was always talking).
first of all ouch, it hurts (my voice is very hoarse now). and also. it's so so so draining. like. we really have nothing in common at this point. but she's my oldest friend and I do love her so it's tolerable... but just barely. these days there's way too much diet/food/weight loss talk, and also she seems to be getting into alternative medicine which I cannot fucking stand (it's one topic where I can't pretend or be nice about it either). lots and lots of very preachy vegan stuff too (I don't have any problems with it, I admire people who can do it, but fuck dude you know I eat meat and that I've said many times that I *can't* go vegan (I would starve. there's not enough foods that would be left. seriously.) and it feels pretty shitty to keep going on about it every damn time. I'm not sitting there trying to convince her that she should really be an atheist or something, because I know what her thoughts are about that and I respect it.
when she hangs out with her other friends a lot it's mostly just talking about all the issues that come from that (they fucking suck). I don't know, it kind of feels like I'm her therapist. when I talk about something I'm interested in she doesn't ask many questions and it kind of sucks. like, dude I don't care about your plants either, but I'm interested because you care, so. maybe try that too. would be nice!
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