Dude, Where's My Update? #13

Hey folks. Been a minute since I’ve done a newsletter, newsletter, hasn’t it? I won’t bother with the summary of the stuff I’ve published since August, which to be fair isn’t all that much, and instead fill you in on some life stuff and where my head’s at.

Where’ve You Been, Dude?

September and October have always been difficult months for me. They’re jam packed with obligations and events and holidays. There’s SPX, the chagim (Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, etc.,) and at least one yearly meet up with out-of-state friends I don’t see during my SPX trip. It wipes me out, to say the least, so I spend much of my remaining free time resting back up instead of writing.

For some, writing is a relaxing exercise. Restorative. It’s externalizing the monologue in one’s head and it flows like water from a stream. While I do find that to be true, it’s not something I do to unwind. Writing is a task. A deliberate act that takes precedence over other activities that I squeeze into my evening and night hours. Yes, it is something I’m often compelled to do, but it is a task nonetheless. 

And tasks…I find easy to push aside.

The worst part is the times I am most ready to write I am doing other work and by the time I have the space to work on my own pieces, I have to muster the energy to spin my brain back up again. I’ve been trying to do that “work one hour every day” thing and I think I hate it more than not doing anything?

I am a very project driven person. I need to have a shape and then work on filling it. The project could be “write an 800 word review about a single issue every week” or “make a reading list for every single TMNT comic you can find.” It doesn’t matter. It needs a shape, it needs a deadline, and I need to work on it and little else. With the bigger projects, I can get away with a pick-up and put-down approach. The smaller pieces? Forget about it. 

With this “hour a day” nonsense, I get partway through an article, put it aside, and then struggle the next day to get it over the finish line because I’ve had ideas for a different review that I need to get down and start work on that and then I bounce to a different, much larger project that needs some chipping away, and then it’s 11 pm and my eyes are swimming and my head is feeling like a visualizer put through a strainer. I lose myself in a neverending spiral of doubts and jump from piece to piece to piece, leaving me with a pile of semi-coherent paragraphs scattered across a multitude of docs and nothing to show for it.

Prioritization. Usually I’m pretty good about it. With no external due dates, though, I have to really push to get over the initial hump, and it takes a lot less to get me to walk away. Time slips by and the stress crawls in, building and building the longer I leave those pieces unfinished, open, incomplete. 

The writing continues until morale improves, er, the piece is scheduled.

Eventually, I find the rhythm and make the time and push and push and get it done. It takes longer than it would’ve if I just kept working, the structure nebulously in my head rather than having to be reconstructed from fragmented memories and unconnected paragraphs. Tired, I take some time to rest, and the nagging feeling that I should be writing crawls in.  “You should be writing about this.” “What about that project gathering digital dust over there?” “Didn’t you promise a monthly column? It’s coming up in just three weeks.”

And so on and so on.

I hate that I can’t feel satisfied with something until it is fully complete, wrapped up, finished, ready for presentation. That I need to either spend hours and hours of uninterrupted typing or I will forever live with these bits and pieces that haunt my hard drive. 

Uh….You Good, Bud?

I could be better. To peel back the curtain a little, last year around this time I had a really terrible couple months. It was hard and I’m still recovering, as it were, from the grief of it all. (And all that was before the election.) Then, this year, as we were preparing to take a trip to the west coast for a wonderful wedding, I had a friendship come to an end and it stung far more than I expected.

Oh. Yeah. I spent an entire week on vacation.

No writing or thinking about writing for me! That knocked me out for a whole week after. Turns out catching a red eye where time jumps forward, watching “Uncut Gems,” and taking a train that leaves three hours after landing is not conducive for a good night’s sleep or for being in the headspace to write.

Which brings me to…

Where the Heck is Mangaversity?

Initially, this was all supposed to be a short explanation and prelude to why this month’s “Mangaversity” is so late. Turns out, I had a lot more bubbling around in my brain than I thought. Regardless, the other reason the column is so late is…well…

Baker & Taylor to Cease Operations | American Libraries Magazine

Despite measures to continue operations and preserve pending contracts with libraries, the book distributor Baker & Taylor will shutter.

American Libraries MagazineGreg Landgraf

After Previews went poof, I switched to using Baker & Taylor as my manga title aggregator for the next month. It was great! I had much finer control over the range of time I was looking at and I didn’t have to guess which publishers were putting out volumes. The writing was on the wall in late-September while I was working on the previous month’s column. It still caught me off guard and I went scrambling for a new option. Luckily, there was Ingram, though it took me a lot longer to get everything set-up and with all the busyness in October - plus the fact that I work the polls in November -  the whole thing slid to where we are now.

Ah. Yeah. We also had a tree come down on the house. Only a couple broken shingles but hooooooboy was it scary.

For the record, I have the shell of November’s Mangaversity and the books picked out; I simply struggled to do the writing and snark and evaluation portion of it. You know - the actual piece. It’ll get there, don’t worry, it just might take me a little more time. That’s actually why you’re getting this update first instead of after. I didn’t want to keep sitting on my hands because I was having writer's block or whatever.

Next week then?

Hopefully.

As for what’s coming up after, we’ll see. There are a couple reviews I gotta get through and I’m still writing up my SPX haul - another project that really requires some uninterrupted writing time. I want to do some dissection of Neon Ichiban and, when it launched, Sweet Shop - weigh their pros and cons and kinda talk where I'm at with floppies.

I’m also…not quite sure what direction to take this newsletter in.

So many blogs of yore and newsletters of today are these semi-stream-of-consciousness check-ins; public diaries and conversations between writer and reader more than discrete articles living under a banner. Others, though, are just that. They’re projects that you signed up for and each installment is the next iteration.

I’m partial to the latter. I want to do my work and put it out for you and hopefully grow my readership with thoughtful analysis, fun critiques, and sometimes a really goofy article. However, if I want this to be something I put out regularly, I gotta write something every damn week and the easiest way to do that is to, well, “talk.”

And I mean, it’s my show through and through. I can do whatever and it’s all about me. That’s kinda the point. But as with the “one hour a day” thing, I kinda hate it. I gotta make choices? About how I present myself and what I write about? And it’s the only thing keeping people here? Gross.

Alright. That’s enough moping. Let’s end with a section I love dearly and I hope you do too.

My Cats

My cats!