Lessons learned from two weeks of poetry comics

The power of challenges

Hi Poetry Peeps!

Two weeks ago, I was having a lot of feelings—and I wasn’t sure how to process them. I was flailing. The idea popped into my head to do some type of creative challenge. I knew that spending more time creating would help me find the balance I was lacking.

However, I also wanted to make sure that I didn’t overwhelm myself. I settled on a short streak of two weeks.

Yesterday was the last day. I was able to deliver a new poetry comic at the same every day for 14 days. Successfully completing the challenge felt amazing! Here are a few of the key things I learned:

• Creating is an essential part of living my best life. I’m much happier when I regularly make and share things.

• Posting daily without a pre-built queue of comics was grueling. A lot of things went wrong behind the scenes, but I refused to fail.

• A challenge is a great way to see the difference between excuses and reasons. If it weren’t for the challenge, I would have skipped several days because I was too tired.

• The challenge helped me connect with more readers. During the past 14 days, I had more shares, comments, likes, reply emails, and new subscribers than I’ve ever had.

• I’ve made some new haiku friends!

• I’ve had a handful of opportunities that are a direct result of the challenge, none of which I can share quite yet.

• I need to change the way I structure this newsletter. Weekly posts aren’t going to cut it. But, publishing daily doesn’t feel sustainable. (I have some ideas that I will polish over this next week.)

• I have no way of knowing what poetry comics will perform best. Things I thought might resonate had the fewest views. Comics I thought were not as strong as I would like generated a lot of positive feedback.

• Experimenting with different elements and formats helped me better understand visual storytelling

• My best writing is done in the morning, and my best collage art is done in the afternoons. Late nights are the best time for me to assemble everything together into a comic.

• I cannot stop making poetry comics!

Thank you again for all your support. It means a lot that some crazy idea I had to make collage art comics with haiku and other poems has gained some momentum.

There is a lot of injustice and suffering in the world that I cannot do much about. However, I can take slivers of my soul and put them in my poems and comics and send them out into the world. Hopefully, some of what I do here makes your day a bit better.

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

We’ll talk again in 7 days!

Cheers,

Jason