Hello, Deep Sea Divers!
Starting today, I’m experimenting with a slightly new structure for the newsletter. I will continue to open with a precatory sentence or two, followed by a poetry comic. Following the comic, I’m working on crafting stronger micro-essays that are no more than 500 words, and usually less than 100 words.
The real new stuff will be below that. I will be posting artist’s notes that relate to the process of each comic and essay. If you’re not a process junkie, feel free to skip this section.
Below the artist notes, I will be adding commerce notes. Commerce notes are about the process and progress of my indie poetry comic & writing business. I’m not sure there is any wide interest in this, but I’m adding it as an accountability measure for myself and for anyone else curious about the messy intersection of commerce, art, gatekeepers, and indie publishing.
Seahorses & Aliens
A teacher in high school once told us that life is a search for your people. He implied that everyone eventually finds what we’re all searching for. He lied with all he implied.
A business guru once told me (and everyone else in the podcast audience) that business is a search for your niche. She implied that if you work long, and hard enough everyone eventually finds their niche. She lied with all she implied.
Some of us aren’t people at all. We’re sea horses or aliens. We aren’t searching for our niche. We are simply adrift, not searching for someone like us, but for some who will like us for all the ways we’re not like anything else they’ve ever seen.
I think you know, I lie with all I imply.
Artist Note
I knew after I made my earlier seahorse comic this week, that I would have to return to these enigmatic creatures. I wrote this haiku today and then created this comic for it. This piece is more in line with the tradition of haiga than most of my comics. Haiga is an ancient practice of pairing art with haiku. The art is not an illustration of the poem, but it is meant to complement the poem. As with traditional haiku, the haiga paintings would stick to nature and contain elements that alluded to specific seasons.
My haiku comics are my modern spin on haiga. But, usually, there is a closer correspondence between the words of my poems and the images than is true with this poem.
The essay comes from a combination of making this comic while listening to the Arlo Parks album, Collapsed in Sunshine, and a lifetime of being weird. Be sure to check out this cool animation from the Arlo Parks track, Collapsed in Sunshine. It’s more of a spoken word poem than a song, and it’s beautiful.
Commerce Note
Poetry, comics, and writing are not hobbies for me. They’re my career. I’m working to build a sustainable business that allows me to create weird stuff and avoid having a real job. I’m primarily focused on an indie publishing model because it allows me to maintain control over my intellectual property and is more sustainable over the long term, if slower to build, than a career dependent on gatekeepers.
I’m not opposed to publishing in partnership with more traditional venues such as magazines, newspapers, journals, and traditional presses. However, I’ve found my time is more efficiently spent building my audience through this newsletter than pitching work into the void and waiting on people to navigate their slush pile.
If you do know of any digital or print outfit that you think would be a good fit for my work, let me know, and I’ll check them out and try my hand and finding something that’s a good fit for them.
Cheers,
Jason
Great newsletter!!! Thanks for sharing the sausage making (aka creative process) and your plans! I appreciate it! I too am all in on the independent publishing thing... not opposed to the other - in fact I work with Storyberries in Australia (you might want to look them up www.storyberries.com) - it's that I'm finding my work is often "too weird" for much of the US mainstream publishing. So I do the indie thing. It fits me better anyway 😁
Thanks for introducing me to haiga, and the word “precatory.” And of course, more seahorses!