Yuko Made

Yesterday, after what seemed like hours and days (weeks! years!) of deliberating I figured out what I need to be focused on with my free time. My problem in these last months, years, etc has been that I get captivated by too many things, always wanting to try out new projects.  There is always a veritable I CAN DO THAT! gleam to every new project I work on that is hard to resist. But resist I shall!  I’ve been pulled in too many directions and thus my output has been spread too thin.

My business is on hold for now. I have all my licenses and tax ids and all the legal goodies to proceed but the economic timing for this is ridiculous. I just can’t bring myself to throw money down the toilet for the next year.  Shelving this project is the right thing to do.

The other big thorn in my side is this sudden glaring unhappiness at my day job.  I’m reminded of a conversation I had with Craig Thompson a year or so ago when I ran into him at a wedding that I crashed. He asked what I was working on and I told him I was building products for one of the most trafficked websites on the internet. He looked at me incredulously and, to paraphrase, said “What about comics? How can you tell me you’re happy not drawing?”  At the time I was convinced I was happy and told him as much.

Craig and I at said wedding.

I crashed, he was invited.

Craig called me a liar. And this coming from someone I admire, professionally idolize, and just plain like as a pallie. It’s a bad sign when someone like him calls me a liar in not so many words.

The second thing that has been haunting me is a conversation I had with Mark a week or so ago, I was in heavy deliberation/freak out mode when he said one thing to me that made my mind flip out like nothing else, even though it was such an obvious statement.  He said to me,”You should just do what you love and you don’t seem to love this business venture.” I paraphrased that because I can’t ever remember anything verbatim. 

Every job I have, no matter how successful or how much drool inciting money I make, always after the honeymoon of excitement, leaves me feeling bored and uncaring. So it seems I am back where I am supposed to be.

Hello again sweet sweet comics.

I'm disappointed to discover I've forgotten how to draw.

I’m almost back at square one with my drawing skills but I figure I have time to hone. Twenty-three drawings down, thousands more to go!

I have my business licenses in order… sellers’s permit, tax stuff, etc. Yet, I am still so very hesitant to start the prototype process. I keep thinking, the economy is so shitty right now, what on earth are you doing? Also other thoughts like, “Quit your day job and work on other things” are seeping into me after I had a singular explosive moment of “I CAN’T DO THIS FOREVER” at the day job, which, needless to say,  complicates things. Day job means equity for protoypes, small businesses, and story writing.

Frantically, I have these moments where, sans the day job,  I calculate how long I can live on my savings and work on the joys of drawing all day, but then the adult part of me kicks in. And thus also kicks in the hesitation of flipping the switch on for my prototypes.

I think about how much I admire the French writer Karl Huysmans, who wrote the decadent and pessimistic novel Against the Grain. In it he tells the fantastical, excessive, and alarming story of the life of an aristocrat who has shut himself away from the world: complete with jewel encrusted turtles, an ice bar, and a chapter dedicated to the description of one Salome painting. The thing is, Huysmans was a civil servant for 30 or so years, never giving up his day job as he pursued his successful creative endeavors.

He looks crazed doesn't he? He's trying to figure things out as well.

I admire that.

So, things feel like a small crisis these days. Indecisiveness is not normal for me and it’s annoying and a little hateful.

What to do?

test

The other day I was up at the cafeteria at my day job, when I ran into someone I had worked with in a different department (he was a developer and I was a SQA engineer back then). We were chatting it up what projects we were working on when he exclaimed, “You must be so lucky! You get to work on anything you want!”.

This statement immediately annoyed me and I told him that me becoming a product manager and working on fun projects had nothing to do with luck and that it was all due to hard work. I worked hard to get here and worked hard to own interesting and great products. 

I felt offended at the disservice he showed my work ethic and brains. Luck? Mysticism?! WHAT?! 

It was later when I realized I must seem strange to most people, that the way I think about how my life works, what I want on a daily basis and on a grand scheme is planned out to a certain extent… ever changing but definitely planned out. Why would I sit and twiddle my thumbs waiting fora stroke of luck?  

And then I thought about him and wondered what he was wishing luck would drop into his lap? And then I thought about everyone in my work who have said something similar like that to me, and then it escalated to everyone I had ever met… and then well you get the picture. It’s a whole bunch of people just waiting for something to happen to them.

Why are they waiting for luck to intervene? Maybe the solution is a highly simplistic game of semantics … replace your name with the would Luck and POOF! there you have it! I’m getting snarky and I don’t mean to. I just want to tell people that personal accountability isn’t scary, that in fact, it’s the opposite of what you would think it would feel like, which is that it’s relieving.

Luck. Pshaw.

I couldn’t figure out why the things I want to accomplish were taking so long for me do. I am not a terribly lazy person, more of an averagely lazy kind of gal with a dash more goal-orientated drive than most. Which works out that I am averagely lazy and driven then…well in my head it makes sense. I’m trying to start a small business and write/draw my own comic book to be self-published. I’ve read the books I’m supposed to. I hired a teacher to teach me the physical craft of the small business trade and I worked as a professional in the comic book industry for five years (you won’t find me on google for anything comic related anymore, I worked for coloring houses and as a freelance color-assist). I get it. But here I am a few months later with nothing happening with my small business.

Finally, I gave into the idea that my excuse that my day job was taking up a tremendous amount of my time, though a valid reason (50 - 60 hours a week), was still a lousy excuse. So, through a series of fortunate incidents I found myself in a position to be able to cure the fact that I need 30 hours in a day to fulfill all my goals. And since I don’t have a Time Turner, I instead fixed this problem by hiring someone to help with the spillage of work I do not have time for.

It seems extravagant to have a Leftenant of my own but when you boil it down, it works out to what most people pay for a nanny. My friend and new Leftenant is rather brilliant and luckily for me just got laid off, is working on getting his pilot’s license, and is running away to Australia to do his walkabout and meet a professor he is interested in doing his Phd with. The timing is perfect for this. He has time, is a pair of smartie pants, and is willing to wear a suit whenever we do business together.

I found myself trying to organize all the loose ideas I have that are scattered in my brain, into something concrete that he and I can work on. Now there is a cold hard task list in front of me for us to tackle. It’s overwhelming and mildly frightening but on the other hand it is so exciting to see all my action items laid out and unfurled in front of me. I’m practically giving myself a headache with fear and simultaneous optimistic joy that i can do this. I just needed some help.

And this is not to say that my solution to everyone is to hire someone to help you out, but that the problems that are holding you back should be addressed in a hard and clear light. That it’s okay to need help. That there are most likely more than one solution to your roadblock out there. That you can figure it out if you keep the whining down and the “but…i can’t because of XYZ” down to a minimum. Clear the noise out and for just one moment think about solutions to your problems. It’s like playing a game of sudoku, it’ll click, I swear, you just need that quiet moment to contemplate what the hell the real issue truly is.

My own action item was to sit down and start a crazy list of everything I want to do and to break out each thing with more granular tasks. If I do items 1 -4 I will then have accomplished goal number 88! YAY! I’ll get to the end of the list with help at some point. At least I know I’m finally even on the road.

The day to start my project isn’t tomorrow. It was right now. And oh look! It already started and it didn’t hurt a bit.

I don’t think it’s difficult to come up with good ideas or stories. I think everyone has them. The problem, no matter what world your good idea resides in, is that it’s hard to implement and execute on. So many things have roadblocked my way to where I want to be and unfortunately that roadblock was always my own aggravating list of excuses.

I figured the things that I wanted to write about with this blog were all going to be about the challenges of executing on different ideas/projects while also having a day job. It took me awhile but I’ve ended up exorcising most, not all, of my bad habits and mental blocks.

Here are my top few issues that were not helping me in the slightest to get to my road to fun:

1. “I’m too tired” - Ultimately I’m always tired, so really it doesn’t matter. That day where I wake up feeling physically great isn’t coming anytime soon.

2.”My day job drains me.” - Just like trusty #1 up there, this also is a business-as-usual sort of compliant. I always imagine a chorus of millions of voices between the hours of 5pm -7pm collectively grumbling about what a shitty/tiring/stupid/etc day of work they have had. Sometimes, it’s a true statement but if it’s an everyday statement, well then there is something deeper going on. And while I am one of the few people I know who is relatively happy about my day job (it’s exciting and challenging), it does get exhausting. But like I said in #1, I’m always tired so there is not point I should not make time for projects because my body is a piece of crap. Take that body!

3. “I’ll start tomorrow.” - This is just stupid and arbitrary. It’s like my pet peeve where people freak out over turning 30 (I myself turned 30 a few months ago) as though we live in the Logan’s Run universe and something dreadful will happen like a trip to Carousel if we haven’t “proven” ourselves (whatever that may mean).

Time on his Life Clock is running out for that hottie Michael York. Now this guy had a real reason to fear turning 30.

Carousel, once you turn 30 your useless life is Renewed here aka you get murdered aka that you happily go to to be murdered.

By the way, Logan’s Run featured one of my all time favorite robots, Box. A ridiculous robot that has gone completely bonkers over the centuries, he is delighted by things like murder. Are we overwhelmed, Box? More delighted that you like your day job a lot, I think. Bonus: Michael York is naked.

Box is delighted to kill

Tomorrow or turning 30 is an arbitrary marker of time, what if today is your 30th birthday…you’d start today right? If you’re thinking about starting a project, a new career, a new trade or whatever, the next thing you should do is sit there for 5 minutes and write it down. Done. Your tomorrow just started today and it only took you 5 minutes. (Though this goes straight into the problem of keeping up with your work which is a whole another entry in itself.)

4. “I’m afraid of failing (or suceeding)” - Hmm, my workaround for this really speaks to an unpleasant side of myself. I feel as though there are people who have worse vision than I do, who produce things because they are more diligent than I am, which makes me angry that I’m being a wuss. I figure that even if my vision is not great, at least I will have competed against mediocrity though it’s possible that I will find myself being apart of it. It’s not positive motivation but it’s some kind of motivation. I’m working on it, but iI have to admit failing is still scary.

5. “I don’t have enough time.” - You make time. The end. You turn off the tv, your phone, IM, your browser for 30 minutes and you sit down and have alone time and you write what you want to do , draw, practice, whatever it is that you want to achieve. If you don’t have 30 minutes to spare how about 15 minutes? Or the 10 minutes it takes to brew coffee and drink it?

Five issues. Five mediocre but very easy cures to start working on that side project you’ve been daydreaming about when you are stuck in your cubicle at 2:16pm being bored and beat down thinking about all the things you WOULD do if only you weren’t stuck in this place right now. Oh, I know I am over-simplifying things but honestly sometimes things are easily fixed when they do seem to be set in black and white terms. I’m just saying you need to start somewhere. You could even just stop reading here, and go jot down the idea you want to implement. It’s not hard. Go give the beast it’s rightful name and empower it! This blog will be here when you get back.

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…whistle….

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Are you back? Cool! No don’t worry I’ll wait. I brought a book with me.

My first brog all by myself! I’m an adult! Just go to the bank, guys. Just go to the bank!