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2025 / #11: Renew, Refresh

You might notice this one looks different from previous newsletters.

I spent the last few weeks (finally) moving everything over from Wordpress to Ghost and activating the new website. There’s some hygiene matters left (and comments – I’m debating whether to use the native ones or embed Disqus), but the old site is gone, this is it, and all the old links should automatically work here. (Let me know if you find something not working, and I’ll try and fix it.)

I am sad to be leaving Buttondown (unlike Wordpress, my dislike for which I made clear in the last few posts), because it was a great experience, but one reason for moving to Ghost is the integrated newsletter facility, which means I would no longer have to wait for Buttondown to pick up new posts from my RSS feed before I could send them. The danger with Ghost is that its price increases commensurate to your number of subscribers, but one hopes that such an increase in subscribers bodes well for the enterprise and might be worth the increased price.

If you are subscribed to my newsletter, but haven’t received this one in your inbox, it might be worth checking in your spam folder.[1]

I’ll be writing more on the blog, so you’ll see more posts when you visit, but I don’t want to clutter up your inbox, so I’ll only be sending newsletters via email, and an extra post or two if I feel it’s significant enough.

The rest of my writing will stay on the blog. You can visit the site to read those posts, or subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed, and I’ll link to them in the next newsletter posted.

However, if you are one of the sweet people who’d like everything I write here in their inbox, you can click on Subscribe and select the Everything Else option in addition to the Newsletter option. This will make sure that all posts arrive in your email inbox.

I’m doing this as a nice-to-have, since Ghost enables this. My recommendation would be to use RSS for everything.

Work-wise, I put finishing touches on something that I’d been procrastinating on (this happens sometimes when I don’t have a set deadline – I noodle a whole lot), after which I’m moving on to Everything Dead & Dying #3 and The City Beneath Her Feet #3 to close off the week.

Since we last spoke, Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma #6 came out, concluding the latest collaboration between Ram V, Anand RK, along with colourist Mike Spicer.

September had the least number of releases this year, which means work is slowing down again.

I’m currently laying out my work for next year and chatting with my closest collaborators on upcoming projects. I’ve already had to decline some attractive opportunities, but it’s for the best, since I want to be doing things other than lettering.

I mentioned in the last few posts that I’ve been thinking about a big change in how I do work. I even contemplated taking a break – like a yearlong sabbatical – but it doesn’t feel right to me. I’m in the middle of a few ongoing books, and I don’t like the idea of leaving them midway, professionally or personally – every project I’ve ever left before was due to unavoidable circumstances, and this isn’t one of those.

But I have a feeling that over the next few years I’ll try and pick up short-term projects only, so that when these long-term ones end, I can take proper time off.[2]

I started working full-time in my last year of college, twenty years ago, and I have never had a break of more than one month at a time. I do now have the luxury to schedule weeks off at whim, which I take advantage of, but I’ve never had a full reset, and it seems like something I should do in my 40s. I’m thinking ideally before 2030.

But for now, I intend to keep working, but even less than before.[3] There are things I’m thinking of doing with my time instead, but now is not the time to talk about them.

Writing-wise, I wrapped up the second draft of the second issue of my project codenamed SEASIDE. This was a massive overhaul from the previous version of the issue – I think 20% of the writing is the same. It’s funny how my sense of the story has shifted as I’ve seen the artist do his work. There’s so much more I realise I can leave to the art, and therefore so much more I can pack into the writing while reducing the number of words.

I’m becoming looser in my panel descriptions as I realise the truth of something Ram told me while I was working on the first issue – Your script isn’t going to survive contact with the artist. What I write here exists to communicate something to the artist, and once that is done, story is what they drew, not what I wrote.

I’ve been having conversations with the artist and with writer and artist friends about how time and space in comics works, and how much comics writing limits itself to a “this happened, then this happened” mindset when more is possible.

Anyway, this draft now goes to the editor, from where, after any suggested tweaks, it goes to the artist to draw, and I jump into the next draft of issue 3, which is also a major overhaul (issue 4 is a page-one rewrite).

I recently read the four released issues of Zander Cannon’s Sleep, and it’s immediately become the comic whose next issue I’m looking forward to. (Issue 5 is out this week, thankfully.)

Cannon is a consummate cartoonist, and draws beautiful, well-inhabited characters. Sleep, in its structure, is a mystery box – there’s an apparent story, and there’s the story under the story, which gets hinted at as we go deeper, and there are clues throughout as to what’s going on, which will retroactively change the meaning of the story.[4]

With such a story, you can’t tell if it works until you reach the end (which is always a creative risk), but Cannon is good enough that I trust him to land the plane. Even if he doesn’t, there’s enough interesting formal work to make me glad I read it.

This is my fifth month using the Bullet Journal as my daily organisation system, and I’m surprised at how well it’s going. I expected more things to get lost in the shuffle, but once I write it down, it’s there and I simply have to look at the notebook.

I’ve had days where I didn’t look at the journal early enough, or missed it entirely, but after those, I set a reminder in my phone to look at the journal first thing in the morning, and that cares of everything.

So you can consider me a convert. I’ve even figured out how to integrate Cal Newport’s time-block planner into this – it’s as flexible as Ryder Carroll says it is.

The only downside has been that my actual diary – the intimate sort – has laid blank for these months. So I decided to take a page out of Michael Palin’s journaling style, and decided to use the Bullet Journal to note down things about my day that I can later write up – small details I want to remember, the order of events and so on.

What I’ve found is that this makes the actual writing of my diary a pleasure, since I don’t have to worry about remembering anything, and can focus on the details and how I felt about them.

Far from killing my diary habit, the Bullet Journal has given it new life.

Links:

I think that’s a fair chunk of newsletter. I had more, but decided to move it to one of these blogposts I’m thinking of writing, which should make future newsletters shorter. We’ll see.

  1. I recently had to fish out a couple of Ghost-run newsletters from my spam folder. On the other hand, when I suddenly imported nearly a thousand subscribers, the Ghost support locked my sending facility till I showed them my newslettering credentials, so I suppose they’re working on it. ↩︎

  2. This is assuming the world remains more-or-less as it is right now for the next few years, which doesn’t look like a guarantee these days. ↩︎

  3. I’m currently down to 1,200 pages in 2025, from my peak of 2,800 in 2020-21. Before that, I averaged 2,000 pages a year starting 2017. ↩︎

  4. Here, while the entire story is in black-and-white, Cannon has used the colour red to mark out objects that indicate … something that will tell us more as the mystery is revealed. It’s like a post-Lost Twin Peaks riff (which could describe Riverdale, but this isn’t that). ↩︎

  5. It feels weird that Michael Chabon has a Substack. So do George Saunders, Chuck Palahniuk, and, of all people, Jeanette Winterson, who wrote about the 40th anniversary of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. ↩︎

  6. It’s the only tv show whose logo I’ve got tattooed on me, if that tells you anything. ↩︎

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