Good morning! Here is a sweet little roll of a cat.
I’m moving again. I hope I’ll be back to longer posts here soon—maybe even next week!—but I won’t make any promises. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your Juneteenth.
Moving! 6/19/25
Category Archives: Autobiographical
Alex the cat, 6/13/25
The busy-ness will continue until morale improves. Or maybe that’s until baby gets much older? Either way, I missed my usual post here yesterday and I’m here to offer you a cat.
I did read Stuart Gibbs’ first FunJungle book in the last week, Belly Up. It’s great. It is a neat distillation of the noir-ish detective story reinterpreted for a middle grade novel, and set in a zoo. There’s a whole series of these books, and I’m itching for a go at the next one. Maybe when I’m more awake and have more time I’ll give you more in depth thoughts, but now the baby is waking and I must feed him.
05/01/25
This time I finally have two posts in the works. Maybe next week I’ll have enough time to finish one of them and post that instead of pictures of Alex. Until then, I hope you’re able to enjoy some good spring (or fall, you do you) weather.
belated 04/24/25
I’m afraid we have a changeling. That, or Alex the cat has hidden our baby.
She’s not supposed to be in the bassinet. She knows this. She’s a cat, so she sleeps there anyway.
Gibby’s homecoming
Little does this cat know, but she’s about to have a new baby to keep her company. He’s coming home today!
Maybe I’ll have something else for you next week. Maybe I’ll be trapped in a fog of sleep deprivation, unable to escape. We will see.
Baby!
I have a baby. The baby is not Alex, you’ll have to enjoy seeing Alex instead.
Posts in the near future may be less long-winded, coherent, or have a significantly higher cat content.
Real life intrudes, and art by Nate Powell
This week’s post has been delayed by hospital visits. I might have more for you on that topic next week. For now, I wanted to call your attention to About Face, a comic by Nate Powell about symbols, identity, and the normalization of the language of force. It’s an excellent piece, though perhaps not an uplifting one. It does, however, make me wonder whether Nate Powell would be interested in working with me on Ironsides.
Powell also made the March series (book 1, book 2, book 3), creating the art for the late Representative John Lewis‘s nonfiction work about the American civil rights movement. I haven’t yet picked those up, but I’m really looking forward to reading them. I think you might like them too.
Internal tumult, and comic progress
Today’s an odd one. My cat is not doing well, and I’m stressed about a lot of different things both large and small. I am, however, still making progress—the agent who offered feedback on my query liked my rewritten draft, I’ve had a very helpful conversation with my friend Lucy Bellwood about making comics, and I’ve been reading Molly Ostertag’s substack series on making graphic novels. With those last two details, I can confirm that…
Continue readingHo-ho-home time, 12/26/24
I’m on the road visiting with family. You can expect to hear from me again next week. In the meanwhile, I hope that you are doing well and (if you’re in the northern hemisphere) staying warm.
Take care!
untitled, 11/07/24
Your regularly scheduled programming has exited my brain stage right.
The wisdom I’ve found most useful this week comes from my similarly distressed elders: don’t borrow trouble. What I fear may yet come to pass, but it probably won’t look exactly as I imagine it. More importantly, I won’t gain anything from letting my dread wax eloquent—unless I’m imagining ways to create solutions that are within my power to work towards.
That’s all easier said than done. I’ve only managed to follow this advice some of the time.
I’ve been thinking about my current need for distractions, and for narratives that give me hope and feel empowering and encouraging. I’ve also felt a growing urge to make those narratives for myself and for others. But even as I feel the need to do that, and wonder about how I might do it, the task itself feels a bit like climbing out of a well without a rope.
I’ve been scripting a comic recently. Maybe that’s part of the recipe. It certainly feels like it hits some of the necessary notes. I’m meeting with the friend who came up with the comic’s original concepts today. I hope he likes where I’ve taken things.
Perhaps it’s also time to revisit my old Protectors stories. They feel especially timely once again. I just need to have them critiqued and rewrite them a bit more before I can shop them around… or find a way to publish them myself at this point. Maybe it’s time to push harder in that direction.
This election didn’t deliver what I’d hoped for. So far it’s doing a good job of delivering what I feared. Regardless, I hope you’re all ready to weather whatever storm is coming your way, and are enjoying your good times while you have them. Take care, and good luck.
Fistful of Wits 