For the past few years, I've been building up towards a project that I will unveil next year.  I wasn't always aware that I was building towards it, but my efforts at self-improvement, which were taking place on a number of levels, have all been leading towards it whether I knew it or not.  However, there comes a point at which you can't progress much further without proper focus and motivation, which means creating specific goals and the plans that will help me reach them.  With that in mind, last year I created a "seven year plan."  I already know where I'll be and what I'll be doing in January of 2020, and it starts now.

One half of that plan is personal and I won't discuss it here as it would distract from the more relevant half.  There came a point where I asked myself: if money wasn't an issue and I could do whatever I wanted, what would I do?  Among the possibilities I considered were comic book artist and comic book creator and lots of things related to both of those.  What I finally reached as an answer was: I want to tell my stories.  Obviously, the medium would be comic books.  But the wording was important.  I didn't just want to draw stuff and publish stuff, and definitely not for someone else.  I want to tell MY stories, and I want to tell them my way.  And I'm going to.  I have plans for a long-term comic book project.

I initially set up a Tumblr page to focus on the work related to that project.  But it's also going to start bleeding into this page, since I intend for more and more of my energies to be focused on that project (I'll still draw stuff that's not related to it, and I still have a lot of other art to post, so for a while things here will not seem any different).  But my focus is on the goal.  For the rest of this year, those drawings and sketches and designs will be the only information available about my project.  Over the next couple of months I will be writing my stories, designing the characters that will help tell those stories, and do layouts for all of the stories.  Starting in the Spring, I'll be producing full comic pages from pencil to ink to lettering and coloring and final output.  But you won't see those for a while.  I will have several issues complete and ready to go by the end of this year, providing a backlog of work for 2014 when the comic debuts.  I don't know for certain where it will be published, but I've got a pretty good idea.  I'll continue to write and design and draw and produce throughout 2014 and each year thereafter, with an overall goal of producing at least ten complete issues each year.  So when I wake up on January 1st, 2020, I'll be getting ready to work on issue number 61.  Or issue number 73.  More likely something in between.

And I strongly suspect that when I get up on January 1st, 2021, I won't be doing it in New York.  But that's a whole other story.