Baby's First Newsletter!

Welcome!

It’s February, and it feels like the entire world has been holding its breath for a month straight. January is always a little like that, an anxious threshold standing between the true beginnings of the year. This year, that vestibule held a lot of weight. I feel it in the heavy center of every conversation, and at the edges of every day, wrapped in the comfort of my bedding where anxious thoughts sap at my sleep. It feels as if everything might collapse, and it isn’t difficult to see the things that already have. I find myself drawing further inside of the worlds I create, wishing to inhabit them in full, in place of acknowledging the reality around me. It’s important, right now, to keep our eye on what’s happening, but in times of great political strain, building those hovels of escape is important as well.

So, welcome to my little hovel of escape! In this space, I want to take a moment, once a month, to check in with you all, and let you past the seems that separate my personal and social-media face.

PROGRESS AND GOALS

I don’t know if listing out goals is entirely healthy, not when I’m the type of person who builds lofty ideals of what I’d like to accomplish in a month, but I’m going to do it anyway. Maybe, there’s a lesson in grace there for me to learn. Maybe, I’ll stop doing it a few newsletters in when I find I never actually reach any of them. Time will tell.

My goals for this year are straight forward. I want to finish the Line Art, or Inking phase of my upcoming Graphic Novel, HEARTACHE. It’s my first solo book, my first time scripting a full OGN, and I’m excited to have a long-term project to chew on while it feels like the world is burning. I can’t stop the world from burning, but I can make queer art; I can tell queer stories. I won’t delude myself into believing it’s an extremely important job, but it is my job, and I know that it will reach a handful of people who need it. I can live with that.

My goals for February are simple as well, and also very focused on HEARTACHE. It’s my entire world right now and will be for the next year and a half. I’d like to get through 100 pages of layout sketches this month. I did 78 in January, with a slow start so it feels like something I can do! I also make a goal of putting out two Patreon drawings, and a postcard every month. I don’t always make it, but I am always trying. I’m fortunate that this year I don’t have any spring cons I’m attending, so hopefully I’ll be able to dedicate more of myself to just sitting down and drawing.

As I work on HEARTACHE, I’m going to share snippets with all of you (until my publisher tells me to do otherwise). I hope that inviting you into the process will drum up the same excitement in my audience as making it is creating in me.

This is Jack, my POV character. She's angry and has a penchant for hyper individualism.
 And here's a snippet of what I'm working on right now! I've never thumbnailed anything so tightly, and I feel like you can see how much I'm enjoying working on this project.

BUTTON JAR

When we go to create something often times those worlds are built on all of our little interest we collect, like a jar full of buttons, each lovingly placed into a colorful, eclectic little ensemble. In this section, I want to show you my jar, and the things I’ve been collecting.

This year, I’ve made it one of my resolutions to read more classic literature. I realized it’s a bit of a blind spot for me. For someone who loves vampires, I had never read Dracula; for someone who loves Sci-Fi, I’ve never read Issac Asimov. I’m remedying that this year, sprinkling classics into my TBR to bounce between contemporary books.

I started the year by reading Frankenstein, which has already cemented itself as one of my favorite books. It’s a glimpse at how truly romantic Horror can be and is filled with so much beautiful language. It was an incredible jumping off point to my classics journey. I also read Dracula this month, which I adored for entirely different reasons, specifically the character Mina Harker, who might be one of my favorite characters I’ve ever read. It makes me excited to see how many worlds are sitting in this blind spot, and how I might trace those threads to modern books I love.

I watch and read so many things, and if I listed them all this would be a very long, very insufferable section. I want to keep this as a space for the true interests, the things that cement themselves within my psyche, ready to trickle into my art and writing. That being said, Blue Eye Samurai and Arcane both made their way into my jar of buttons recently, joined the other little sparks of fancy I’ve placed there.

THE LIFE

One of the problems with working from home in what is a solitary job is that I don’t actually live a very interesting life. I spend most of my days sitting at my desk drawing and barely leave the house. I’m aware that art and stories are often influenced by our experiences and by holing up in my apartment I fail to experience things, but creating also takes time. I need that time spent alone, and that space of safety to build from.

So, what did I do this month? Well, I did a talk with the Boulder Public Library about OFF MENU, the book I illustrated that was published last year. It was an intimate little conversation between me and maybe 15 other people, and I enjoyed it a lot. I also played DND a handful of times and maintained a consistent gym schedule. It was a sleepy month for me, which is what January should be. We aren’t meant to do grand things in the middle of winter.

I enjoy winter for this reason. There are few expectations, and I get to spend long, cold days inside, writing and drawing. I'm an indoor kid at heart, and the winter months truly cater to that side of me.

OUTRO

If you’ve made it this far, thank you, thank you! This is likely my fourth or fifth time trying to type out a newsletter in my life. It’s been a somewhat distant goal of mine for years now, though every time I sit down to type, I’m stopped by this invisible barrier. It’s a mix between impostor syndrome—an innate sense that my words don’t actually matter, and this great inability to gather all of my thoughts together into a singular document.

While I am an avid writer in my own personal life, and I guess I’m a professional writer now (a title that still feels unearned), I’ve always found it difficult to write about myself. I’m not a character, and my own thoughts and motivations are not as easily distilled as someone propelling a story forward. People, real people, are much messier, much more difficult to define and contain. My own mind is a maze of half formed thoughts, lofty goals and crippling paralysis. I have both an inflated sense of self-importance, and an unbearable understanding that I’m not nearly as good at any of the things I do as I should be—or worse, as I could be. I don’t know myself well, and I’m unsure that a self can be attainably knowable. It’s a difficult thing to write about.

I hope I can manage to continue this newsletter, and that those of you who take the time to read it find it worth reading. It'll be a little goal of mine to collect more images for the next one. I want this to be a beautiful space as well as a peaceful little hovel.

Thanks again, and welcome to the messy parts of me.

<3 Kelsi