2018 Wrap-Up

I've been picking away at compiling a 2018 wrap-up since December and, y'know what,  we are well into January 2019 now and I think I  gotta just push this out, even though it's not the insightful retrospective I was hoping to write.

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The  Professional Highlights of 2018:

- OJST hired about 25ish guest artists this year!

- Drawn to Sex: The Basics was our most successful Kickstarter ever at 85k and it's our most well-reviewed book O.O This is... just. Wow. This book is an enormous accomplishment for us, on several different fronts. 

- Signed on with Monika Verma to be our agent at LGR Literary 

- Finished the Let's Talk About It (a guide for teenagers about sex and relationships) Book Pitch. $5 patrons can read a selection of it and two sample chapters right here.

-Random House Graphic bought Let's Talk About It O.O 

- We hired Maria Frantz to help layout and rough in Let's Talk About It pages to help speed up my drawing process.

- Tons of good press, including an article in The Advocate, Portland Monthly, Newsweek, and a starred review in Publishers Weekly.

- Portland's Handsome Pizza briefly named a pizza after me!!!!!!! 

- Exhibited at Emerald City Comic-Con (Where I took part in the best panel of my life with Lucy Bellwood) and attended XOXO Fest.

- Collaborated with one of my fav sex journalists and also friend Lux Alptraum on the comic Feminists Should Support Decriminalizing Sex Work for The Nib.

- Auctioned off my red umbrella embroidery to raise a couple hundred dollars for SWOP.

- Partook in Inktober with my theme being beets and almost finished the challenge! Technically I still haven't, but I've only got, like, five more prompts to go through, so I think it's feasible I may still come back to it.

-Drew a guest comic for Questionable Content, written by Jeph Jacques!

-Contributed some custom embroidery to Dylan Meconis' upcoming 17th century graphic novel, The Queen of the Sea. It is SO COOL to see my needlework next to Dylan's beautiful artwork!!!

-More things also happened????

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It was a productive year, a lot of good things happened and I am grateful for them

In spite of everything I just shared, I’m leaving 2018 in pretty rough shape. But I’m still here and moving forward, so that’s something. Matt's physical health took a nosedive and, though it's better, it's not looking like it'll ever be resolved and, as ever, I'm struggling really hard with my mental health. Haha, just about every one of my friends has had an "I'm worried about you, you are destroying yourself with work" conversation with me at this point. I’m going to really work on my mental health this year, I’m finally diving into a new therapy that I’ve been avoiding for years because I just... didn’t have it in me to take on one more thing. But the way I’m surviving is not sustainable so, ready or not, I have to make the jump and do the hard things in order to eventually be healthier, be a better studiomate, a better friend, a better partner, a better human-shaped vessel for me to inhabit.

2019 is going to be a hard year in many different departments. We won't be doing a book Kickstarter this year, which will be a huge blow to our typical income, and we're working on two books simultaneously for two different publishers, so we're stretched pretty thin time and brain-wise. To compensate for the time we're putting into these books, we're hiring a loooooot more guest artists to pick up the slack on OJST and, as I mentioned above, we hired Maria to help us with one of our books. It's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful to work with so many talented people, but, again, haha, it's taking a much larger bite out of our income than we've typically had to pay out before /:) It will all be worth it in the end, though. 

This is just a year where we have to focus on getting through one week at a time and before you know it twelve months will have gone by and we'll have two more-or-less finished sex educational books to show for it 🙌

Wish me luck.