When You Tire of One Side, The Other Serves You Best

When you read yesterday’s Life and How to Live It daily comic (if you read yesterday’s Life and How to Live It daily comic), you read the last one.

The project itself isn’t dead. I’m not done writing about me, my family, my thoughts, my experiences, but I am done doing this in a daily format.

The reasons are varied, but the biggest are that I’m ready to do other things that I don’t have time for while keeping this daily format running and the simple truth that the end of 2016 into the beginning of 2017 was one of the most difficult periods of my life. It isn’t just that I became overwhelmed and got behind, it’s that something in the stress and the grief burned out whatever was driving me to do this daily and it became less a salve and more a duty.

One day, I just thought to myself, “What if I don’t do this anymore?” A weight fell from my shoulders and my whole body relaxed. At that moment, I knew I was done. I wrote and even made more comics than have been published, but I remembered that I wanted to do this for at least three years when I started it and decided to end it there. By not knowing that it was going to be the last comic at the time that I wrote it, I got to stay true to the random nature of this project, which felt right.

In the future, you can expect a return of something closer to the Monthly Comics that I did when this first began. Memories, experiences, rants, and maybe a biography or two. Think less American Elf and more American Splendor.

While I’m recharging my batteries, I’ll be acting as a custodian of the work that’s here. There are three full years of daily comics (over a thousand in all) and I know that there aren’t many of you who have read every single one of them. Maybe none. I’ll be taking care of the work I’ve made while I decide how best to add to it.

I look forward to making more comics for you and already have nonfiction and fiction plans in the works. I’m not done, I’m just ready for something new.

Love Always,

Jesse

April 22, 2014