In case you’re wondering, YES I’m watching @startrekcbs and YES I’m loving it. Here’s my Space Anxiety BFF, Saru.
Saru
Category Archives: Announcements
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
Update
After months of worrying about the security of my job, I was fired on November 7th. The next day, a narcissistic sexual predator was elected President of my country.
As life became completely overwhelming, this comic fell behind.
Towards the end of 2016 even though we were in the middle of moving, I found myself in striking distance of catching up and started publishing again.
Then, on January 5th, my mother died unexpectedly. We had just a few days of illness to prepare, but I wasn’t ready.
The week afterwards was one where I was surrounded by love and support. The help I received left me humbled.
Life keeps throwing road blocks my way, but I’m still here. This project is still alive. I don’t have a definite date in mind for when I’ll be caught up yet, but I’m working hard to bring back my little gem of over-sharing. This story is far from over.
Thank you so much for sticking with me.
Jesse
Here Come the Comics!
With all the delays recently, I’m finally ready to get this thing rolling again! Over the next few days, I’ll be publishing a comic every two hours from 8 AM to 8 PM PST until I’m caught up, moving back to the 12 PM PST publishing time.
Sorry for the delays, everyone. Life just makes it hard to keep up with this project (and a lot of other ones I’d like to have progress completed on), but I’m committed to keeping this going.
Daylight Savings
Loyal Readers,
When I first started this project, I realized that I didn’t want to have to scan something and upload it every single day, so I built in a buffer so that I could do the least fun part of this process a couple of times a week instead. I sort of randomly chose six days between when I create a comic and when it’s posted, but over time this has made less and less sense. It was needlessly confusing for me (Monday’s comic posts on Sunday, so I’d better be sure I have everything caught up by Saturday night) and the delay has never been clear to the readers I’ve talked to about it.
So in the interest of simplifying my process and hopefully making all of this a bit more streamlined, I’m moving to a seven day buffer starting on Tuesday, March 9th. Starting that day when you read a comic, you’ll know that it’s covering events from exactly one week ago.
I’d been mulling over doing this for a while, but I hated the idea of leaving a blank space on the calendar. Thankfully, I had a happy little accident this week because my Wednesday comic actually covered something that happened on Tuesday. While I know that no one would actually know (or probably care), I couldn’t let that stand. I went back and made a Wednesday comic and just intended to have two posts for Tuesday so that I didn’t waste the material. Then while I was out enjoying the beautiful and unseasonable sunshine today on SE Hawthorne, it occurred to me that this was a perfect opportunity to make this long-planned change without depriving my readers of their daily dose of my angst and ennui.
Thanks for reading! You’re all the absolute best.
Jesse
Tag! You’re It!
Over the last few days, I have added a new Tagging system to all of the comics that have been uploaded to Life and How to Live It since the website was created on April 1st, 2014. These will help me organize content and direct readers more effectively to what they may be interested in reading (or help them avoid the things they don’t want to see). This also gives me an opportunity to track the content of this site, which is also the content of my life.
Expect some sort of post with numbers, percentages, and possibly even some graphs and charts over the coming weeks or months. Why? Because, as the people who know me personally can attest, I can’t help crunching numbers once they’re available to me.
Within the next few days, you can also expect to find a new landing page for people who are visiting the main page of the site since my upcoming theater work is likely to bring in some new readers and, given the graphic nature of some of the content, I would like to be sure that they have as pleasant an experience as possible.
Of course, for those of you who read the comic every day you probably won’t notice any change at all since you’re looking at the individual links.
In the mean time, enjoy being able to click a button and see all of the comics where I am not wearing all of my clothes.
Jesse
10/9/2014