I find the process of drawing a comic soothing because it’s very different from most of what I do. Words area at a minimum – images are at a premium. Not unlike when I was struggling through the process of writing a screenplay, and being forced to work without an omniscient narrator. (Someday I hope to turn that screenplay into a graphic novel, but that’s a tale for another day.)

One way, however, in which drawing differs not a jot from writing is eyestrain. Yesterday I was on a video conference for work that lasted more or less six hours, and today I am once again convinced that I am going blind. Thanks, attention to minute visual detail. Thanks, bright computer screen. I MEAN NO THANKS.

That said, I am genuinely grateful to the wonderful editors at Carve Magazine, who’ve nominated my story “The Eternal Youth of Everyone Else” for a Pushcart Prize! Thanks guys, and good luck/congratulations to the other Carve nominees!

***Also, a late-breaking update: I don’t know why I forgot to post this before (perhaps because I was busy losing one of my most cherished of the six senses?), but my friend Lyndsey has started a wonderful project called The Message Saved, which you should all submit to. Remember (at least from books or TV?) the good old days when people saved shoeboxfuls of letters to one another? Now that so many of our communications are digital, how will they be memorialized or revisited by our romantic 16-year old descendants?

TMS solves that problem for you. Submit your most hilarious or heartfelt texts/emails/tweets etc., and Lyndsey will render them in loving pen & ink, and then collect them online for the world to share. In Lyndsey’s words: “The Message Saved is an anonymous collection of the words we would leave behind.”