Deadlines of Promises

So. Elisa and I had made a promise in August to get a first draft done of our books by January 5th. It’s January 6th.

Source

Did we make it? Not really. I’m sure that Elisa will have her own post on this promise but I want to give my opinion today.

I spent a lot of time worried about the promise–which is time I probably should have spent writing. But the fact is, I was busy drowning in other things that came up.

My job, for one. I was really really event heavy over the fall semester. I hadn’t been expecting to have weeks with 4 events in them, including working on a weekend, leaving me little time to recover, let alone write.

I certainly wasn’t expecting to be sidelined by depression. When I realized it was hitting me in October, I was already deep under and struggling. I set up my support system and tried to turn things around but it took a lot of what I could do just to get out of bed.

I was not expecting that something I learned at the conference would lead to an event for the artist of Crash and Burn, thus leading to us rush finalize contracts, contributors, edit, and publish the first chapter for December. At the time, I didn’t expect to become the only writer on the project. At the time, I didn’t anticipate learning how to format a comic ebook–totally different from text-only ones! At the time, I had very little knowledge about storyboards, typesetting, and webcomic marketing.

Going back to the promise, these were all things I didn’t expect to happen. While one way to look at them is entirely defeatist and say, “Those are just excuses for why I failed,” I am looking on the upside. I am established in my job. I have a firm grounding in my comic project. I have another publication. I have a plan for next year.

Elisa and I are both mutually happy with the progress we made on our projects. That is success. We both managed to get our heads more in the game, to push harder, to expect more of ourselves and each other. I am proud of the progress Elisa made in the 5 months since we made that promise on a whim. I’m proud of myself, too. That’s what fucking matters.

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