Jack's September Update, or Why Things Have Been so Quiet Around Here Lately.

 

Hi folks. It is news to nobody that this blog has been pretty slim on both updates and content recently. In fact it has had the least amount of updates since I started this blog in 2008. There's a reason for that, and I figured I'd go into some of the details here, maybe just for my own benefit than anything else.

Truth is I've kind of been in a depressive spiral since November of last year. 2024 was a hectic year. There was a lot of stuff that I wanted to get done, like the print editions of my work, and multiple significant conventions that I wanted to make the most of. I figured if I just got my head down and kept at it, I could just then relax over the Christmas period and brace myself for the new year.

However, the Christmas period did not relax me. I'd burnt myself out over 2024, so I decided to dial back the amount of events I'd do in 2025 and projects that I wanted to take on. This then had the knock-on effect of demoralising me more, making me feel like I was lacking forward momentum and squandering the year. Combined with some personal stuff just making things worse, I started to feel swamped even with the reduced workload.

Eventually I could feel myself slipping back to the anxiety ridden depressive that I was before I went through therapy in 2016. I knew then that I needed to get myself checked out. I'm currently back in therapy now, and while it's slow going, just admitting to the problem managed to take some of the weight off my mind.

I haven't been completely unproductive. I've been spending a lot of time working on the script for a 16 issue long comic series. Not sure what I'm going to do with it yet, but I'm leaning towards turning it into a webcomic. I've been practising page layouts to get back into the swing of things.

I've also been making plans to try and consolidate my works online. Right now this blog is only getting me so far, and I could really use a proper website that collects all of my most recent work, as well as directs people to where they can buy my books and comics. I think if I want to start taking things seriously I need to focus a lot more on the admin side of things.

So, where do I stand right now? I'll be away travelling for a few weeks in September, which hopefully will let me take my mind of things and release some of the pressure. I've no more conventions planned for this year, but I do have a couple projects on the go that'll be going up some time later this year.

In the meantime I'll still be working on my artwork as normal, and trying to figure out what I'm eventually going to do with this script. As ever, you can find me posting on Bluesky, Tumblr and Deviantart.

I'll leave you with a couple of 40k fan comics that I did for practice.

Thanks for reading!