I’ve been absent a while (at least on this blog), but not gone entirely. There are a few things I’ve had to attend to personally and a number of things developing behind the scenes (which my Patreon supporters had a full update about yesterday). But there’s no time to lose on explanations. Baltimore Comic-Con is nigh (I’ll be there all three days), Inktober lurks around the corner, and NaNoWriMo looms in the distance. 

First, Baltimore Comic-Con. It may very well be my last convention of the year, and quite possibly one of the last I do for the next year or two. I know this may come as a sudden shock, but the truth is, for about a year or so now, I’ve been debating taking a year off from conventioning. Not because I don’t enjoy them–I love doing conventions–but I do feel I need a respite from them, to gather my energy and to focus more on projects.

So I’m going to push hard to clear out my stock this weekend. If you’d like to help me do that, I’ll be at table A269. That said, if I’m invited as a guest to a show (such as the No Such Con in New York) I’ll likely do the event, but do expect at least a significant pull back on the amount of shows I’m doing in 2019.

Also it’s worth mentioning I won’t be at the New York Comic Con this year. It’ll be the first in 9 years that I haven’t done the event, but I will be there in spirit as my good friends at Inbeon Studios (inbeon.com) will have a new artbook out with an Alice in Wonderland piece by me in it and perhaps a few of my prints.

In keeping with this theme of pulling back on shows to focus more on work for the next year (and I am looking at a busy and productive 2019 if even half of what I’m looking at and being offered comes through), there is this blog to address as well.

Similar to the convention situation, I’ve been blogging weekly for years, but have, for a long time, felt the content of this blog is lacking. I too often post about what’s going on behind the scenes, and I’m sick of writing that sort of news. And though there are plenty of other topics to blog about, I’ve been so much more focused on my fiction writing again, and increasingly so for years, that I feel (to some extent) the time on the blog is ill-spent (if any writing could be called time ill-spent).

And then, what with my patrons to update often, a mailing list I’m all too guilty of neglecting, and new ideas I’m looking into for promoting my work, it becomes less and less important to me to update. More so when I consider I’m already just shy of completely booking November 2018 – December 2019 with fiction writing work alone (both for myself and others). Yet I would not have the blog just sit here, with dates going back to a year or two before (as I see so many blogs do). So a compromise is in order.

I’m thinking about blogging monthly for now. Perhaps that will do. I know it’s not nearly as often as a weekly update, but I’m beginning to think it’s best, at least for the moment. I’ll try it out until the end of the year, and see how that works. If something remarkable comes to mind, I may post more than once a month, but I’d like to stick to at least that, so it doesn’t seem like I’ve disappeared entirely (as it may have seemed the past few months).

That said, I have some plans for this NaNoWriMo, and for Inktober (which starts next week), but I do need a bit of help in coming up with a direction for the latter. Up on my Patreon page is a poll (public, for patrons and non-patrons) to vote on the theme of my Inktober book for this year:

Inktober Poll on Patreon
patreon.com/posts/21630763
(EDIT: non-patrons can’t vote or comment, so visit the link and post your vote in the comments section below this blog post.)

The winning theme will be what I draw this Inktober, and the second-place theme will be for next year’s Inktober. But the voting ends quite soon. Monday morning, in fact! So click the link and put in your vote, and then make sure you follow me on Instagram (@jmdwriteist) and my other social media sites for the daily 31 drawings of Inktober.

See you all again soon…or in Baltimore this weekend!