Carrying on (including the 'Heroes Incident')...

In my last blog entry, I attempted to bring my readers and followers (few as they may be) up to date on my personal and creative lives, and to fill in the gaps left by my lengthy disappearing act from the scene. 2012 was a productive year, with my work on the Comics Forge at the beginning of the year; reviews for She Never Slept; convention reports for SNS; and, finally for SNS, my videocast Retrodome, which taped a few shows and has lapsed into a state of limbo. Lastly, I was writing as 'Chronicler', and voting for, the Inkwell Awards. With the exception of the Comics Forge, my wife and I were working in tandem in some capacity or another. And 2012 was the year my web comix projects came apart. On that, more in an upcoming blog...

At the end of 2012, I finally landed a "real job", as a clerk at a very cool record store that sold new and used LPs, CDs, and DVDs, as well as toys and sundry pop culture items. Unfortunately, the job was stressful, and contributed to some serious health problems that reared their head in early 2013. I acquired a serious nervous condition - an outgrowth of extant anxiety issues and stress processing problems. Unfortunately, around this time, my father, who was 90 years old, was facing rapidly declining health and needed more attention from my wife and myself. Finally,  my duties for the Inkwell Awards, which normally would've been no sweat, began to overwhelm me and exacerbate my nervous condition.

One night at Heroes Aren't Hard to Find, the awesome local comics shop I'd frequented for 30 odd years (and which sponsors the yearly Heroes Con here in Charlotte), I had a horrid experience. My friend Rhett took me to do research for my vote in the 2013 Inkwell Awards (which would be held at HeroesCon). While Rhett visited a nearby video store, I struggled with the voting ballot due to uncontrollable tremors in my hands and a feeling on intense anxiety rippling through me. I was so embarrassed, as I could barely scrawl the names of the inkers whose work I was considering voting for. That night was surely a nadir for me in recent times, though sadly it wouldn't be the last such incident, merely the worst - one in which I felt the most exposed in a place where I was usually in my element.

I'm going to cut this short, in the interest of maintaining regular content on this new/ old blog. But I'll be back soon with the terrors and triumphs of 2013, and the vagaries of a life yearning to create but shackled to the mundane.... Plus: some recent sketches perhaps...