I have been neglectful about sharing my monthly Patreon updates on here, because most updates seem to consist mainly of apologising for not having any progress to update on. So here is a summary, to save you some time. (If you want to read each month in full, with pictures: January, February, March, April, and May are free and public, as always, on Patreon.)
Life, Work
I have been getting some work done. This mostly consists of outlining, and then outlining in greater detail, the remaining chapters of the story. I started doing this while in bed with Covid in December, and then through the brain fog that followed, and now that I am going back over everything again to write it out more properly, a lot of it reads like brain fog, too. So that is dispiriting. But getting anything on the page is better than nothing; the scrawlings of a Covid-addled brain might not be usable in themselves, but can, I hope, be turned into something usable. I tried to redo the Hut Point section from scratch and ended up with something which more or less resembled what I had before, so maybe it’s not as bad as it looks.
Largely, though, the first part of this year has been spent doing other things. I had my deferred family Christmas in January, then was off for my regular teaching gig in February, with a week of follow-up admin and writing attempts at a friend’s house afterward. Then came consulting on someone else’s Terra Nova book, followed immediately by house guests, and that saw out March.
By April I was so awash in backed-up admin that I took the entire month ‘off’ just to catch up on it, so that I might be able to think straight when I got back to creative work. Chief on April’s to-do list was arranging to move the last of my stuff from storage in the US to my home in the UK, a feat which involved a lot of researching, comparing quotes, and filling out paperwork. On top of that, I started assembling everything I needed for my application for British citizenship. And did two countries’ tax returns. Then of course the thousand emails and the jobs they contained, corresponding with my US publisher on book design, jobs around the house that were well past due … Every single day in April was packed from beginning to end and I just about managed to get ahead of the to-do list before more jobs got tacked on. Then I got on a plane to go help my parents move, and to get my own stuff on its way, which took up the first half of May. The second half went to catching up on everything I’d had to let slide while otherwise occupied in the first half.
Pant, pant, gasp.
I am happy to report that I have nothing at all planned for June, and have ringfenced it for as much writing as I can possibly manage. I have already made some progress on that front, and if I can keep it up, by the end of the month I should have the rest of the series outlined in sufficient detail to write scripts. I need to write the whole story, now, in one go, because it’s a machine of many parts and I need to make sure they’re all working together. Writing is, by its nature, not the sort of process that generates shareable content for Online, but is the bedrock of everything that will come after, so I must give it all my focus while it’s on the table.
The U.S. Edition
It has been a significant preoccupation over the last few months, but I am happy to say that Iron Circus have been excellent to work with, and I am convinced the American edition of Vol.1 is going to be a beautiful thing. We were ahead of the game so moved up the release, then had to change printers at the past minute and moved it back again, but everything is on track to land a gorgeous hardcover in bookshops around the country in October 2024. When preorders become available I will be making a big noise about them, so stay tuned.
Online
With the exception of Admin April, for which my generous supporters allowed me a holiday, I have been trying to keep Patreon supplied with interesting stuff. Already this year, Patrons have enjoyed
- A discussion, with visual aides, of the symbolic use of colour
- A preview of a sneaky stratagem I’ve devised for depicting the passage of time
- A collaboration with a PhD student at SPRI, presenting the mythologisation of the Terra Nova Expedition and how to strip away the layers of cultural baggage to get to the actual history
- Accounts of the Roald Amundsen Memorial Lectures is Oslo, and my post-hoc ‘research’ (de-search?) trip to Madeira
- Many, many sketchbook pages
- My attempts to get better at watercolours
… and I am always lining up new posts to please the people who believe in me, while I write boring words on small pieces of paper which will become more interesting pictures down the line.
There have also been changes on my Patreon tiers. Firstly, Patreon has opened up to be more friendly to non-paying customers: There is now a Free tier, and you can get a week’s free trial of any open tier, if you want. Both of these are buttons you can click from the cold landing page and should be pretty obvious. ‘Free’ patrons get all public posts emailed to them – this includes both free-at-the-time-of-posting, and posts that are made public later. The monthly update is always public, so if you want more granular updates from me, that is your best option! Patrons, both free and paid, always get everything first.
Another change is a byproduct of switching my Patreon to GBP: If you are in the UK, or opt to pay in pounds from elsewhere, you now get a discount! I have not raised my prices with inflation, and when I did the currency conversion I tried to keep USD as close as possible to the original price, which means the GBP price has gone down. If this was a few p. too high for you before, perhaps it is more manageable now. The lowest tier is less than a filter coffee at Pret, and you get four posts a month! Such a bargain!
Elsewhere, I am trying to draw down my social media presence to focus more on writing. I was helped in this a great deal by Instagram, which after years of being hard to work with, recently announced it was going to use its (our) image database to train AI. So I have deleted the art from the archive and am no longer posting on Instagram. You can still follow me here (obvs.), on Twitter at @WorstJourneyGN, on Tumblr as @worstjourney, and on Bluesky, mostly for off-topic nattering, as @tealin.
Au Revoir
I need to get back to work, so I will leave this here … Thank you for reading all the way to the end, and hopefully I will have more and better news next time, ideally before December. See you around!
The Worst Journey in the World: Graphic Novel 