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I am finally coming back. (warning, long post)
6 years ago
General
Hey everybody.
Wow, it's been an entire year since you heard from me. My tendency to procrastinate must have reached an all-time record. For that, I sincerely apologize.
So, what's been going on with me? I'll try to keep it short, but like I said, it's been an entire year, so bear with me.
---
The Negatives:
1) Around the end of 2018 I was pretty much "on the way to walking into the wall" (i.e. on the verge of having a breakdown). The weather was awful, my energy was low, I felt exhausted all the time and work was getting to be too much. At one point I stayed an hour after my normal end of the day without orders just to finish all my chores, and when the boss saw me she said that "I needed to work better so I could finish on time". That's it. That comment started a whole slew of events, which led to me trying out a different stable for one day, which I really liked, but I couldn't handle more than 75% of the required job (they needed me to ride the horses, which I don't know how to do, and ironically enough, the mucking of the stables was so different that I had to reinvent my methods, which actually made my job back at the original stable much easier/quicker, which meant I stayed there.
2) Around the end of March, not long after my birthday actually, I was in a car accident. Nothing too serious, I was not hurt (the other driver, a young girl in her first car, was terrified) and it was entirely my fault. But my car got hit in such a way (small damage but in a corner, meanign a lot of parts were affected) that the insurance company decided to scrap it and just pay out the insurance instead. Now, I'm glad it wasn't a total loss, but that was my mom's old car that she had passed on to me. She'd been driving that since I was a teen and I have a lot of memories associated with it, so I considered it something of a family heirloom. But now it's gone. That still makes me a little sad.
3) Near the end of August, after I'd come back from my vacation, near the end of my workday I got kicked in the chest by a horse. Now, this was (again) a complete accident, but I still got kicked in the chest so hard I flew off my feet. Anybody's who's gotten a direct hit from a horse know it's nothing to joke about, but thankfully the horse wasn't one of our biggest and I didn't immediately start coughing blood, which was the first thing I dreaded (that would have meant my ribs had punctured my lungs, which is *bad*). I somehow wasn't run over when the two horses in question started running circles around me ( I was in no condition to dodge them) and I managed to crawl out of the pasture and get back on my feet. Somehow (I have no idea how or why) I took the time to take the very last horse with me when I walked back to the stable, and after that, I drove straight to the local clinic and had them check me out.
While I was describing what had happened to the nurse, she asked me how I'd gotten there and I told her that I'd driven myself, at which point the blood drained from her face. Apparently, people who have just been injured/shocked can get swoony and have fainting spells shortly *after* the fact, which neither I, nor my boss, had thought of. She said I was lucky I hadn't fainted behind the wheel, 'cause that could actually have killed me or somebody else (sobering thought). She checked my heartrate and ribs, but nothing seemed broken, but she still wanted me to get x-rayed. I called my mom, she came and picked me up and we went to the city hospital, where I actually *did* have a swooning fit during the x-rays so the nurses had to give me oxygen so I wouldn't pass out. I have no idea what happened, I was just standing there when something like an extreme case of the goose bumps spread from a point on my back up to the back of my head, my vision went dark for a few seconds and my balance kinda... fluttered. Nothing serious happened, but keep in mind that I had been on something like 60-80% (at best) of my normal breathing capacity since the kick, so I wasn't breathing right.
After that, it took about 2 weeks before the pain went completely away, during which time the muscles in my upper body kept shifting the workload around to keep the strain off the impacted muscles, meaning that every two days I got muscle cramps in places I had not even been hit, which is one of the strangest experiences I've hard with an injury. Also, get this; I didn't get a bruise. I was hit nearly in the middle of my solar plexus by a steel-shod horse and I was barely even red the day after (I checked). And while I had trouble breathing and pains in my muscles, a visual examination of my chest would barely have shown anything. Odd.
4) A few weeks back I found out that my sister would be moving away, back into the big city. This saddens me, because for a long time most of my family (me, my mom and my sister)lived here in the same community in the south of Sweden, all within a 10 minute drive at most. But first my mom moved into an apartment in the city because she was getting too old to manage the huge garden she had on her plot. She's just as happy, and I'm happy for her, but it's still a bit further apart. And soon, my sister will be going into the city as well, leaving just me and my younger cousin still down here. Again, I want the best for my family and I am happy for them, but it's another little sliver of lonelyness in my life.
Inbetween all that, lots and lots of days filled with work. Anybody working class knows that most of your year is filled with drudgery to some degree or another, but that's our lot in life and we accept it.
---
It's not been all bad though.
The Positives:
1) I had a really good summer, which was nicely balanced, instead of having more rainy days than not (2018) or roasting hot with no rain at all (2017).
2) I finally got off my ass and got some help with my cleaning routines, which has led to a much more tidy home. Nice.
3) My car may have been totalled, but I bought a new car that is newer and much nicer than my old one, and with the insurance money and my personal savings, I could pay for all of it on the same day, no loans needed.
4) Sure my ribs were still sore from the horse kick, but I got to attend a very nice wedding of a few friends of the family, and I even got to dance with the sister of the groom.
5) Through a friend at the stable I got to meet their two week-old foals (different moms though) and I got the chance to cuddle with them and they are *ADORABLE*!! SQUUEEEE! It really brightens up the whole year to meet some baby horses.
6) About a month ago I happened upon a plastic bag lying on the side of the road, which contained no less than *SIX* bloomed-out but perfectly healthy orchids. Guessing someone didn't want them around after the flowers were all gone and didn't have the patience to grow more. Well, I took them home, gave them water and fertilizer and put them in my last free window, and now I have new stem buds (multiple in a two cases) on all of them. More flowers for me, YAY!
---
In the spaces between all of that, I have *tried* to write for the comic again. Multiple times. I've sat there in front of the computer, opened the HtbD folder, opened a new copy of the page script layout, looked at it and... nothing. Nothing would come to mind. I have the base parts of this chapter clear in my mind, but the finer details just... wouldn't materialize. My fingers just wouldn't move. This happened repeatedly. At one point I managed to somewhat lay out 3 pages worth of script, but when I needed to polish it and add dialogue, again, nothing.
At one point Karno asked if I could give him a basic idea for how the comic would go and he'd wing it from there, which actually was an interesting offer. We have similar enough senses of humour, and he's made more comics than me, that maybe that would have worked. But I wanted my own personal touch on the comic, and a few weeks after, that got me thinking. I thought about the core comic idea, then the newer sections that were roughly done but needed polish, and I tried to spot where the problem was. Maybe that dash of OCD was flaring up without me noticing it and I was making a mountain out of a molehill. Let's go back to basics, K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid). I looked of what I'd roughed out, then threw it out and started fresh. And that was the trick. I found my groove again. The muse has finally woken up again.
And here we are. Slowly coming back but over the worst of it, and I actually find myself happier. Here there be Dragons was always a story I wanted told, and over the years it's become something of a staple in my life. I send Karno a few page scripts, then go back to work and put it out of my mind until one day there's an email and new pages appear before me. I look them over, mark whatever edits need to be done and send them over, back to work, then inked pages show up, they get posted on Patreon first and then on FA, and at the end of the month the Patreon donations come in, I pay Karno for his work, write up some new page scripts, rinse and repeat.
Every time I got a new email from Karno with another couple of fresh comic sketches, it's like a mini-dose of pure Christmas morning, and it wasn't until recently that I realized how much joy I got out of this process.
But now, I know. And I am back to work, doing something I really like (and which apparently brings joy to other people as well). Hope you all have missed the comic, because I have some *weird* ideas for this chapter. Stay tuned. *evil laughter*
Best regards
Euro
Wow, it's been an entire year since you heard from me. My tendency to procrastinate must have reached an all-time record. For that, I sincerely apologize.
So, what's been going on with me? I'll try to keep it short, but like I said, it's been an entire year, so bear with me.
---
The Negatives:
1) Around the end of 2018 I was pretty much "on the way to walking into the wall" (i.e. on the verge of having a breakdown). The weather was awful, my energy was low, I felt exhausted all the time and work was getting to be too much. At one point I stayed an hour after my normal end of the day without orders just to finish all my chores, and when the boss saw me she said that "I needed to work better so I could finish on time". That's it. That comment started a whole slew of events, which led to me trying out a different stable for one day, which I really liked, but I couldn't handle more than 75% of the required job (they needed me to ride the horses, which I don't know how to do, and ironically enough, the mucking of the stables was so different that I had to reinvent my methods, which actually made my job back at the original stable much easier/quicker, which meant I stayed there.
2) Around the end of March, not long after my birthday actually, I was in a car accident. Nothing too serious, I was not hurt (the other driver, a young girl in her first car, was terrified) and it was entirely my fault. But my car got hit in such a way (small damage but in a corner, meanign a lot of parts were affected) that the insurance company decided to scrap it and just pay out the insurance instead. Now, I'm glad it wasn't a total loss, but that was my mom's old car that she had passed on to me. She'd been driving that since I was a teen and I have a lot of memories associated with it, so I considered it something of a family heirloom. But now it's gone. That still makes me a little sad.
3) Near the end of August, after I'd come back from my vacation, near the end of my workday I got kicked in the chest by a horse. Now, this was (again) a complete accident, but I still got kicked in the chest so hard I flew off my feet. Anybody's who's gotten a direct hit from a horse know it's nothing to joke about, but thankfully the horse wasn't one of our biggest and I didn't immediately start coughing blood, which was the first thing I dreaded (that would have meant my ribs had punctured my lungs, which is *bad*). I somehow wasn't run over when the two horses in question started running circles around me ( I was in no condition to dodge them) and I managed to crawl out of the pasture and get back on my feet. Somehow (I have no idea how or why) I took the time to take the very last horse with me when I walked back to the stable, and after that, I drove straight to the local clinic and had them check me out.
While I was describing what had happened to the nurse, she asked me how I'd gotten there and I told her that I'd driven myself, at which point the blood drained from her face. Apparently, people who have just been injured/shocked can get swoony and have fainting spells shortly *after* the fact, which neither I, nor my boss, had thought of. She said I was lucky I hadn't fainted behind the wheel, 'cause that could actually have killed me or somebody else (sobering thought). She checked my heartrate and ribs, but nothing seemed broken, but she still wanted me to get x-rayed. I called my mom, she came and picked me up and we went to the city hospital, where I actually *did* have a swooning fit during the x-rays so the nurses had to give me oxygen so I wouldn't pass out. I have no idea what happened, I was just standing there when something like an extreme case of the goose bumps spread from a point on my back up to the back of my head, my vision went dark for a few seconds and my balance kinda... fluttered. Nothing serious happened, but keep in mind that I had been on something like 60-80% (at best) of my normal breathing capacity since the kick, so I wasn't breathing right.
After that, it took about 2 weeks before the pain went completely away, during which time the muscles in my upper body kept shifting the workload around to keep the strain off the impacted muscles, meaning that every two days I got muscle cramps in places I had not even been hit, which is one of the strangest experiences I've hard with an injury. Also, get this; I didn't get a bruise. I was hit nearly in the middle of my solar plexus by a steel-shod horse and I was barely even red the day after (I checked). And while I had trouble breathing and pains in my muscles, a visual examination of my chest would barely have shown anything. Odd.
4) A few weeks back I found out that my sister would be moving away, back into the big city. This saddens me, because for a long time most of my family (me, my mom and my sister)lived here in the same community in the south of Sweden, all within a 10 minute drive at most. But first my mom moved into an apartment in the city because she was getting too old to manage the huge garden she had on her plot. She's just as happy, and I'm happy for her, but it's still a bit further apart. And soon, my sister will be going into the city as well, leaving just me and my younger cousin still down here. Again, I want the best for my family and I am happy for them, but it's another little sliver of lonelyness in my life.
Inbetween all that, lots and lots of days filled with work. Anybody working class knows that most of your year is filled with drudgery to some degree or another, but that's our lot in life and we accept it.
---
It's not been all bad though.
The Positives:
1) I had a really good summer, which was nicely balanced, instead of having more rainy days than not (2018) or roasting hot with no rain at all (2017).
2) I finally got off my ass and got some help with my cleaning routines, which has led to a much more tidy home. Nice.
3) My car may have been totalled, but I bought a new car that is newer and much nicer than my old one, and with the insurance money and my personal savings, I could pay for all of it on the same day, no loans needed.
4) Sure my ribs were still sore from the horse kick, but I got to attend a very nice wedding of a few friends of the family, and I even got to dance with the sister of the groom.
5) Through a friend at the stable I got to meet their two week-old foals (different moms though) and I got the chance to cuddle with them and they are *ADORABLE*!! SQUUEEEE! It really brightens up the whole year to meet some baby horses.
6) About a month ago I happened upon a plastic bag lying on the side of the road, which contained no less than *SIX* bloomed-out but perfectly healthy orchids. Guessing someone didn't want them around after the flowers were all gone and didn't have the patience to grow more. Well, I took them home, gave them water and fertilizer and put them in my last free window, and now I have new stem buds (multiple in a two cases) on all of them. More flowers for me, YAY!
---
In the spaces between all of that, I have *tried* to write for the comic again. Multiple times. I've sat there in front of the computer, opened the HtbD folder, opened a new copy of the page script layout, looked at it and... nothing. Nothing would come to mind. I have the base parts of this chapter clear in my mind, but the finer details just... wouldn't materialize. My fingers just wouldn't move. This happened repeatedly. At one point I managed to somewhat lay out 3 pages worth of script, but when I needed to polish it and add dialogue, again, nothing.
At one point Karno asked if I could give him a basic idea for how the comic would go and he'd wing it from there, which actually was an interesting offer. We have similar enough senses of humour, and he's made more comics than me, that maybe that would have worked. But I wanted my own personal touch on the comic, and a few weeks after, that got me thinking. I thought about the core comic idea, then the newer sections that were roughly done but needed polish, and I tried to spot where the problem was. Maybe that dash of OCD was flaring up without me noticing it and I was making a mountain out of a molehill. Let's go back to basics, K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid). I looked of what I'd roughed out, then threw it out and started fresh. And that was the trick. I found my groove again. The muse has finally woken up again.
And here we are. Slowly coming back but over the worst of it, and I actually find myself happier. Here there be Dragons was always a story I wanted told, and over the years it's become something of a staple in my life. I send Karno a few page scripts, then go back to work and put it out of my mind until one day there's an email and new pages appear before me. I look them over, mark whatever edits need to be done and send them over, back to work, then inked pages show up, they get posted on Patreon first and then on FA, and at the end of the month the Patreon donations come in, I pay Karno for his work, write up some new page scripts, rinse and repeat.
Every time I got a new email from Karno with another couple of fresh comic sketches, it's like a mini-dose of pure Christmas morning, and it wasn't until recently that I realized how much joy I got out of this process.
But now, I know. And I am back to work, doing something I really like (and which apparently brings joy to other people as well). Hope you all have missed the comic, because I have some *weird* ideas for this chapter. Stay tuned. *evil laughter*
Best regards
Euro
It'll be nice to see collaboration again and know you're part of it.
*gives you a tight hug for all the negative stuff you went through* Really hope your chest is better and that you can breathe normally now
I know one of my horse breeding relatives got horse kicked in the chest, but Ive only been hit by the planet a couple times. I know which I prefer.
Glad you are happier with your situation
Glad you didn't die from a freaking horse :< that would of been too much Irony, God doesn't allow that kind of stuff, that only happens in Final Destination movies :<
Glad that this comic is back!
That said: HOLY CRAP of course self-care comes first! Yay adorable foals. Woah! to chest/stomach injuries by startled terror-couches. (if you are asking yourself WTF I can link you the tumblr that describes them this way in the most hilarious way)
Here's to a new year with better life than before~