It feels like there are 2,009 things I want to do in 2009, so I had better add “learn to prioritize” to the list!

My personal goals for the coming year are to take better care of myself (better eating & sleeping habits, more physical activity), improve my relationship with time, hone my intuition, and speak from the heart even when it’s scary.

I want to make more comics, so a big goal for me is to draw them every day, in the morning. I also plan to set aside specific time every week for other things that are important to me: Trees & Hills duties, website stuff, engaged citizenship / activism, etc. I need to regulate my computer usage so I can spend less time in front of the screen.

Naturally I will continue devoting a lot of energy to Trees & Hills (there is a LOT to do), but I need to devote more to my personal comics work than I did this year. My main focus here will be resurrecting my minicomic series Square Dance (a 5.5″ x 8.5″ catch-all for my comics work). I hate to risk jinxing myself by announcing plans like this, but I intend to produce three 32-page issues of Square Dance a year: one each for the spring, fall, and holiday touring seasons. I have some other comic & zine ideas in mind, but they will be prioritized behind Square Dance. I hope to place work in some more anthologies.

In 2009 I expect to be a more engaged citizen. From the get-go I will be working with one or more anti-nuke groups to produce a comic for late winter / early spring as part of the effort to prevent the relicensing of Vermont Yankee, and may help out in some other ways. Throughout the year I will be working with The Sustainability Project on the Monadnock Community Gardening Initiative in a variety of ways: making comics about food and gardening, but also the less familiar tasks of trying to lay groundwork for tool banks, community gardens, and skill-share networks. Yowza! More reasons to budget my time better.

In the fall, I look forward to officiating a wedding in Minneapolis!

That isn’t even everything, but I would hate to drain the coming year of any sense of wonder and surprise for you. It’s going to be quite a year!

Well, things have been so crazy lately that I’ve lost track of what day it is! Somehow I thought Friday was Thursday, and then I had a weekend houseguest, so here I am making the sort of post I’d intended to have up on Thursday.

Although it looks like the onset of winter has slowed things down somewhat, the end of this busy year has been nuts. In mid-November I attended a friend’s wedding and to my surprise ended up reuniting with an estranged friend. Not long after that I lost one of my jobs, and at about the same time had some intense positive dating experiences & other shifts in my personal life. My other job, in which I work from home for my newly-married friend, had scaled back hours, but through the power of coincidence, picked up the pace just after I lost the first job.

In trying to figure out how to actually accomplish all the things I hope to do next year (a subject for later), I contacted one of the groups working to ensure Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant closes on time, and much faster than I expected got a comics project OK’ed in their 2009 rough budget!

So, I have been experiencing a lot of upheaval. Some of it has been stressful, but looking past that it mostly seems to be just the sort of bubbling ferment that produces good things. It has also fired me up again on the simplifying project I started last August (to make all my possessions fit comfortably in a roughly 10′ x 15′ space)! Once again I am winnowing and organizing, and it feels good. I made a lot of progress before, then let things get slovenly, and have pushed back the piles again and hope to finally get this place into a pleasing, functional order. Related, I am working harder at improving my relationship with time.

Winter is a good time for this sort of inward-focused work. I had my last public event of the year a week ago, tabling for Trees & Hills at the Stars & Skulls Craft Fair, which went well for us. The day before that I brought some comics to Rebecca Migdal‘s Tidings Of Joy event to help raise money for Doctors Without Borders, and the day before that I bravely passengered through the aftermath of an ice storm to attend Howard Cruse‘s release party for the North County Perp #2 (in which I have a few strips).

Speaking of anthologies, I am working on submissions for two different ones that both have their deadlines on December 31. We’ll see what happens! If I spend New Year’s Eve drawing comics, I suppose it will at least be appropriately symbolic.

After that, it’s a whole new year, chock full of possibilities!

It may be a little early for this sort of thing, but the mass of things I hope to somehow accomplish in the coming year have set me to thinking. So – what did I do this year?

Well, I kicked off the year with a nasty cold, and just as I was recovering from that, the person I was apparently going to settle down with dumped me with little explanation. By mid-January I had had enough of 2008 and was ready for next year.

Fortunately, comics treated me much better.

I did not print a single new comic of my own, except a small giveaway for Halloween, but I did place comics in several anthologies. I co-edited & contributed to this year’s Trees & Hills anthologies Swingin’ Hits and Seeds; I also had comics in Matt Reidsma‘s 600th-strip celebrating High Maintenance Machine #20, Candy Or Medicine Free Comic Book Day Special 2008, Candy Or Medicine #3, Secrets & Lies, Always Comix #4: Activity, and Izzy Challenge #5: 50 State Jam. I initiated, edited & contributed to Trees & Hills’ free comics sheet Twig, then stopped when I got too busy. My strip Spinning World continued to appear in monthly Vermont newspaper The Commons.

I participated in the Comic Rehab Ripoff, Hourly Comic Day, and the 99 Doodles Project. I started a Comics By Request project, which I will draw next year (meaning you could still submit a request!). I also reprinted Before Sleep #3, 4 & 5.

I tabled at Granite State Comic Con, Broke: an affordable art fair, MoCCA, Arts Alive, Boston Zine Fair, Winchester Pickle Festival, Philly Zine Fest, and Broke (again).

I shut down my prematurely-started sustainability journal Downpower, and started a sketch & illustration blog. Unfortunately January’s events threw me off the regular sketching I was doing, and I haven’t yet regained the habit, nor have I found the time to keep scanning sketches. I committed to updating this website twice a week, and have mostly stuck to that. More recently I have decided at least half the posts should be comics. I also added a store, shortened up the header, and some other webby stuff.

I worked 2 part-time day jobs, for which among other things I built 3 websites. I’ve been pretty happy with both jobs.

I’ve made new friends and entered into new correspondences. One of my best friends moved back within driving distance. I have been subject to weird coincidences, omens, and the hand of fate.

All of this (and more!) brings us up to a couple weeks ago, when things got crazy!

But that’s another story, for another time (namely next week).

(ps. the sketch above is by Seth Tobocman, whose comics I’ve really gotten into & who I briefly met a couple times this year).