Unfinished Business.

It's all peaks and troughs. But where do you want to be?

How are you today? Been keeping busy? Is that good? And what does it even mean?

Busyness is part of the business, but it’s an abstract concept. Work comes in waves, all freelancers know that, but that doesn’t make it any easier, it’s just how you manage it. Unfortunately each time it feels like a slightly different version, because each moment is unique and dependant on an incalculable amount of other factors. It’s also a very personal preference.

What would you want if you got to choose? Continuous gentle ripples? Hokusai’s wave followed by the Mariana Trench? Or something in between?

A big wave can carry you a long way, but it can also crush you. And a period of calm is restorative, but too long and it leads to famine and insanity. Everyone has a different preference on this scale, and I have mine too, but that doesn’t mean you get it. The gods of work and luck deal out what they will.

But that leads us to another question; what is work? In my life, this takes many forms. There are the obvious paid jobs; ‘do X by X for X’, and then there are the nebulous endeavours I undertake that will hopefully lead to something, but don’t necessarily have an end point, and certainly don’t have any guaranteed reward.

Into this category I would put all my writing and comics work. I have never been paid an advance for any of the books I have made (this isn’t a complaint, I’ve gone into all my publishing relationship with my eyes open) so they have all been speculative endeavours at the start. So, these kinds of things are longer term investments, seeds that might yield down the road. And I emphasise the ‘might’ part.

For me, both types of work are important. The former, because I need to survive and I genuinely enjoy working on projects that have parameters (much as I like to rail against them), and there is something very satisfying in have such a thing as an end point. The longer term, more personal projects, are probably the more rewarding to me creatively, but it’s hard to balance the feeling of guilt when they don’t have that aforementioned ‘guaranteed reward’.

I can rationalise it out. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to work on my own work exclusively, I like the different elements of my job. And I know that personal work brings me paid work, just as I know that paid work gives me the freedom to create personal work. I do rationally know that it’s all part of the same organism, it’s just hard not to separate them in your brain sometimes, and never more so than when the balance is slightly off.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, I find myself in the space between things, and it’s an exciting opportunity to move some of those neglected counters forward a little. I get to write the things I want the write, draw the things I want to draw, but that freedom of choice can come with its own state of paralysis. With no obvious end point for any of them, which gets priority? All of them a little bit? Or go all-in on one?

For me, the trick is to try and stay calm, but it’s easier said than done, as any time I invest on one task I am haunted by the ones I am neglecting. When your job is literally to ‘make stuff up’, it’s very hard ascribe and import to anything at all.

One thing I do in such situations is to work on things that definitely do not have a future beyond what they are, which frees me of the pressure that it has to be something. And the hope is that the process of doing them levels me out enough to move in a more definitive direction. So, that is what have decorated this newsletter with. The canoeist at the top was a gift for my dad, as he likes to explore his local hidden coves in Cornwall. The defiant girl is a single one panel that has been knocking around my studio as a pencil sketch for about five years. And the isometric was an oddity that was forgotten about, and I think was some sort of military outpost, but I repurposed it as an abandoned resort island.

Finally, here are some analogue landscape photos from my most recent film I had developed. Most of them are taken in Greece, where I spent a lot of time floating about in the sea, trying to work out what to do next.

So, yeah, I can confirm it’s all peaks and troughs, and you’re at mercy of an unpredictable and sometimes cruel ocean. But all you can do is strike out for land and eternally hope that you might arrive at some kind of paradise.

With the jolly thought, I shall leave you for today. Catch you next time.

Owen D. Pomery.