Why don’t you get it together now?
Failure’s not Flattering.
When will you show yourself?
When will you show yourself?
There’s a famous quote I heard in high school about Edison working on the lightbulb. The saying went that a reporter asked how it felt failing at creating the light bulb 10,000 times and Edison said “I didn’t fail 10,000 times at creating the light bulb, I just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”
I don’t know where you fall on the Tesla vs. Edison battle, but for today’s post, it doesn’t matter. Real quick, All credit to this blog, which did the investigation into the now-famous quote. Having heard all the variants now, I prefer this one:
‘Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven’t been able to get any results?’ Edison turned on me like a flash, and with a smile replied: ‘Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.’
Why am I talking about this? Most recently, my steampunk comic Kickstarter has failed to meet its required funding goal and so we’re back to the drawing board on that project. The dream has been at least 5 years in the making with lots of money saved and spent, artists interviewed, setbacks, and false starts, but it all culminated with this launch….
And we didn’t quite get there.
I think my writing career has so far been a series of failures that are at best helping me fall upward and at worst wasting my precious time on this planet. I know this post is starting to sound all doom and gloomy, but I promise that is not my intention.
To be clear, I’m not as upset as I thought I would be. I’ve learned so much from the last two months of tiktocking, instagraming, sharing, marketing, etc that I’ve come to understand a truth; There are benefits to not getting what you want.
I’m going to go religious on you for one sentence to say, I was taught that God answers prayers in three ways: Yes, Not right now, OR I have something better planned.
I always default to the latter.
If you’ve made it this far, I have two simple requests:
- Please like our Facebook page. We’re not done with this comic. We’re just retreating/huddling to figure out the next steps
- Please support a local artist, somehow, some way. I’m so exhausted having conversations surrounding the idea that “they don’t make movies like that” or “they couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today” or whatever. They don’t make them, because people don’t support them. Hollywood looks for evidence that something different can be successful before giving people more. So buy a beautiful picture in a coffee shop, go to a bookstore or a comic shop and ask where the LOCAL table is at and just give.
That’s all. One more thing. I’m taking December off from all Social Media. I had a draining daily schedule of posting on instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, Twitter (which I’ll soon be deleting for good), and LinkedIn, and I want a damn break.
I should be back in January with a new outlook and a new plan. Cousin Joe and I are currently working on our list of SMART goals for 2022, one of which will include raising more money to get Forged printed.
Either way, that’s all I’ve got to say for now. If you need a quick hot take, Cowboy Bebop was cheesey, corny, and absolutely what I needed this weekend. Loved almost all of it. I don’t care for what they did in the last episode with the main love interest, but sometimes, you just need to binge an entire bag of Cool Ranch Doritos with no expectations.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in January!
~Nic