Carlin Cottam

So, I’ve decided to make a comic… and am actually going to make one this time. Probably.

Me, like most creatives I know, have dozens–if not more–projects going on at once. Even if those projects are only in your mind they are constantly with you, nagging you, begging you to let them out. Sometimes those ideas make it. Sometimes those electrical signals leave the neurons and enter the real world.

For stay-at-home-dads like me, and anyone else who has other priorities that keep those ideas only as electricity bobbing on neuronic waves, seeing an idea materialize can be tricky to say the least.

Currently, in my head, I have two more books of a trilogy I want to write (thank heavens I’ve at least written one!), a slice-of-life novel set in my hometown and a comic that I’m currently creating with an old friend of mine–a collaboration that has been in the works since we were sixth graders together who put colored pencils to paper to pit our creator-owned heroes against each other. And that’s just the ideas/electrical signals in my brain that I dare to share with you, my casual reader. Sure, I could go on and discuss how my unfinished trilogy plays into a larger six to seven book sci-fi adventure, but I want to keep this simple. Especially because this newsletter has nothing to do with any of the projects listed above.

The whole point of this newsletter is to give me a chance to share my progress/process as I create.

I want this place, this blog, to be what I always wanted ever since I was that sixth grader drawing on white computer paper the first adventures of a sentient robot from space, or when I was writing my first novel with my newborn child asleep on my chest. I wanted somewhere to go where I could see someone else attempting to create even as they changed diapers and even as they edited their novel on their lunch break.

I hope this blog will be just that. I hope that as I take you through my creative process you’ll be able to find your own creative process even as you attend to your real life.

Here I will post what I worked on that week in the minutes that I could sneak away from other responsibilities. If I have nothing to show, because of a particularly busy week, well—I’ll share that too.

I want to create and if you’re here, maybe you do too. Let’s create more than electricity for our neurons, let’s create electricity with the things we produce.