I regularly find myself re-reading William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I share this quote from it with my students, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”
I’ve been a fool for a long time now, but especially since around last June when I started writing Dolorem.
When other educators ask me how I learned some of the things that I train people on, I tell them that I did everything the wrong way first and learned from that and I hope to save them from the same mistakes. That’s how this whole writing process has been as well. I’d love it if I didn’t have to always learn from my own mistakes, but there aren’t many guides for the things I set out to do. And if there are, they don’t fit me very well. On my business cards I printed on one of the sides, “The Default Version Sucks.” If something is so streamlined that there is a recipe for it that can be followed, then it likely isn’t for me. I don’t cook with recipes either.
Wanting to write and share this story has led me down all kinds of roads I didn’t expect when all I thought I was going to do was write and submit to publishers.
In the last few months, in addition to writing Dolorem, I have:
- built an impressive team to help me realize the comic;
- started a production company;
- built a website, including all the domain, SSL certificates, software installation, database and back end customizations and all that before designing the webpage itself!
- set up a Google Apps account for the business and integrated the email/domain
- integrates a blog, merchandise/payment;
- create social media accounts on almost all the major platforms;
- created a trailer for the comic using iMovie;
- designed the merchandise so that people can share their own interest in the story as well;
- set up a Kickstarter page to be launched soon, developed a marketing plan
- taught myself image editing software;
- Had Gail Simone retweet my comic pitch!
And I can say that at each of those stages along the way, I made every mistake and ran into all kinds of problems that made me want to give up on that element and just move on. I couldn’t do it though. This story is too important to me. In the middle of it all, I fractured my spine, but I still kept going. There is nothing that is going to stop me from completing this work and spreading it as widely as I can.
So, I may now have some wisdom in some of these areas, but I’m looking for the next thing where I’ll be the fool again, and I’ll get through that too, because each thing brings me one step closer to sharing Dolorem with the world.
-Jon