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A Letter From a Friend

Colleen Doran — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 00:39:32 +0000

I’ve written many times about toxic fan groups, and one of my oldest friends in fandom wrote me a letter about it. Printed with permission and light edits to remove personal information. Yesterday I got into a twitter-spat with a friend from many years ago. It was really kind of terrifying, but it gave me the opportunity to reflect on one of the things I am most thankful for.: Having known you. That fellow and I were once quite tight. What’s scary is that looking back I was well on my way to ending up like he has. The man I spoke to yesterday was once just like me and is now sustained only by resentments and finds his self worth only in vitriolic hatred masquerading as righteousness. Knowing you when I did helped to blow fresh air on the dying embers of my self awareness. It inspired me to get the hell out of the emotional tar pit my social circle often was, and, as a wise person once said, stop “muddling through life with delusions of adequacy”. The seeds of sloth, cowardice and hate are within us all. A lack of self reflection and malignant associations are the water and soil needed to grow those weeds. Knowing you helped me catch myself, and be on guard against the self destructive aspects of my nature. For that I am forever thankful. I once had it out with this friend, and a few other friends, that the fan circle was dragging them down and keeping them in a place where they could never be outstanding in any way. The entire group were the biggest bunch of crabs in a barrel I’ve ever encountered. I could be pretty harsh, telling someone they were “muddling through life with delusions of adequacy,” which wasn’t a very nice thing to say. But it drove me crazy how often these talented, smart folks would settle for less, or worse yet, let their fan circle of “friends” deliberately drag them down and belittle them until they stopped trying for better. They were the sort of people who were always there to buy an alcoholic another drink, which is not a metaphor. You need serious emotional backbone to get away from that dreck. The worst fan art and fan fic were given golden trophies for participation, but by God, if you went pro or accomplished something in the real world, they’d piss on it. If you were one of the few pros in that circle, you’d better stay low enough not to rise higher than their egos. I recall one writer whom I’d known for years who became inflamed with jealousy when I started working with J Michael Straczynski! The jealous writer (you’ve no doubt never heard of him, he doesn’t write fiction) sent me furious emails about how my life would soon be ruined by all the hi-flying people with whom I was keeping company. Obviously, I was undeserving, and these people were just messing with me. As of 2004, he was still advising me to get out of comics as he’d done for years, since that comics gig was going nowhere! Whew, sure glad I didn’t listen to this dude! My response to the letter. I want you to know once more how much this meant to me. I realized a long time ago that many of my early friends in fandom and prodom were incredibly toxic people. They don’t like to see you change or get better at anything. They just want everything to remain as it was in 1987. I think I finally cut ties with all of these people and my life has changed for the better. I’m glad I didn’t steer you wrong. I can’t believe how angry, resentful, and full of self pity some of these people are, and so ready to drag other people down over the dumbest things. I think they were always like that, I just didn’t see it. Anyway, thanks again I haven’t spoken to that ass of a writer in well over ten years. Or any of the rest of these people. Good riddance.

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Why I don’t blog anymore

Colleen Doran — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 22:04:28 +0000

EDIT: I go into details about time investment in the comments below. Dear Colleen, I bookmarked many posts on your site for information about self publishing and contracts, but when I came back to read the posts later everything was gone. Now I get page after page of broken links and comments without posts. Did you know that most of your website is completely broken? Kelly Dear Kelly, I stopped blogging in public regularly almost 8 years ago, (UPDATE: I now blog on my Patreon behind a paywall, so the 15 million hits this blog once got will now pay me directly instead of an advertising service that pays me almost nothing). While I think it served a purpose at the time, now it is holding me back as an artist. Between social media and blogging, I am investing hours every week into activism that is costing me on a personal and professional level, and I am no longer willing to pay the price. When I started blogging, there weren’t very many websites that covered the same things I was writing about. Now there are, and you have many other resources to choose from. As for where the posts went, I loaded a blog security update that broke the site. The home page looked fine, and I didn’t look any further. So, when the site backups updated, they updated to a broken version of the site. This included both the blog and the comic inventory portions of the site. Many of my old posts were locked into a system that required each post be reformatted and imported one at a time. I don’t have the resources to do that. You will find that some of the material has been restored, but I will not make further efforts and am letting the rest go. It’s for the best. I’ve written of how expensive it is to work on my A DISTANT SOIL comic, and how I can’t carve out the time for it among all my other assignments. But after giving everything a really hard look, I come to the conclusion that if I’d invested just a fraction of the hours I’ve put into blogging over the years, I’d be completely finished with A DISTANT SOIL by now, and it wouldn’t have cost me a penny out of pocket to do that. There are 24 hours in the day, and if only 1 hour per day goes into blogging (and I used to blog daily,) then that is an hour I’m not drawing and writing stories. I’ve had a blog and/or message board for 15 years. Even half of that investment would have finished A DISTANT SOIL by now. A brutally realistic estimate shows me that my blogging and social media use is the time investment equivalent of three 200 page graphic novels. I’d rather make the graphic novels. Since 2010, my online presence has been great for sales and visibility, but that is something that must be carefully balanced with the art. For several years, when I was unwell and spending a lot of time in bed propped up on my pillows with a laptop, blogging was the easy alternative to drawing. But making comics is far more labor intensive than blogging. As I am getting more and more publishing work, and believe my best work is yet to come, I can’t justify blogging anymore. It is time-consuming, and it is often stressful as well as ephemeral. I don’t think I realized just how anxious and stressed online activity made me until recently. I am making the choice to self care, and spend less time engaging with things that don’t promote my well-being and the well-being of my art. Of course, I am posting on my blog to announce this, and I do intend to update periodically. I’m more than happy to post art on my Twitter and Facebook accounts. But I will no longer engage in activism of any kind, and will no longer blog about professional issues in publishing and fandom (my own business being the notable exception, of course). I will continue to maintain and update the A Distant Soil website, but my priority is finishing the final graphic novel which I fund at my Patreon. Thank you for your kind understanding, and I am truly flattered that you considered my postings helpful in the past. I am moving on, and I hope that your future will be filled with the great art and writing you will do. Family. Friends. Art. Nothing Else. My mantra.

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Brain Fog

Colleen Doran — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 22:47:30 +0000

You used to be able to do long division in your head. Now you can’t do simple math on paper. You always knew what time it was, never needed a watch, and had the entire television schedule memorized. No one bought a TV Guide because they had you. Now you can’t keep up with your favorite shows because you can’t remember the storylines. Or when they were on. You never had to study because one pass over a book and you had it down. Now you can barely remember what you’ve read a half hour after you put the book away. You write for a living, but you stumble over spelling words like “who”. Brain Fog or Cloudy Consciousness is a cognitive disorder caused by…something. …inattention, thought process abnormalities, comprehension abnormalities, and language abnormalities…reduces quality of life by impairing work activities, social interactions, and driving, but it does not effect basic daily life activities such as dressing, personal hygiene, eating, shopping, answering the phone, or taking public transportation…may even exhibit normal cognitive performances, but overall productivity may suffer from inattentiveness and fatigue secondary to attention abnormalities…(Doctors) have a tendency to “psychologize” it and misdiagnose it as depression or apathy. So, I’ve been struggling with this for over a decade, and did not get a diagnosis or adequate treatment until 2012 (UPDATE: diagnosed in part, but underlying cause not addressed until 2016 – auto-immune disease. Bummer.) It got bad enough that for years there, I was pretty much disabled, producing only a few pages of work a month. I was so out of it that I had trouble remembering things like my middle name. Every day was one long comedy of errors – variations of not being able to find my keys. By 2006, I thought I was pretty much done and would not be able to work in publishing anymore. A close relative also had the same symptoms, and, as I did, later developed severe migraines. (For those of you who have never had a migraine, chronic migraines are debilitating. Mine include migraine aura, temporary blindness, and vomiting. Hit with migraines up to 21 days every month, as a writer and artist, I was simply unable to perform.) He was diagnosed with ADHD and given drugs that made his problems even worse. Only after years of bad reactions to the medication did a doctor finally figure out the real problem behind his brain fog was chronic Lyme Disease. My issue was an even more obvious and common problem – an endocrine imbalance (EDIT: alas, caused by that auto-immune disease that went undiagnosed for years. Can you say bummer, twice? I knew you could.) Once that was addressed, most of my brain fog symptoms disappeared (They can go into remission as the disease does, and come back whether you’re getting treatment or not. I got gobsmacked Fall 2016, but feel better several months later. Hope springs eternal.) After years of unproductivity, I’ve published a number of books over just the last couple of years. Brain fog isn’t just forgetfulness: it’s living in a bizarre twilight world where you are half in and half out of consciousness. Everything seems grey, and you don’t feel the passage of time. ( I could not remember the month, day or year it was.) You float through life, but it’s not a good feeling. You have an almost complete lack of awareness. You’re there, but you do not process what you’re experiencing. What memories you do manage to internalize seem as if they happened to someone else. If you’re a high energy person like me, you feel as if you’ve had a personality transplant – not a good one. You are listless, apathetic, and you don’t have the energy to fight to get better. What’s worse is it may seem like depression or ennui to others, when what you really have is a medical problem no one has caught yet. So you’ve got people telling you to snap out of it as if you have magical powers over your thyroid or your progesterone levels, as if you can talk yourself out of Lyme Disease, Celiac’s Disease, or Lupus. After a few years of dealing with all this, you do get depressed about it in the end. Back in the 1980’s I had chronic fatigue syndrome (they call it myalgic encephalomyelitis now, I’m told,) and when I began having brain fog problems, I was terrified that the viral infection had returned. I’d been symptom free for over 10 years. However, unlike chronic fatigue, my brain fog had no accompanying flu-like symptoms or fever (EDIT: not at first. Later came joint and muscle pain, but I no longer run a mild fever, which I always did when I was first hit with encephalomyelitis. I ran a fever almost constantly for years. Researchers believe that encephalomyelitis, which is an auto-immune disorder, may go hand in hand with the Hashimoto’s disease, with about 20% of patients having both diseases. Hashimoto’s also runs in my family. ) I wondered if a series of personal problems hadn’t plunged me into a depressive state. Everyone feels sad when people die or when someone embezzles your money. Most of us move on. I moved on, but didn’t feel better. Whatever, I felt lousy and couldn’t get stuff done. I was able to get some relief from my symptoms with over the counter energy supplements and herbal remedies supposed to increase pep and attentiveness, like Black Cohosh and green tea. Back in 2010, I blogged about “losing my mojo” and gradually getting back in the game. Even so, I was only working at about half the rate I used to. Now I feel pretty darned good and am working at about 80% of my prior work capacity. I expect that will improve in the coming months. But I wish my doctor had found out what was really going on, oh, about ten years sooner. Because I lost a heck of a lot of quality of life in there. There are many medical problems that can cause brain fog. It’s hard to deal with because you feel so listless and out of it that you have trouble finding the motivation and energy to find out what’s wrong. You may have something that affects a lot of people such as low testosterone or peri-menopause, or a thyroid problem. Or you may have a disease no one thought to look for. If you are unproductive, people tend to dismiss that as a character flaw. At first, I wasn’t very kind to myself when this was going on. I kept thinking if I exercised regularly, or ate the right foods, or stayed motivated, I’d snap out of it. I thought I’d gotten lazy. I’m sure lots of people thought so. People would joke about my absentmindedness, and when I was at shows, I’d be embarrassed by my inability to add up a total on a purchase, or remember things I’d worked on. Clients didn’t appreciate my spacey attitude. Friends who used to chatter on the phone with me wondered why that stopped. People I met at conventions were offended that I couldn’t remember them. I’d screw up orders and commissions. I’d forget entire assignments. Now that I know I have an medical problem, it’s easier to take. But I have a lot of catching up to do. My income plummeted for a long time, my medical bills skyrocketed, and I’ve lost years of prime productivity. When I first mentioned my spaciness, dizzy spells, headaches and other problems more than a decade ago on my old (now down) blog, several of you figured it out immediately, long before my doctor did! But a couple of you blogged that I must be a drug addict or drunk. That was sweet. I forgot a lot of things during all this, but I remember you. Several readers who also struggle with brain fog ask me to blog about how I deal with the problem. Sometimes, not so well. Sometimes like a champ. These days I’m much better, because hey, we know what’s causing this and the fix is pretty easy. But it’s a question of maintenance and I still have brain hiccups. For whatever reason you’ve got your brain fog, your working memory is completely screwed. You have to reduce stress and replace working memory with organization. Get organized, stay organized, and keep notes and records on everything. You will not be able to remember things other people take for granted. Think like an engineer, and back up, back up, back up. Redundancy is your friend. This is why I beg people to follow up with me, and to never make requests of me at conventions or other events. I simply won’t remember them, and then I have to deal with these people being pissed off later. Keep a blog or private journal, save every email, take notes on everything, and keep them in an organized format to which you can easily refer. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel with list-making: keep to a simple, easy to follow routine. Let the people who need to know realize that they must follow-up with you. You don’t have to give clients your sob story: few people appreciate it when they feel guilted into treating you differently. Everybody has problems and some are much worse than yours. Just send a friendly note once in awhile to let your associates know to follow up with you. OK, I’ll blog more about this later. I promise to remember. Acephalous made Work Bird. Work Bird made Acephalous write a dissertation.

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This is Not 0’s and 1’s

Colleen Doran — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:09:58 +0000

This is not cochineal, and lapis lazuli, and Indian lac, and alum, and linseed oil. The human being who made this image is not chlorine, and carbon, and magnesium, and sulfur. This is not 0’s and 1’s. The copy of this art is not 0’s and 1’s. The extraordinary human experience of art is not 0’s and 1’s.

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