Over the past several months, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the directions I want to take my life. I’ve had fun nights writing a graphic novel series, trying out different methods of sketching, and learning nearly a dozen songs on my acoustic guitar. This is a big change for me: before winter break, I’d spent the better part of two decades spending all my time on a computer: programming, designing, architecting, engineering.

Rediscovering my spots, as I wrote about last month, has opened my world so much wider than it was. As I head into my fourth month of this new way of thinking, I find myself somewhat surprised that it’s been so… durable. I still wake up every morning excited, proverbial tail wagging like mad, that I get to be a Dalmatian again today! I get to take morning walkies, go to work with great people doing cool things, take evening walkies, hang out with my cats and friends and family (either online or in real life, depending on the day), write, draw, watch, read, play, then curl up with Melody and sleep so I can do it all over again tomorrow!

I really expected that excitement to wear off eventually. I’m glad it hasn’t. But the variation on what I’ve been doing lately has made me pause for a moment. I really feel like I need to think about what I do want to do with myself. Obviously, I’m quite happy with my work situation right now – but outside that. What do I want to do with my time here on Earth?

I’ve thought about getting into video and content creation. I could stream my sketching – but more than that, I have a bunch of games I love playing, I have old computers that seem to be interesting to others, I have so many topics I’d love to talk about! But it’s also a lot of a time commitment. If I include writing, editing, set up, and tear down, a 45 minute video is at least 6-8 hours of work, which means a lot of time I’m not doing the other things I enjoy.

I want to get my graphic novels into a form where I can really start to share and publish them somehow. But none of the options I’ve found have felt “right” to me. And do I want to release by chapter or by volume? What’s fair; what’s something readers will enjoy while still letting me publish on a schedule that I can actually keep? Do I really want to release the writing without the “graphic” part of the graphic novel? I’ve been told by early reviewers that my writing can “definitely stand alone”, but does that ruin the illustration part? Would people really re-read it later just to see the drawings? There’s so much of the stories that I want to be seen.

And that leads into sketching. I do feel like I have raw talent, but I need a lot of work to refine my skills into where they’re where I want them to be. And it is fun to work on those skills, so I’m not averse to that! But I feel like I also need to decide on an art style – and that’s been really hard for me. The three art styles I keep referring myself back to would be Housepets!, Ruki Fox, and 101 Dalmatian Street. I’ve noticed in my writing I make a lot of references to eye colour, and I’ve even written a scene where eye colour plays a big part, so it wouldn’t make sense to use the exact style of 101 Dalmatian Street for my illustrations. But I also don’t know if I could properly display the wide range of emotions my characters express and feel in Ruki’s style. What I need, of course, is to make my own style – and it’ll probably end up being a combination of my influences with my own flair. But that will take time to truly develop.

Then we come full circle. What about technology? Being away from it for a quarter year has given me so much new inspiration. I did that work on Gentoo last month, and found it quite enjoyable, which I haven’t felt doing Linux work in years! I have actually been inspired with another project idea that is sort of correlated to a skill I’m trying to learn at work. But I feel guilty when I spend time on technology. It feels like time wasted, when I could be working towards one of my other hobbies. I’m already good at technology and I do that at work, why spend time on it that I don’t have to?

But I also really enjoy it. At least sometimes. And I know I don’t have to choose only one of these. I can do all of them. But I don’t want to stretch myself too thin, either. I’m a bit nervous that I’ll grow a following doing one of them, and my following will grow to expect regular updates on whatever it is they are following me for, and I’ll have to give up on the other things. Maybe that wouldn’t actually happen. And even if it did, it’s my life, and my time, so I have a duty to myself to make myself happy, right? But I don’t want to disappoint the people who enjoy the art I create! And yes, I include software as an art form. Software creation is a lot more “right-brained” of an activity than I feel most people give it credit.

I don’t know. This is kind of a messy, stream-of-consciousness article. I considered not even publishing it. But I like having an article a day, and this is what I felt like today, what I wanted to write, what I wanted to express, what I wanted to convey. And I hope that maybe it can help others know that they’re not alone in having to make these decisions. They’re hard! They’re also a lot of fun. I suppose that’s what makes life rewarding in the end.