SO! If I got my blog running back in January, and planned to blog every day, why haven’t I been posting?
Because I also wanted to draw every day … and wanted to build a buffer.
Why? Well, let’s break it down.
First, I want to draw comic books. Yes, yes, yes, I have a webcomic called f@nu fiku, but after I broke my arm, and got my laptop stolen, and found my hand-crafted blog software stopped working, and got swarmed trying to crank out my first four novels … well, after all that, I found my confidence in my drawing had collapsed.
I never was that great at drawing, frankly, but when I was working on f@nu fiku with the goal of cranking out a page a week, I never let my drawing limitations stop me. If I wanted to have an image in my comic, I had to figure out how to draw it, no matter what. But even though I wasn’t that great, I had a level of self-confidence that let me tackle whatever I had to.
But I never gave up on comics. Not only do I want to finish f@nu fiku, I have other comics I want to draw, from Cinnamon Frost and Serendipity the Centaur stories up to and including becoming the writer-artist for Green Lantern. Obviously that last one is aspirational, but I can’t frigging aspire to become the writer-artist of anything if I am not creating comics at all.
But, I not only love comics, and want to work on comics, I study comics. I know, for example, that Jim Lee spent a solid year teaching himself to draw after college in an attempt to break into the comics industry. Now, I can’t yet put in 8-10 hours a day drawing like Lee did, but I decided I could at least draw every day.
But it’s hard to draw every day if real life intervenes (like Dragon Con, for example). According to my records, I’ve tried the “Drawing Every Day” project 3 times in the past, and never made it through the full year once – I lasted 215 days in 2021 (through Dragon Con), just one day in 2023 (the layoffs), and 135 days in 2024 (through the Embodied AI Workshop).
I find it really disheartening to hit the end of the year and to be that far behind. But I also know that professional comic book artists who do daily strips build up a buffer to keep themselves ahead – Bill Holbrook, the author of Kevin and Kell, built up 30 strips before launching what is now one of the longest running webcomics in history.
So, I decided to do a buffer for Drawing Every Day 2025.
So, for the first part of this year, I leaned into drawing, trying to get ahead. I decided that I wouldn’t start blogging every day until I built up a buffer of drawing every day, and in an act of quixotic hubris, I also decided to start retro-drawing the missing drawings from 2024 so that I would finish those drawings as well.
But, I wondered, how far ahead should I try to get in my drawings? Following Bill Holbrook, I guessed a month, but once you’re out of January, you need a tool to keep track of what day of the year it is. I wanted something simpler … so I started to think in terms of a simple formula I could keep in my head.
Fortunately (thanks, passage of time!) months are ordered, thus can be numbered. Call the number of the month in the year “m”. Months have a notch over 30 days on average, but for a mental formula, you want to round to even numbers to keep the math simple. So 30m is a good quick overestimate of what day it is in the year.
But 30m is a variable, vulnerable overestimate, as it is more ahead at the start of the month almost 30 days less at the end of the month. You could add 30 days, but even 30(m+1) still has this variable property. So, call the day “d” and add that to the formula: 30(m + 1) + d. And that sounds great. 30(m + 1) is guaranteed to always be more than 30 days ahead.
And … 30(m+1)+d is a treadmill. Every day, you’re just at your buffer, and every day, you can’t fail to lose focus, or you eat into your buffer. That’s no good: the point of the buffer is to get your back when major life events (like Dragon Con) happen, not to put you constantly on edge that you’re about to lose your buffer.
So I decided to add a few more days to the formula. I know I typically draw two to four drawings in a session (sometime as few as one if I am busy or have chosen something complicated, sometimes as many as five if I am sketching). So adding two more to the formula gets us to 30(m + 1) + d + 2 … a number I can easily calculate in my head, and, what’s more, add to my drawings, even if I don’t have internet where I am.
It’s not perfect – when transitioning from a short month, you can find yourself a few days behind – but it’s a number so far ahead that I can skip a day whenever I have to, confident that I will be able to get back on track with the typical number of drawings I do per day. And if I am at my buffer, I can do a “retro 2024” drawing or sketch some idea not on my drawing plan (which is a whole nother topic for a whole nother post).
So. Anyway. My point, and I did have one.
Today, I reached 30(m + 1) + d + 2 in my drawing buffer.
And so today is the day I resume Blogging Every Day, with this post.
It’s good to be back.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Where I am, drawing, and writing, and one of the drawings. And unfortunately, it’s too dim to do my normal photo of my drawing for today, so I’ll have to scan that when I get home.
