Step 13: Go Back To The Drawing Board (?)

What has two thumbs and is back at it again with the white Vans blog posts?

This girl!

Yes, my little jaunt to the Pacific Northwest for fun and fishing was great, but reality can only be pushed to the back burner for so long. A good friend of mine confided in me recently that she has been struggling with the frustrations of personal and professional failure, and boy howdy, do I understand those feels. So, Lindsay, if you're reading this, I'll have you know that I had not one but two rejection letters from agents waiting for me in my inbox when I got home.

Lucky me!

At this point, I'm feeling pretty lost and without direction. I've spent eight months working on something that has gone approximately nowhere, and I haven't the foggiest idea what to do now or how to move forward with my idea. Needless to say, my resolve is sinking faster than the Titanic.

My heart: I'll never let go!
My ego: :::is dead:::

While I was up in Portland I stopped by Powell's Books, which is a famous new and used bookstore that was simultaneously inspiring and depressing. Inspiring, because who doesn't get a hard-on when they walk into the literary equivalent of a pornography warehouse, and depressing, because JFC there are so many authors vying for the tiniest bit of real estate on a shelf. I ended up dropping $12 on a used copy of Five Centimeters Per Second, which is a manga adapted from an anime I had never heard of, but the tagline of "a love story that is as timeless as it is fleeting" tugged on my sucker heartstrings.

Nothing quite like the smell of unrequited love to make you cry in the morning.

I didn't even bother to watch the anime after reading the manga, because my choking sobs upon finishing the comic stopped me from punishing myself further. I'm not sure if it's a cultural difference, or if I'm the only one on the planet who likes happy endings, but the manga left me feeling very unsatisfied. Its depiction of love was almost too real, and if I wanted to make myself feel shitty about failed relationships, I think I'd have more fun sorting through photos of my old boyfriend and drowning myself in a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Obligatory "weeping my way down memory lane" gif.

Still, the art was beautiful, and it made me consider re-adapting Defining Lines into its original graphic novel form. There's something powerfully intimate about a story unfolding in images without the burden of a bunch of extraneous narration. Some of my favorite pages from comics don't even need words; the pictures do more to tell the story than any dialogue could accomplish.

Provided without context.