Confession (Patreon)

It was April last year that my nervous breakdown started and it took me out of commission as a functional human being solidly for a couple months after that, and then recovery, when it started much later, was very slow. I survived the last year, but my wounds haven't fully healed yet, I'm still in the process of mending. 

We hold our book Kickstarters in May. 

Last spring is very cloudy in my memory, just small snapshots here and there that look like they were taken from a camera underwater. One of those scattered images is of me uncurling myself from the fetal position just long enough to post  chirpy, upbeat messages on social media encouraging people to please pre-order our book, and then curling back into myself to resume sobbing and dry heaving. 

This is my confession:

I'm so scared to do the Kickstarter Dance again next month. 

This is the book I've wanted to do from the very beginning. It's just the sex education comics, nothing else. It's my first purely sex educational book, one people can hand to somebody new to this world (whatever age they may be) and just say, "Read this. The dad jokes are atrocious and it's gunna make scary sex stuff approachable and understandable."

I mean, it's not the BE ALL END ALL of sex education books!!!!! Not by a loooooong shot. It's the appetizer before the meal-- the meal being Scarleteen's books and Girl Sex 101 and all the other massive tomes that have been produced by sex positive, queer, inclusive organizations. This book? Drawn to Sex: The Basics? It's a sweet, bite-size introduction to the basics. 

Matt has just blown me away with his book design on this one, I think it's fucking classy as shit. It's shorter, so the cover price will be way lower than our normal 300+ page $30 books. And. I just. I'm so fucking proud of this. This is the end product we've been working toward for the last five years. 

Haha.

And I'm so scared. 

I'm scared to go through the motions I did last year, to do that public performance of asking for money. Again. I'm scared I'm not going to do enough. I see people doing such creative and interesting things to promote their Kickstarters, to get people excited ahead of time, and I'm like "I should do that" and then I'm like "I'm so tired." Pretty, fun promotional graphics, creative written copy, engaging with your audience, performing excitement when you just don't have it in you. Woof. Even when you're not having a crisis, that shit is still totally hard work and draining at the end of the day.

I just have to keep telling myself "This isn't last year", this won't be like that. 

I'll do the best I can do. 

Oh, about these photos. Back in 2012, some friends commissioned me to make this giant ass triptych for their living room in exchange for making me a website. I'd never done anything this large before! (The photos say 2013 because that's when I finished) Originally I thought I'd TEACH MYSELF how to paint on wood with Grown Up Paints (acrylics or oils or just anything opaque) but then I realized, oh no, this is really hard, so instead I painted with watercolors like I always do on a regular sized piece of paper and then just blew that image up real big, cut it out, and glued it to the wooden panels with the help of my wonderful husband. I still made some corrections and embellishments by hand on the big printed version, which you can see above.

This was the original painting.

And here it is all finished. 

Ok, that's all. I'm not fishing for encouragement or reassurance from you guys about the Kickstarter stuff, or subtly trying to guilt anyone into feeling obligated to get our new book, I just wanted to be... honest about what it's like behind the computer screen. 

I'm gunna do my best and I'll be ok and at the end of the day I do love this book. I know we'll reach our basic funding goal, even if it doesn't go crazybananas and make us a profit, and the book will exist and it will be good. 

It will be so good.

And I will be ok.