New York, Batman and moving forward.

For those of you not paying attention, yesterday was the deadline for my Kickstarter. For those of you not paying attention, I didn't make it. There was a time when this would have spelled complete and utter disillusionment for me. I would have spent weeks, if not months, lamenting the fact that people didn't care about my particular little corner of the zeitgeist enough to help me "make it" and no doubt everything in my life would have suffered because of it. In a word, I would have been manic. I'd like to say that me is completely dead and gone, but I'm too self-aware to buy a statement like that. I can say that for the first time in my life, I'm genuinely seeing the brighter side of situations and dealing with things from a far more adult and aware place. So maybe the Kickstarter didn't make it's goal. Big deal! I can still do everything I laid out in the project, I'll just have to do a lot less of it on the road. And you know what, that's fine by me, because to tell the truth...I love Chicago.

For years I've felt held back by Nashville. Not that I think there is anything wrong with Nashville, nor is it that I don't love the hell out of the town and especially the people within it. Nashville though, it's home, it's slow, it's easy. I felt stymied there, always like I was missing out on something by not being in a bigger, more fast paced city. Maybe it's just honeymoon style excitement, but my first month in Chicago really seems to confirm the fact that I needed to be in a place that moves a little bit quicker, stays up a little bit later, gets a little bit stranger. Every morning when I leave the house I see new angles, each day when I ride the train or bus, I find new characters, each night when I lie in bed listening to the sounds of a city busying itself with the business of being a city, I dream new stories. I love it here.

This has been a long, hard year for me. It's been a long, hard year for a lot of people around me as well, some of which could be laid squarely at my feet. Most days I wonder what it is I've done that's led to these days, to these slow but serious successes. Some days, I even wonder if I deserve them. I hope that asking yourself that question is the mark of a decent man. I know one thing, regardless of what it is in life that brings us to the places we end up, I will never waste another day not taking advantage of it. On January 1st of this year, I wrote on my Facebook wall, "2011 - The Year I Get Published." In 2011, I was invited to participate in a Sequart collection about Transmetropolitan, in 2011 I decided I wanted to live more like Batman and now I'm going to do it, in 2011 I started a collective to help fellow creators learn to construct better pitches and now, as 2011 comes to a close, I'll be reporting on New York Comic Con for the web's largest comic book news organization.

I don't harbor any illusions that there aren't trials ahead, that the world won't tilt horribly on its axis and topple us all over again at times, and that everything is hunky dory just because things are going well, but for the first time in my life, I'm not worried about that. I'm only worried about moving forward.