-
Patreon, the future and feelings
Silence Killed the Dinosaurs started out as a whim. It continued as a way to help me cope through the worst of my chronic fatigue syndrome. Now I would like it to be a little more.
I have been thinking about how to write this for a few weeks, and I have made a couple of false starts. It’s all been wrong.
So I’ll start by telling you this:
I have set up a Patreon page to support my writing and illustrating for Silence Killed the Dinosaurs.
For those who don’t know, Patreon is a crowdfunding site designed specially for creators who have a constant output (i.e., writing, art, comics, music, podcasts, etc.). Instead of a big one-off fund-raising goal, patrons opt to pledge a smaller amount (as little as a $1) each month.
Don’t worry, Silence Killed the Dinosaurs will remain free to anyone who wishes to see it.
But if you like my work and think it’s worth a couple of dollars every now and then, please consider becoming my patron. There are some cool extras and rewards available for those of you who do.
If you don’t want to (or can’t afford to) support me that way but would still like to help out, please consider sharing my work around on social media and telling friends about it. I would really appreciate it.
If you don’t want to do that either, we’re still cool. But maybe leave a comment and tell me the picture I did for my Patreon banner is totally kick-arse. Because it is. Go look at it. That thing took me ages to get right.
Ages.
And now that has been said, I’ll tell you some news:
My chronic fatigue syndrome has improved.
I’m not better, but I am better than I was six months ago. I might improve more over the next six months. I might not. I don’t know.
I am still not well enough to drive, catch a bus or find employment. But I have more energy and fewer migraines. I can help around the house. And, more relevant for you, I can concentrate better and for longer, meaning I can write and draw more.
Maybe I’ll never be well enough work as a librarian like I had planned and studied for before I got sick. But there’s more to me than my university degree and plenty of other things out there. Maybe I could be a professional writer/illustrator.
Which brings me to something else that I want to say but could never get the lead up right (and still can’t):
All this—Silence Killed the Dinosaurs, you guys—saved me.
Maybe that’s a soppy, silly thing to say on the internet, but I don’t care. It’s true. Probably you didn’t mean to. Probably you didn’t even notice. It’s still true. You saved me and it means everything.
I was so sick that I barely left the house. I ached all over all the time. I was too tired to think. On bad days I spent the entire day lying down. On really bad days I would not eat food or drink water until my partner returned from work in the evening because I was unable to stand and go to the kitchen.
But I wrote and I drew. Not always a lot. Not always well. Not at all on bad days. But I never stopped, even when it felt hopeless.
And you guys.
I little while back I wrote about the awkward conversations I have about not ‘doing’ anything. It was written to be entertaining, and I like to think it was, but it didn’t come from an entertaining place. Chronic fatigue syndrome had been getting me down. I felt like I was achieving nothing and that I was worthless.
But then I got heaps of comments from you guys telling me that of course I do something—I do this.
The idea needed some time to simmer. It didn’t just tip me into a new way of thinking and a new way of doing things, but I thought about it a lot over the last couple of months. And then when I visited New Zealand I filled out my occupation on those customs cards. You do two; one for the country you leave before you get on the plane and another for the country you are going to while you are on the plane. Somewhere in the air things clicked into place. I left Australia unemployed, but I arrived in New Zealand a writer.
Putting it down in words like that was weirdly hard to do—especially as there weren’t enough little boxes to fit /illustrator—but I was brave and I did it.
I consider my life saved.
And now I’m going to go do some scary things with it, like putting my work out there and finding new ways to challenge myself creatively. Please hang around while I do it. We’ll tell jokes and I’ll draw dinosaurs. It’ll be fun, I promise.
The last thing I wanted to say was just this:
Thank you.
-
Call me Foureyes
Comic-me (awkward mid-sentence tangent that shouldn’t be happening two hyphenated words into the story: I have decided to refer to my drawn-self as ‘comic-me’ rather than ‘cartoon-me’ because it can be misread as I am comic, i.e. amusing, and I’m okay with that) is getting a makeover.
You know the classic high school movie makeover scene? That’s the scene where a designated cool-person exchanges a nerd-girl’s glasses for contacts (or just takes them away and leaves the poor nerd-girl to walk into things and get reading-headaches) magically transforming the nerd-girl into a cool-person worthy of having friends and being treated like a human being.
Well, I wear glasses now, so we’re about to do the reverse.
Kind of.
Reverse implies I start cool, put on glasses and get nerdy. In reality I start kind of nerdy, put on glasses and then I stay the same level of nerdy with the same personality and the same questionable social skills, but I feel a bit happier with how I look.
(Which is how successful makeovers work in the real world. I hope all you high-school-movie-screen-writers out there are paying attention.)
Here we go!
Look at me! I’m so happy that my arms have gone bendy! And how crazy smart do I look? I look like the kind of person you would stop in the street to ask pressing questions about quantum physics.
I need the glasses because I have moderate astigmatism. My left eye is almost okay, but my right eye isn’t. My right eye is that awful group-project partner you always end up with for university assignments who doesn’t do much, gets in the way, drags down your grade, ends up passing because of all your hard work and is the subject of your pencil-stabbing fantasies for the rest of the semester.
It’s probably a good thing my left eye no longer has to carry the team.
I’ve known about the astigmatism for years. And, actually, I’ve had glasses for years. But I didn’t much like them and the narrow frames annoyed me.Annoyed is the wrong word.
Wearing my old glasses slots in on my list of everyday things I have an unreasonably intense dislike of just above the term ‘happy snaps’ and a little below folding fitted sheets. There must be some narrow-frame perks that I can’t see (/joke. Get it?) because some people seem to like them. But I would rather not wear glasses at all than wear my old glasses with the narrow frames.And in fact this is what I did for years. I just didn’t wear them, except for reading. It was a surprisingly successful solution. It even saved me money on blu-rays and granted me immunity from getting carried away about otherwise mediocre video games with awesome graphics.
But sometimes you catch yourself wondering what pores look like.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise the answer was to just get different glasses. I worked it out a couple of months ago and immediately went out and picked out the biggest frames I could find in the shop.
And I love them. I wear them all the time. They are part of who I am now, the way not quite being able to read streets signs in time to make turns was part of who I was before.And I thought it was time to make the relationship comic-official.
-
I’m back!
I have returned from my honeymoon in New Zealand! This means that I will be responding to comments and creating new content again.
Before you ask, no, I didn’t bring you back anything.
I’m sorry.
I find buying souvenirs for people weirdly stressful. I keep overthinking it. The gift should be something nice to receive, not too tacky, but also something that relates to the place you visited or what’s the point? After several shops worth of cognitive overload, I decided I would only get things for immediate family members and that they would all get socks. And I felt much better. (Spoiler alert for family, your future involves having fabulously-attired, toasty-warm feet.)
Also yes, I enjoyed the trip. It was non-stop this:
There’s an extra joke in that picture for those who already know I spent the entire time taking photos of my partner when he was taking photos of things. This amused me a great deal more than it should have; I ended up with 191 photos of him with his face behind a camera. My favourite ones are of him in awkward photo-taking poses such as climbing a fence for a better view or chasing a particularly photogenic duck.
But hey. Now that we’re married the paperwork required to ditch me probably isn’t quite worth it, which frees me up to be more cavalier with irritating jokes that go on way, way too long.
I think I will enjoy married life.
-
BIG NEWS
Probably, anyway, because I made this in advance and scheduled it to appear at just the right time. But I’m sure I would have had a free minute with an internet connection to delete it if anything untoward occurred and messed everything up, so if you can see this, it’s safe to assume that I am now married, half-way through my third drink and up to my elbows in cake. I will busy
taking the hobbits to Isengard-gard-gar-gar-garexploring New Zealand for a few weeks, but have scheduled some things so that you won’t miss me too much and …… hang on.
Wait. Not you guys. I’m sorry, but the big heart-frames weren’t for you.
Stop it. You’re supposed to be the evil monsters.
Guys no.
GUYS NO.
-
I have a friend with an autoimmune disease, and I need your help.
I have a friend with an autoimmune disease. For anyone unfamiliar with how autoimmune diseases work and why having one sucks, it’s basically when all your white blood cells and other bits and pieces of your immune system are over-enthusiastic action-movie heroes who think ‘destroy everything’ is a mandatory step in the process of saving the day.
Imagine being the city at the end of an Avengers movie. That’s how my friend feels most of the time. Unsurprisingly, she also gets lots of viruses and infections. 
She frequently comes down with tonsillitis. To stop this happening, she just had her tonsils removed. The procedure went about as well as these things do.
And she was fine until her immune system decided to save her from the painkillers.
She was so unwell and in so much pain that she had to go back to hospital. This was not unusual for her. She has been to hospital 5 times in the last 6 months. She sees her GP about as often as she sees her mum, more often than she sees me.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: these medical comics are no Awkward Yeti and this is kind of a bummer story.
You’re right. I’m no Awkward Yeti and this is kind of a bummer story. And it’s about to get worse.
That statistic on how many times she has been to hospital in the last 12 months? I had to ask her for it when I sat down to write this because I didn’t know it. Even though I consider her one of my closest friends, she doesn’t always tell me when she ends up in hospital. She only told me this time because on that particular day I happened to message her to check up on her recovery. And in that message she apologised profusely for having to tell me bad news.
That’s why she doesn’t tell people. She doesn’t want to be a downer. She doesn’t want to force a nasty reality about life and illness on other people. She is afraid that if people get bad news every time they talk to her, they will stop.
Hearing this broke my heart a little bit.
It can be difficult to talk to people about chronic illness. It feels socially unsafe to bring up in conversation, and even the people who care don’t always want to hear about it. Perhaps because they want you to be happy and healthy and it hurts to know that you’re sick, so it’s easier for them to avoid all reminders.
With my collection of medical conditions (depression, assorted anxiety disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia) I get it. Or maybe I should say I kind of get it. Although I feel that social pressure to shut up, sit down and not rock the boat, I’ve never been very good at submitting to it.
Whenever someone dismisses my anxiety and tells me I’m just being ridiculous, I smile and get through the conversation. And then I draw a comic that touches on anxiety and publish it here.
When someone says that because I have depression I must make up stories for attention (true story … or is it?), I smile and get through the conversation. And later when I find other people who are drowning in emptiness I listen to them and then talk to them about what depression is and isn’t.
Every time someone shuts down discussion when I mention my chronic fatigue syndrome or completely ignores the effect it has had on my life, I smile and get through the conversation. And then drop my chronic fatigue bomb into the next one too.
And I was happy doing that privately. I would have gone on with my tiny rebellions for years, maybe my whole life. But then one of my closest friends apologised for telling me she was so sick she had to go to hospital, and that changed things.
My rebellion is going public, and I’m recruiting.
Please talk about illness.
I know it’s hard and maybe you don’t know how and it feels too awkward, but life is about doing hard things.
You can start small. Acknowledge it in conversation when it comes up rather than gliding past it. Think about how that person’s illness might impact your plans together and, if it would help, offer to make adjustments. Ask them how they are doing. Listen to them, and let them tell you the truth. Ask follow up questions. Let them make jokes about it. Let them scream about it. Say Voldemort, not You-Know-Who.
Unless you are a hermit (…with an internet connection who follows my site), I guarantee that among your circle of family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances there is somebody with this kind of illness. Autoimmune disease, thyroid conditions, endometriosis, anxiety disorders, polycystic ovary syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, severe back pain, lingering physical injuries, fibromyalgia, Parkinson’s, MS, depression—I have names associated with each one.
When my friends end up in hospital I don’t want them to feel they should hide it. I want them to feel safe enough to tell people when they are so unwell they cannot get out of bed, in so much pain they vomit, or falling apart because waking up to the same struggle each and every day is becoming too much to hold together.
This is a bummer story, and I do not apologise for it. Maybe it’s awful to hear a friend is going through all that, but it’s far worse not to hear.
Please talk about illness. Take away its power to isolate already vulnerable people. Help me make a world where my friends will always know they can say something. I can’t bear the thought of them facing it alone.
-
He Can Thunder My Lizard Any Day
I’m glad that palaeontologists decided to go with Brontosaurus in 2015. Apatosaurus just isn’t long term relationship material.
P.S. When this hit the focus groups (i.e., when I came up with the idea at 2am and woke up my partner by giggling uncontrollably and generally making a lot of noise and fuss for 2am so that he would ask what I was doing) it became apparent that not everyone just casually knows that “Brontosaurus” means “Thunder Lizard”. It does.
P.P.S Apatosaurus means “Deceptive Lizard”. Just saying.
Silence Killed The Dinosaurs 