This is a profession for me, but I started off as a self-publisher working on my own schedule and my own stuff before moving on to graphic novels with First Second Books, where there was definitely a schedule, but it was very different from monthly comics.
Even I thought I would be a writer who put something out every year. But that's not how it worked out.
Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.
At the moment, I have it planned as a six or seven year experiment, but the books will only ever appear in bursts like this every couple of years and only with the best quality artists.
I can understand the natural anxiety of readers when waiting for another installment of a favourite series, but I think it is much more important to get a book right than it is to have it appear on time.
For a very long time, I wrote a book a year, and was eager and willing to do it, to put bread on the table, to have my work out there. Now I must write a book every two years, and that's never enough time, either.
I'm used to doing comic books, where every month there's a new comic book! I find that the movie business is not quite the same. It doesn't move quite as fast.
I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.
The things that have really gotten confusing to me is how you balance the desires of your publishers to produce things on a schedule, and people are always sort of giving you ideas on what you should follow up with or how you should proceed next and things like that.
I've been planning a chunk of time to myself for years now. It's been my intention to finish 'Astonishing X-Men,' 'I Am Legion' and 'Planetary' and then sort of 'disappear' from doing comic interiors for a couple of years. I'll pop up here and there with a short story or two, old promises to friends and all, but no major series work.
You don't usually have to wait a month for a new episode of a TV show. We ask comic readers to wait a month for a new issue, and honestly, given the time that it takes to put them together, a month is really too fast.
