My paperback copies of Sunny Days of Rain arrived today, and I was not joking about its size. My last essay collection was a slim 451 pages, compared to this 824-page giant-sized behemoth.
If you would have told me back in 2017 that there would be over 1,200 printed pages of my tiny-captions-turned-small-essays I would have told you to shut up and make me a drink.
The sold-out, autographed special editions will be shipped out this week. Thank you so much for your love and support and occasional hugs.
I’ve been taking it easy on social media because I am working on so many things right now. Jojo, Brushfire, Maple Island, other secret projects, and I recorded a song demo just this morning.
It’s good to be in a new era, and it’s going to be a good year for anyone who’s a hater of my work, because there’s going to be a lot of it, and if nothing else, the internet needs stuff to hate.
What kind of psycho announces and then drops a new book on the same day?
It’s me. I’m the psycho.
Sunny Days of Rain, my twelfth book and second essay collection, is out now. This video gives you all the information (and affirmations) you need, but I did write a few quick notes for you if you don’t have the time. (I get it.)
1. I was worried I wouldn’t have enough material for this collection. Ha! The paperback version of Time is a Solid State is 451 pages; Sunny Days of Rain is 824, holding over 120,000 words.
2. I care a lot about my essays. Like, way too much. I spend a lot of time thinking about them, a lot of time writing them, and they are a genuine way I express myself. I love them and I love publishing these collections.
3. That being said, I acknowledge the people who can be jerks about my writing in the video. I compare them to people who go to book clubs but haven’t read the book. All due respect to human beings and their opinions but, also, fuck those people, you know? We live in a era where butchers argue with scientists over science and it’s just a part of life now.
4. There are THREE (3) exclusive, signed copies of Sunny Days of Rain available on my website, while supplies last. Why are they exclusive? They come with a secret gift that I can’t talk about but I’m really excited to share. Only three! While supplies last! Go get ’em!
5. You can get a million copies of Sunny Days of Rain on the other website, and I hope you do. Get paperbacks and hardcovers for your family, friends, lovers, enemies, strangers, and pets.
6. Love you all. Truly. Thank you for still supporting me, for sending me messages in the middle of the night telling me what my writing means to you, for being here. You’re all the best (except those of you who are the worst).
All this and more in the video, it’s a good one, sorry I avoided you and hibernated all January, now you know why, I’m back, baby, go get this badonk of a book!
We have different definitions for what it is that makes us human, but mine is pretty simple.
Humans have the ability to protect those who are the most vulnerable, and know how noble and sweet it is to care for, shelter, and serve those who need us most.
There is a very, very good chance that this will be a very, very ugly year for most of us.
If you remember nothing else I write this year, I want you to remember this:
Targeting, attacking, or harming vulnerable people in any way is inhuman.
You need to keep this in your head and heart, and recognize it when you see it. Because you will see it a lot this year, and that should be, as the kids say, a big red flag.
Weirdly, I was wrong when I thought something all Americans had in common was a love (or at least respect) for the United States Constitution. Specifically, the part that “secure[s] the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Personal freedom.
The idea that, as long as you weren’t hurting anybody else, you could say and do and be anything you please, with the responsibility and consequences for those free actions.
This does not seem to be the case.
And we see it: the inhumane attacks on vulnerable people in this country for simply trying to be who they are.
The inhumanity of places that do not believe in personal freedom.
At the risk of sounding like a Jesus-loving hippie, we have a love problem. Not the kind we keep for our parents or children.
No, the love we have for absolute strangers. For our acquaintances and neighbors. The kindness and benefit of doubt that we wish everyone would share with ourselves.
We need that kind of love. Especially so now.
And love doesn’t mean you have to agree with or even like anybody else.
It just means you recognize how vulnerable they are; that they are as vulnerable as you.
And you deserve to be cared for, sheltered, and served.
If you remember nothing else I write this year, please remember that.
A year ago this week, I announced — in celebration of a decade publishing books and comics, and twenty years of making music as The Next Step — that I would be focusing on a different Sleeping Kitty Productions project every month for all of 2023, taking you behind the scenes and talking you through my processes.
And I did it.
And people kept asking me why the hell I was doing it.
When I was a kid, I was an idiot. I can’t count all the ways in which I was a stupid boy, but I know I needed a lot of help to understand art. I knew what I liked, but I couldn’t articulate why.
I had to be spoonfed ideas like metaphor and symbolism and theme by very patient teachers and friends. Once those ideas were unlocked for me, however, my life was changed. My obsession with art, and consuming it and creating it, grew exponentially.
And so that’s what I’ve been doing this past year.
I was creating a key.
I don’t want my art to be one-sided. I want what I do to be a conversation.
Through the internet, we are submerged, drowning under the weight of all the new art, words and images and sounds, released in the digital waters daily. And while we do talk about cultivating artists, what we really need to do is cultivate communities that care about and understand the art we make.
There’s an argument that art should speak for itself and artists should be mysterious. I don’t agree with that. That’s not who I am, and I have always gotten more from art through context, through history and intent and reaction.
I became a better artist and a better person by having these conversations throughout my life, and I wanted to have a yearlong talk with you. I wanted to make you the key to my work so far.
You might not need a key. You may already be curious and insightful and throw yourself into artistic exploration. This wasn’t for you, then; this was for someone like me. Like my work itself, I made a key to inspire curiosity and insight and exploration, to incite empathy, to ignite compassion.
And it worked: I sold more books this year than any other. More importantly: I can’t remember a year when so many people told me they actually read one of my books. And we talked about them. Stories I released years ago got new life, and deservedly so; I can’t express how grateful I am for a story like Theia finally getting the love I hoped for it over three years ago, even getting itself its own little book club at a dope coffee shop.
Who knew that talking about what I do at the most personal, honest level would be the best kind of promotion I have ever done?
(Well, I did, but you know what I mean.)
This year was about celebrating what I am, at the deepest, darkest core of me: a storyteller. And it was about celebrating those of you who have supported me in telling those stories, who have been reading and watching and listening to the words and images and music I’ve been making all this time. You might say I did the Eras Tour before Taylor did (okay, you might not say it, but I definitely am).
Next year, I’m going to be telling many more stories, in even more ways. I’m hard at work doing that right now. So I might be a little quiet around here for a while (I’m sure you’re devastated), but I’ll try to make it worth it.
I know every year is different for every body. But I hope you’ve been able to be present in your own life; to be able to find joy among the sadness, to find light wrapped up in the dark, to find laughter through the tears. I hope you were able to celebrate what you are, what you’ve accomplished, and what you’ve survived.
No matter where I turn, I can’t escape the refrain, delivered with a deep sigh: “It doesn’t feel like Christmas this year.”
I try to empathize with the observer; I attempt to comfort them by telling them that it’s just the weather. It’s the rain. It’s the lack of snow.
It’s the lack of something.
I haven’t had lefse in a while. It was something I grew up eating (I’m at least 59.4% Scandinavian, thanks DNA testing), and then my grandma passed away, and I don’t know if lefse passed away like she did, all at once, or if it slowly faded out of my life like a song that isn’t sure when it’s supposed to end.
I picked up some lefse today. Like snow, maybe it’s the thing I’m missing, the thing that will make it feel like Christmas.
It’s easy for me to talk about how great my mom was. Because she was. She was really great. But she had so many not-great moments and less-than-stellar days.
Holidays caused a share of those moments and days. On more than one Christmas morning, being close to her was like enduring static shocks from a particularly nasty doorknob. Though decidedly more chill (but still brutally hilarious) in her later years, the mom I remember from my youth was all kinetic energy, anxiety and worry and stress; I was sometimes the cause of those feelings, and sometimes the victim.
I remember those Christmas nights even more vividly, driving home though the dark from the events of the day, waiting for the heat from the front of the car to break into the cold in the back. The unwinding, the hair down, the interior light to catch the shapes of our hands, the debrief and the gossip, inhabiting our human ashes from the burnout of the holidays.
I know that it’s not the burnout we’re missing. I read an insightful article by Laura Kennedy today on the subject, and it feels like we’re burned out more than ever, and it’s not hard to understand why:
“Parenthood, high rent and full-time work. Caring for elderly parents while falling asleep nightly considering that you do not — and will not — own a home or have a pension. A sense of radical displacement from community, a disdainful suspicion that our jobs are fundamentally unstable, pointless mouse-moving busywork. A general sense that being alive is becoming too demanding and expensive to do comfortably or well, that ‘the dice are loaded’, to quote Leonard Cohen’s satisfyingly grim ‘Everybody Knows’. That there is a frightening, overarching way in which we are not ultimately able to determine what our lives look like, or to change them if we want to. That it’s all changing so quickly, but that human nature can’t accelerate to keep pace, and we are all hanging on by our fingernails as the momentum makes our eyes water.”
So if it’s not the weather or the lefse or my mom, what could I be missing?
It’s stupid, but I think it’s magic. I think I’m missing magic.
I’m tired of this version of the world. The version where so many people are selfish and cruel, and rewarded for being so; the version where people make politics their identity without applying that passion to discover what makes life worth living and people worth loving; the version where physical, flesh-and-blood community is a relative relic, a curiosity that’s harder and harder to find; the version where the writing is on the wall for our current stage of capitalism, where it feels impossible to get ahead and the best case scenario is to barely stay afloat; the version where we are at war, all the time, forever; the version where we have all the information humans have ever gathered at our fingertips, but we willingly choose to learn little, and more often choose to learn nothing at all.
All of that feels decidedly unmagical.
But today I saw a little girl notice that Santa Claus — the real Santa Claus — was eating lunch two tables away from her. She smiled and she laughed and she waved at him while she enjoyed her mac & cheese. He smiled and he winked and he waved back and he ho, ho, ho’d and then he left, and she stood there, unable to believe it, her eyes wide with awe and truth and joy.
It was magic.
And I hope you all find a little of it wherever you can.
One of the taglines I used for A Dream… was: “The sequel to everything, real and imagined.”
Anyone who read the book found out exactly what I meant: while I used most of the major characters I’ve introduced in my published stories over the past ten years, they shared the stage with other players I had been creating over my entire life, but never shared before.
This is a deeper dive on those deep cuts.
THE GRIBLIX: I created these half-cute and completely disturbing creatures in 1994, when I was 8 or 9 years old. Upon rediscovering the notebook pages, I thought I had been writing about something that existed already; Googling them in the present gave me no relevant results, so this was all from my strange kid mind, totally peak me. In A Dream…, the Griblix become guides and guards and akin to the Oompa-Loompas from Willy Wonka’s factory. I used all their abilities and was even able to update them; for example, instead of being capable of mere warp speed, they’re able to move at the speed of thought in the dream world. The only thing they don’t do in the book is eat my sister, Nina. There’s always the sequel?
DYING DEVILS: These characters were a blast to write as an adult, and a love letter to 90’s shows like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, which inspired the creation of them. My childhood friend Danny (Hi, Dan!) and I used to run around our backyards, having adventures and fighting monsters under this name. The initials of the Dying Devils — DD — were also our initials, Danny and Dennis. I kept our names intact in the book (changing Dennis slightly to Denny).
LUCK: A character that increases in importance as the story rolls on, Luck is a mutant; more specifically, Luck is me, if I were a mutant who co-existed with the X-Men. For a while, as a kid, I was convinced that I had luck powers; I could vaguely see the future and sense both good and bad things to come (turns out, this is just what we humans call “instinct” and “gut feeling” and I was wrong a lot). I wrote and drew tons of X-Men stuff at that age, and Luck was an original character that just stuck with me.
DAZZLING HOLLOW: In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo, a white fox and armadillo appear out of a black portal. That is Lauran and Niko, the stars of Dazzling Hollow, an eight-page all-ages comic I created for Free Comic Book Day in 2019. Those have to be a collector’s items now, right?
MAXIM: One of my favorite appearances in the book isn’t even my character! My good friend Steve has been writing a book for something like 50 years now, so as a nod to his story that barely exists (and a hopeful push to keep on going), I put his main character, Maxim, in the I.D.E.A; last I heard, Maxim was still there.
JOJO: This is a character I have actually kind of introduced to the world, as he’s the main character of my next graphic novel, Jojo’s Time Machine. He’s been around since at least 2001, and I have spent so much time with him, especially this year. Jojo is a middle-aged rabbit who owns a coffee shop and moonlights as an inventor. I’m in a really weird stage with him right now; he has occupied so much of my mind and heart the past few years, but he still feels like an imaginary friend, because none of you have seen a page of it yet. That’s going to change soon, and I’m getting excited to just feel able to announce and share more about this project in the ever-so-close future.
This is a good list, and there are even more appearances, dramatic and subtle, throughout the story; part of the joy of telling a story that spanned my entire life to now was being able to use every chapter of it. For me, it elevates what could be a novelty into something deeper, more vulnerable and infinitely personal.
Lists are so stupid. I know it. Shut up. And I adore them so much.
There is nothing that will stop my scrolling like a good (or bad) list. I love learning what people love; it’s always been a weird hobby of mine.
With that being said, here’s a few lists from me: my favorite albums, comics, films, and television shows of 2023. I listed them in alphabetical order; it was hard enough to keep the lists to 10 or 15 items each, much less rank them.
If you want to share a list or two in the comments, PLEASE DO! My gratitude in advance. Like I said, lists are my thing and I’m only partially ashamed and/or apologetic for it.
With no further ado…
Albums
Andre 3000, New Blue Sun
Blink-182, One More Time…
Boygenius, The Record
Chappell Roan, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
Durry, Suburban Legend
Fall Out Boy, So Much (for) Stardust
Joseph, The Sun
Olivia Rodrigo, Guts
Paramore, This Is Why
Wildermiss, Levitate
Comics
Daredevil (Chip Zdarsky)
Fantastic Four (Ryan North)
Moon Knight (Jed McKay)
Nightwing (Tom Taylor)
Saga (Brian K. Vaughan)
Star Wars: The High Republic (Cavan Scott, Various)
I was reading an essay and it argued that most of us can’t even “articulate the strongest or most charitable argument which opposes our position,” which means we don’t even reasonably understand the people and ideas we disagree with.
So I wanted to try. I believe in love. I believe in being kind, even when it’s hard, even when you have to make yourself smile to generate just one spark of general good will for humankind.
And as I tried to think of the strongest, most charitable arguments for hate, I found out it wasn’t even that hard. Hell, hate is easy.
– You get to be on a team! And the way you form teams is simple: everyone you hate is on the other one.
– You get to blame people you’ve never met for all of your problems! They get to be your personal scapegoat and guess what? Nobody ever has to learn or grow when they project their own failures and defects of character on others.
– Speaking of people: you get to generalize them! You don’t have to think of them as unique individuals with beautiful, intricate relationships and distinct lives. You get to decide that all of one kind of people say the same things and act the same way. You don’t have to get to know a single one because you already know them all.
– Anger and rage are addictive. You get to feed it daily! Those emotions actually cause chemical reactions in your body that you get hooked on. And the great thing about addiction (trust me, I know) is that the more you use, the more you need to fill the tank and feel the same way. So, the more you hate, the more you have to keep hating to feel something.
– You get to ignore all facts! You don’t have to know anything about reality! You don’t have to believe any true thing anybody tells you! You get to choose whatever you want to believe, no matter how wrong, hurtful, or destructive it is. Your biases are your education, and hate school is free. (Hate school is not an accredited university.)
These are all examples of why we hate. (And this list took me just a few minutes to write.) And it made me realize how hard love can be. We have to trust people, who can hurt us. We are responsible for those we love, so we can get anxious and worry.
Love is work.
And hate is easy.
And as we watch humanity consistently choose lifestyles of least resistance and lives with less community, it becomes harder to imagine a future where the argument of love wins.
On Saturday, I celebrated a sobriety milestone, but it was also another anniversary: I released A Dream of Tin & Eternity exactly a year ago, on December 9th, 2022.
I joked (kind of) that I wanted December 9th to be more than just a reminder of what a piece of shit I was; putting that book out on that day did have a much deeper significance, though.
I reread the story last week, and while there was an undeniable joy for me to see all these characters I made up over the years interact and play, I wouldn’t have written it if that was all there was.
No, this book is about someone preparing to make a massive change in their life; perhaps, even, the biggest one.
That was the hook. When I came up with the concept of this book, I washed between wanting to take the time to write it or not. Once I realized there was a very real theme with very real stakes, there wasn’t any going back. I had to carry it all the way.
And once the last few pages were written, I knew that the only day I could release this book was the same day I had decided to release myself.
Art imitating and then inspiring life in a way that only the characters in my head could possibly do.
Six years ago today, I pulled off my biggest act of rebellion.
Despite being an unfortunate people-pleaser who needs everyone to like him (and has succeeded maybe 30% of the time), I have always been rebellious by nature. I was born obstinate and stubborn (a Taurus!) and, sure, I can still be all that now, but it is all I was then.
In my late teens, I discovered I was sick, stayed in denial for years, and only got worse as long as I was drinking. I kept drinking until December 9th, 2017.
To get better, I had to rebel against my own nature.
I was self-centered, filled with self-delusion and self-pity, the dictionary’s definition of all things selfish; my photo accompanied the entry in the book. We talk a lot about trust: trust for the people closest to us, like family and friends, and even our trust for strangers.
But over the years, I lost the most important trust of all: my trust for myself.
I’ve written about it before (most recently in Brushfire), but losing trust in myself allowed me to lose trust in everybody else, through no fault of their own. With my brain and my heart and my soul, I made decisions that I never thought I could, if all three hadn’t been so damaged from the beating I was giving them daily.
At my worst, I was all those negative self-words, plus belligerent, ignorant, disrespectful, insecure, gross, and mean.
Recovered addicts talk about the moment they had to accept they had no power over whatever it is they were addicted to, but just as important for me was the moment I had to accept that I am not just the worst of me.
That moment, with the support of people (and a dog) who believed the same, allowed me to finally take steps toward the life I (and they) deserve.
I was able to rebel against me: the dark, selfish, hopeless, worst parts of me. Not just rebel, but accept and let live.
And I’ve been successfully rebelling for six years now.
I started sharing this story with you all on close to day one, not just to keep myself accountable, but to let people like me know that it’s possible; to witness that personally would have been such a powerful thing for me to have in my life, and I wish I would have seen more of it sooner.
In The Weirdos, I bookend The Flying Squirrel issue with the lines ANYTHING CAN BE SAVED and EVERYTHING CAN BE DESTROYED. I wrote those words while I was in it, and now that I’m out, I can confirm: everything can be destroyed, and still anything can be saved. Things do get better, and so can people.
I do things like go to the dentist now, and apologize when I’m wrong (which is often), and let myself feel feelings. Sometimes those feelings are of worthlessness and jealousy and insecurity; I have to remind myself that I am not the worst of me.
Remind myself that things do get better, and so can people.
All it takes, sometimes, is a little bit of rebellion.
The Den 