After I wrote my parenting book and got a lovely literary agent I learned that parenting books are sold on fear, which is not the way I roll—I think we all have enough fear—but that's how the money is made, I was told by kind and encouraging publishers who said my book was too kind and supportive and encouraging. They offered that I should write a book to scare parents (pick any topic at all, I was told) and then tell them the solution to the fear I drummed up (I suspect those publishers have moved on into politics, but so far no one seems to be offering any solutions to all the fear that keeps being drummed up but I do notice that good old money keeps being made from all that fear). I was also told that you need to be famous to sell parenting books, and that's when I told my agent that I wanted J.D. Salinger's publicist—she's great, but she didn't get the joke—she's not so much of an introvert.
If you too are remotely introverted, then you will readily understand why the very idea of self-promotion fills me with dread and anxiety; I learned from my parents that I absolutely had to be successful in order to get love and survive the ever-present threat of annihilation, rejection and generally being a loser; and at the same time I absolutely needed to never challenge, threaten or be in any way "too successful" as this would cause the immediate withdrawal of love and support and shelter and food and any hope that later, if I were to become successful, I might have love and friends and shelter and maybe even fun, but that was probably best left to the next life, after-life or just forget about it, it's never going to happen in this or any other life.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but so far my words have not been worth much at all so it's hard to know how much a thousand times nothing adds up to—especially if you just want to be friendly, ride your bike, draw pictures and generally hang out.
Still, I do tend to talk a lot and if no one is around to talk to I tend to write, so maybe I'll write some stuff here. Mostly, I hope to make more comics so I will mostly be working on that instead of blogging. Wow, this is sounding pretty stupid. I better stop.