Without the ACA, I can't afford the dozen different meds I take, and without them, it's very hard to stay on this side of the dirt.

How have I not heard of this place?!

1000%

Ooo which one?

I'm my experience, most people assume that if they've heard of you, you must be famous, and if you're famous, you must be rich.

Welcome to the arts. You will never know stability the entire time. Your fate is in the hands of the universe. You better love what you do because that's gonna be 95% of the reward.

I had a lot of good luck that was then hundred by a lot of bad luck. Networking and notoriety doesn't just bring you closer to good people, it brings bad people closer to you. Not gonna rehash that right now, but my point is that a lot of stuff was just never within my control, good or bad.

But at the turn of the century, very few other people were even attempting to do what I did, so it was a lot easier to stand out and have a larger piece of the pie. If you were a lesbian who read webcomics in 2005, my comics were like 15% of the total lesbian webcomics in existence. Lucky me!

If you wanna go back to 2001 to launch a webcomic, I can very much tell you how to do that! But a lot of what I did still might not work for you. And if I had to start from scratch today, none of you would ever know my name. 2025 is a strange and confusing time that I am not built for.

But if I catch you in a silver net, you'll be bound by fae law to reveal it.

Also, I have a huge folder of unfinished stories, but that's okay because it all ends up being practice for the stories I do finish. When you get stuck somewhere in the middle (which always happens), just move on and come back to it later. That's what second drafts are for.

For me, I reach a point where NOT doing the thing sounds scarier than doing it. When you reach a point where you don't even care how anyone receives it but you just gotta do it because it's more painful to keep it inside. (And wow, I just realized I'm also talking about transitioning lol.)

And a nonzero amount of women who say this end up being trans guys with a mountain of internalized transphobia. Most women don't actually want to be men. They want the privileges men have, but they don't want to be men.

I always say that hard work buys you a lotto ticket, but luck still draws it. Plenty of really talented people will never ever find success. There are things you can do to buy additional lotto tickets like making connections and showing up, but luck will always, always be a factor.

Some of the best advice I ever heard was from @silviamg.bsky.social who said that you shouldn't set goals that require other people to do what you want. You can write a book. That's a goal. You can't control whether anyone buys it. Other people have free will.

Sometimes, creators are reluctant to share career advice because they know how much of it can't be replicated. Authors can teach you how to write, artists can teach you how to draw, but no one can teach you how to force a publisher to sign you.

They presented their advice as "If you do X, then Y happens." They didn't like when I pointed out that Y only happened to them because they were in the right place at the right time and knew the right people (and were also all cishet white American men.)

Many years back, I paid a subscription to a forum for comic artists that had Very Important Creators™ giving advice. But most of these creators failed to see how much of their success was sheer luck, & refused to acknowledge that their advice wouldn't work for anyone but themselves. I unsubscribed.