Over the last nine years while I’ve held full-time jobs in the city, I also worked on a graphic novel called "Sailor Twain, or the Mermaid in the Hudson." It’s set in 1887 on our mighty New York waterway, on a steamboat. Two men and three women are the main characters—well, two women and a half-fish woman, really.

Before any of this began, as I started working in publishing, I had a driving fear that I would shelve my own projects—put them off forever-in-the-future and never return to them. Even as I became a father, and an...