Mental Health Day

I didn’t have a comic ready today. I sat at my desk, staring at my tablet, trying to will one into existence but couldn’t make it happen.

So today would have gone by without a post and I would have felt bad and you guys would be without an update and I’d feel bad about that and nothing would have been solved.

When I first started drawing Mandatory Roller Coaster I said that the second it felt like a job, I’d quit. I wanted my art and expression to be fun, not work. Of course that was easy to say at the time. MRC was something I treated as a hobby. But the second I sold my first book, it became a source of income. A small one, but one nonetheless. Since that first book sale, MRC has become a real business. I’m licensed. I pay taxes. I had to teach myself how to make invoices.

There wasn’t a split second where any of it started to feel like work. It crept in slowly. So slowly I didn’t see it, until one day I felt myself dreading the drawing I needed to have done by the end of the day.

Throwing a comic together just to have something to post today would have been work, and bad work at that. So instead I’m taking the day off. Instead I’m doodling on post-it notes because it’s something fun I enjoy doing, and not work I’m forced to do. And I’ll probably make a little less money today. Fewer people may come to the site and I’ll have fewer ad impressions and that’s okay.

Today I’m taking a mental health day.

If you’d like to see the rest of the post-it note art I made, come on over to patreon.com/mandatoryrollercoaster.