This interview with Chris Onstad about his hiatus from ACHEWOOD could almost have come under our previous belt-tightening post.
I’d been going at pretty much full team for about nine years, and that all the comics, the blog writing… There are more blogs than comics, and I really like to do those. Prose is really what I personally enjoy. There’s a f*ckload of content out there, because I was always under the gun. Every second where I’m not writing, I’m not making enough money to live. It’s a weird job and I have no benefits, so I’ve got to make make make. And that was also peppered with the public demand the internet, which 24/7, 365 days a year. So if you take six hours off, someone’s going to be like, “What the f*ck’s the matter with this guy?” So that constant pressure, it accrued very slowly to the point where I was like, A) I think I’ve written pretty everything I know about over the course of 3,000 installments of comics or stories or other varieties of things I did. Merchandise, speeches, personalizations, paintings, freelance gigs. I was like, I don’t want to repeat anything, and I think I’m burned out. I’d be wondering if I was burned out for a very long time. When it got to the point where every night for a month I’d sit at the computer and say, “I want to be anywhere but here,” I knew it was time to take a break.
We’d be lying if we didn’t admit we’re sitting here nodding our head. There’s a lot of fantastic observation about comics and ACHEWOOD in the interview.
I envy him and his hiatus.
I really wish people wouldn’t go on and on about their reasons for a hiatus. Something like, “I wanted to take a break, so I did,” is so much better than these woe-is-me ‘Oh the PRESSURE’ justifications. It also flies in the face of reality: if he really had to work so hard, he wouldn’t have been able to afford that hiatus.