As absolutely amazing as it is to be writing Brute and seeing it come to fruition, it can also be very difficult. Being so close and personal to the project, of course, I desperately want it to succeed, to have thousand, tens of thousands, or more read it every month (and being able to produce an issue per month), read fan mail, see Brute memes, etc., etc., but that’s not what’s happening now. Currently, it feels like everything I’m doing is just a waste of time and money and I should be working my ‘real job’ instead.

Since I wear many hats – I’m manage the backend operations for my wife’s business (weightlossgodsway.com), I run my own publishing business (prestonsquirepublishing.com – site currently under redevelopment), I write and produce Brute, work my ‘real job’ for Bell Canada and then, do all those myriad of things that make up ‘life’ in general – I find it beneficial to do theme days, where I focus 90% of my attention on just one of those so I can go hard on it all day with minimal distractions. So today being my ‘Brute day’, it can be pretty devastating when you’re feeling like a fraud just faking it and about it be discovered.
So I changed my plans up a bit and jumped into some training with a comics-launch course and got to hear about how other people started and struggles others are going through which helped get perspective that where we are, isn’t so bad.
Partly this feeling is just the lull from the excitement of launching Brute Issue #1 and seeing the reactions and coverage it got. Issue #2 is still in early art and I’m scripting #3 so there’s nothing to talk, or get excited about on those for a long time. Our mailing list and Facebook fans are slooowly growing, sales are happening, but no where’s near enough to, y’know, cover costs, let along make any money. So, yeah, most days it can just feel like, ‘what’s the point’?
However, the point is, I have this amazing galaxy-spanning adventure story, with adorably flawed characters, that shows them going from royal screw-ups with few redeeming qualities to pillars of galactic society – and that’s not just going to write itself. And I need to tell it, it just begs my soul to be told, so tell it I will, any way I can.
The point is, every venture starts somewhere, and ‘overnight success’ virtually is always achieved after years of near no-success, grinding away, working your craft, until you are suddenly ‘discovered’ and adored. Truth is, in many ways, I’m just as messy as the characters I write about. And it’s not about getting to the end where Brute is loved world-wide and being turned into movies and such. That’ll be cool, yes, but it’s really all about the journey, about pick yourself up, time and again, no matter how defeated you feel you are, and keeping at it, keeping at it, keeping at it. Building character, building resistance, building strength for the even bigger challenges ahead, so when they come, and all seems lost, you are no longer deterred, having risen up to beat a thousand challenges that had come before it, until success, isn’t some miracle of fortuitous timing and luck, it is a inevitable conclusion.
So while Rose, Brute, Jerrreecko and co may have more than their fair share of troubles, they also have grit, and that’s why ultimately, they make something of themselves, and hopefully, time will show, so have I.

Sometimes I kinda feel like a fraud … like this guy (Brute #1)