It’s never too late to review 2023, or too early to preview 2025
So, where were we? It’s been an egregiously long time since I last emailed you about my comics and what else is going on as I make them. So long, in fact, that maybe I should remind you about those comics.
You can even read the first two issues of each right here right now. Flipsnack lets you read the books with page turning and everything, and you can download the books from there if you like.
By The Time I Get To Dallas: With 80% of homo sapiens migrating to one spot on the globe, struggling medical student Rudy Deckart must save, or maybe destroy, humanity.
By the Time I Get to Dallas #1 – FLIPSNACK
By the Time I Get to Dallas #2 – FLIPSNACK
The Trinity Project: Deep in the Texas dirt, the bones of the dead wait for someone to tell their story. Companion prequel to By the Time I Get to Dallas.
The Trinity Project 1-2 – FLIPSNACK
The total run for this story is six books for each title, twelve total. I shipped Installment #4 (By the Time I Get to Dallas 4 and Trinity Project 4) in November. Now I’m on the big push to write and produce the final third of this project. Why does it take so long? An excellent question.
Sometimes you have to work
Life in the ER hasn’t been easy the last few years. For many reasons we have lost many, many excellent, experienced nurses and, increasingly, doctors. Hospitals hemorrhage cash, close floors, go bankrupt, and so the ER wait times get longer, the the patients more upset and sometimes violent, and so more nurse quit, and the cycle gets worse. I don’t blame anyone for seeking someplace else to work. I still value the time I spend with individual patients, it’s why I do this job. But it’s taken its toll. During Covid I had immense nervous energy between shift and I plowed a lot of it into the comic book. In the last few years though I find I am more wrung out after shiftsand it’s harder and harder to generate the energy towards the creative stuff. Don’t worry, I’m not quitting either my job or the comic, but sometimes I just have to accept that doing all these things is hard, and it takes as long as it takes.
Sometimes you have to be a grown up
In the last year we had to move both my parents to new living situations closer to us in Boston. It was pretty much all consuming for several months. Things are better now but it was emotionally and physically difficult. I also have a couple children around here someplace, I’m sure there is something I’m suppose to be doing on their behalf right now…
Sometimes you have to make a treehouse
In a few one-week bursts over the last two years my son Ezra and I took on a lifelong pipe dream of building a treehouse at our extended family’s shared spot in Vermont. Carpentry and construction were totally foreign to us, and we live into city, but we’ve come quite a ways with it. We finished the basic platforms last summer. Sadly, the real house on the land burned down soon after, so now the treehouse is the remaining standing structure. Rebuilding a real house will be complicated, but we’ll be heading up soon to help build a pavilion so the family can continue to use the hill and pond this summer.
Treehouses facilitate writing. This was the last time I saw the real house, to the upper right, before it burned down.
Sometimes you choose to rebuild your patio
After the treehouse, of course I started looking for other reasons to cut wood into pieces. Our very small patio needed its decking replaced and I thought I might be able to do that. It involved a lot of curved cuts into mahogany, but I went for it this spring and it was super fun. Came out pretty well with nothing but a jigsaw!
Sometimes you have to rock
My band, Twice-a-Day Ray, has a regular gig at an illustrious dive bar in Cambridge, and it makes me very happy, playing silly rock songs for four hours once a month. It’s hard to beat the instant satisfaction of playing a few chords and watching everyone go nuts. That dopamine is hard to quit. Would I be a faster comics maker without the band? Would I be a better musician without the comic book? Yes and yes, but that’s just how it’s gotta be.
My dad at his first Twice-a-Day Ray show!
So that’s some of the non-comic stuff I’ve been up to. But believe it or not, I have also been making hay on the comics, working on the scripts for Dallas 5 and Trinity Project 5. On my next update I’ll detail my plan and process for getting the story done and into your hands.
I do have a plan, really.
Get ready for Substack!
’ve been using this Mailerlite email platform for years to send this newsletter, but it’s a bit pricey. Also, its kind of static, I feels very one way between me and my readers. Meanwhile I’ve been enjoying following some creators on Substack, where the give and take feels a bit more organic. Also, it’s free.
In coming months I’ll try to ramp up my blog output via Substack, ideally with more frequent shorter notes rather than these large emails I tend to construct. I’ll be porting your email address over to my Substack list and testing it out soon. This newsletter should hit your mailbox as usual, it may look little different.
As an added bonus, when you get your first Substack email from me you’ll get a link to By the Time I Get to Dallas #3 for free just for being on my list.
If you want to check out the Substack world right now go for it here!
https://pitdocpress.substack.com/
That’s all for now. Have a great start of summer.
Thanks for reading!
-Colin
Colin Devonshire
Colin is an emergency physician in Boston, Massachusetts. The seeds of his comics project were sown when he took a sabbatical from the ER for creative writing. His creative non-fiction has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.