Healing the Soul (Patreon)

These are all meals I've cooked. Sweet and sour Vietnamese soup with pork belly, spinach alfredo with sun dried tomatoes, colorful garden salad, steak and golden potatoes with butter, rosemary / thyme, and garlic, pineapple pizza, gyoza, salmon and tomato salad.

Lately I've been trying to heal a lot of the problems I have by improving the quality of my life little by little. Sleeping at normal hours and waking up early, cooking everything myself so I can control what I put into my body, developing useful and fun hobbies like making my own sweet drinks and learning how to bake better, pushing out all the distractions and mind poisoning things out there so I'm not bogged down by negative energy, and so on and so forth. I used to think I was just a broken person, but then I realized how many forces out there are at work against the average person. What we eat, the way technology has impacted human connection, the media we consume, what knowledge we're allowed to know, and what we're allowed to see. Do you know the saying about bread and circuses? It took me years to realize how a lot of things are beyond our control and comprehension, but to not let that distract me from how much good there still is in the world. That's why Ellie is a challenging character for me to write because I have to actively fight against my own pessimism and feelings of nihilism so it doesn't bleed into her character. She's meant to be a bringer of light and a source of comfort for both Grave and the reader. I really do admire people who can maintain a positive outlook on life and a fighting spirit despite how much they get knocked down by life.  I was number one in my category for Patreon for a little while, and the rewards of working on SWFTD have helped me to improve my life immensely. I'm a lot happier than when I was trapped in my old life. There's still so much I need to work on, mind and body wise, but I've noticed a lot of improvement in myself this year. I put myself in a really unstable and uncomfortable situation, not knowing if this comic would still be successful, and I still don't know what the future holds, but I'm grateful to know I could change this much in a year.  Right now, I'm continuing to refine the script. The syndicate arc was something I had planned for a while, but it's a difficult subject to tackle so I focused on other parts of the script, which were just as challenging, if not more challenging to figure out. There's still so much research for me to do to get the script where I want it to be.  And for those wondering if I'm going down the same road as other yakuza stories--no, this isn't a yakuza story. I'm going in with a completely different approach. I'm doing a lot of research on gangs that don't get a lot of coverage, if any coverage at all in webtoons. I won't say which gangs, but if you know enough about the subject, I'm sure you can tell who I'm getting inspiration from. Other than the aesthetic, I don't find the yakuza to be that interesting because their history doesn't seem to be as turbulent as other countries and their gangs. Maybe when Japan was more imperialist, they could have been up to more nefarious things, but it's hard to find information about that when a lot of history gets buried or simply isn't translated to other languages. The gangs with ties to the government and the scariest reputation are really fascinating to me. I always wondered how they could get to the level of activity and organization they have, and the answer donned on me recently. A lot of the realizations I reached while researching kind of scared me, but I'm enjoying the process. I just have to be careful not to let it impact me too much, because the things I read about and see can really tarnish the soul, so I have to take a lot of breaks to determine what information is worth keeping and what I have to push out of my mind at the end of it all.  It's not necessary to go into this level of research, but I really want to tell a story that stands out from all the other stories that involve syndicates and gangs. I want to show glimpses of the things I've learned that both fascinated and terrified me, and balance it out with the softness, safety, and warmth of Grave and Ellie's relationship.