Today's piece is by Stephanie Kao, who is a FANTASTIC friend and ARTIST! Please check her and her other work out!! 

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Thank you!!

-Tess!

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I wanted to take a hot second to talk about some stuff, too! But I definitely didn't want to downplay how awesome Stephanie is so PLEASE make sure you check out her stuff. This here is gonna be a bit about what's been going on and some things in my brain. I realize that I've had this blog space here the whole time and I never really quite utilized it, soo.... HERE I GO!! 

Again, thank you for being so patient. Like, really. It causes me great anxiety to not be putting out new pages for NDE. It's my favorite thing to work on and everything I do is trying to make sure I keep doing it, and you guys have been so phenomenally supportive that you've made sure that I /can/. I don't want it to seem like your efforts and support is going to waste. It's not. I appreciate and love you all. 

The reality is that I'm learning a lot about my own limits in terms of work that I can do. For those of you that were ever curious what I do for a living, this is kind of it! I draw comics. I take freelance, I work on Not Drunk Enough, Is This What You Wanted, and Seen Nothing Yet (18+). The thing is I love doing all of this stuff SO much that I actually got really bad at telling when what I took was too much work. I think this is something that a lot of artists that I know and have met along the way also struggle with. I always think I've learned something after a huge deadline where I wreck my body and sleep schdule to finish something, and I always tell myself "I'll never do that again!" and three months later I'm somehow back.

SOOOO I guess what I'm TRYING TO SAY IS .... if you're finding yourself in the position like the one I'm talking about, make sure to take care of yourself. I've been lucky and having great friends and co-workers help me find out what I am capable of doing and what I'm not, and that it's okay to not be able to do it all. I don't have to keep working myself up into these exhaustion pits where the things I love have to slow down as I catch my breath. It's as cheesy as ever, but your body and brain are huge tools as artists (of any kind! writer/illustrator/singer/developer/programmer/etc)! Running them ragged really does us no good.

I'm cheering you all on, just as you guys cheer me on! SO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF I LOVE YOU ok that was a really long ramble gooodobyeeeee