I said that to Sandra twenty-six years ago, in March of 2000. Less than four months later I’d launched Schlock Mercenary online. My writing decent, if perhaps a bit dad-jokey. My art was really, really rough¹.

We’re doing a book about this.

You can back the project over on Kickstarter. If we hit our $30k stretch goal (not far off right now, it’s pretty likely we’ll get there) then the book will grow from 32 pages to 80 pages.

As of this writing we have just over two weeks remaining in the project. Click the link to get all the details, and to see some sample pages.

Sandra is in charge of this, because I dislike my early art enough to not want to touch it. I’m spending my time right now working on the bonus stories² for book 20, and that Kickstarter project won’t launch until I’ve made a lot more progress on them.

For right now, though, you can help us a lot by backing Doodling as a Hobby: The Retrospective Sketchbook of an Accidental Career. My art and writing have come a long way since March of 2000, but one thing that has remained constant—and constantly amazing—is the support and generosity of you fine folks who followed me on the trip.

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¹ I’ve often said that the only way for my early art to suck any harder would be for us to raise atmospheric pressure.
² Yes, that’s “stories,” plural.

Back when the only version of THE LION KING was the original animated feature Sandra and I came up with a term to describe certain kinds of triumphant endings: “we all have rawwrs together.” And of course the JURASSIC PARK franchise features several iconic closing scenes in which a dinosaur (the t. rex, usually) goes “rawwr” with a cool backdrop.

So, the closing panel needed some shiny and some roaring. I’m not revealing the entire thing here, but I’m happy to share the “rawwr” part of the panel.

How close am I to being finished? In lieu of a progress bar, here’s a spreadsheet full of tick-boxes.

My goal is to finish everything during the first week of March, and then race through the various editorial, commentary, and marginalia tasks for Book 19 in time to send it to the printer at the end of March.

It’s for just one panel in the Book 19 bonus story, but it’s an important panel, and it needs to look good. In the amount of time I spent noodling on this? 2018’s version of me could have written and illustrated two weeks of comics.

I do, however, take comfort knowing that 2018’s version of me, while quite good at his job, could not have done this panel without focused practice and enough time to become 2019’s version of me.

Much of the time I spent working on this piece went into research. I had questions: What was the angle of the impactor? How large was it? What are the physics of the impact? I looked at lots of art from science communications (sci-comm) folks, and tried to reconcile their many different approaches with the theories about the event, and (of course) with the picture *I* wanted to draw.

Yes, it was time-consuming, but I learned some new things, and I learned how to DO some new things, and right now I’m pretty pleased with the results.

It’s a metaphor I’ve deployed before. It means “identify things that create extra work, or stress, or pain, and remove them.” The full metaphor goes something like this:

Before Long Covid¹, I was like a fast vehicle with a very robust suspension. Speedbumps, rough road, and even obstacles were things I hit at full speed, powering over them or through them. Sure, I tried to work smarter, but working HARDER was always an option.

Now, however, I’m disabled. I’m more like a late 1960’s station wagon with the original shock absorbers. Also, the back of the vehicle is full of boxes of glassware, none of which has been packed with proper padding. When I see a speedbump, I don’t just slow down. I stop.

I get out of the vehicle, measure the speedbump, then bring in a bulldozer to scrape it off my road. While the heavy equipment is out I check for potholes, and take care to repair all the pavement in sight.

This slows me down a lot, but it also prevents me from crashing, and the word “crashing” nicely links the metaphor to the lived experience. PEMS (Post Exertion Malaise Syndrome) is part of my life now. If I push too hard, I crash. I get weak, everything hurts, my mental state degrades, and if it’s a bad enough crash I will actually run a fever and end up in bed.

So… by 2023 I had internalized this process. I built systems to make my life easier. Very shortly into this process I decided to build systems to make building the systems easier, and that shaped 2023, 2024, and 2025. I designed, built, and refined the Technocane (I taught my cane to carry my phone so my phone would teach me to carry my cane) and the Gravistation (a zero-gravity recliner surrounded by every last tool I need to write and illustrate)².

2025 felt like mostly smooth road, but from that easy-riding perspective I was now able to see the roads I’d been avoiding. I decided to tackle some of those. There were some refinements to the Technocane and the Gravistation, but most of my effort went into the kitchen.

There were two reasons for this: first, Sandra has some new nutritional requirements³ and I needed to up my cooking game to address those. Second, I like to cook, so I should to make that process as speedbump-free as possible. That way I can cook and still have the energy to do other things later in the day.

At Gen Con Indy we learned I can work a covention booth without being reclined the entire time, provided I have a comfortable kneeling chair. I did need to work on my posture and my core strength a bit, so in September we decided to rebuild my craft station (unused for almost five years) so that I could train for conventions while painting miniatures.

This was a huge success. I painted around 140 minis from September through the end of the year, and now I’m quite comfortable working from a kneeling chair.

Working… let’s talk about that. After all, if you’re reading this it’s probably because you’re most interested in the work I do. During 2025 we finished the last of the shippable bits for the MANDATORY FAILURE Kickstarter project (book sketches and marker-colored sketch cards) and I dove back into the core deliverables for FUNCTION OF FIREPOWER, starting with the Bonus Story, “Refulgence of Refuge.”

That story deserves its own blog post, because it’s a really cool story, and the story OF the story is still unfolding by virture of the fact that I’m still drawing the pictures. Until then, here’s a picture.

So… that’s my 2025 round-up, along with a bit of insight into what 2026 will hold. I have more to say about (and during) 2026, but this is running long, and I haven’t even added the footnotes yet⁴.

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¹ I’ve talked about this before. tl;dr—I got sick during Wave Zero in early 2020, and now I have Long Covid, which manifests mostly as chronic fatigue.
² In 2024 I promised that I’d publish all the details on the construction of these things. I still haven’t done that, but I have all my notes. We even filmed a video of me building a new Technocane in 2025. So… I’m working on it.
³ EOE, which we’re addressing with 6FED. Unpacking that would be a three-page footnote. But now you have the acronyms, so you can upack them on your own.
⁴ Okay, that was a half-truth. I’d already written and formatted the first three footnotes. I write those as I go. But I hadn’t added THIS one yet. I guess that means it was more like a ¼-truth?

We’re crowdfunding A FUNCTION OF FIREPOWER, and the project closes in just ten days. The cover looks a lot like this:

The bonus story in A FUNCTION OF FIREPOWER is called “Refulgence of Refuge,” and it will fill in some of the blanks surrounding the end of Earth’s raptoroid civilization sixty-six-ish million years ago.

Would you like to see the first page? Of course you would!

Many of the stretch goals have already been unlocked, including some which provide freebies to everyone (not just backers!) Head on over to the Kickstarter page for A FUNCTION OF FIREPOWER, click into the Updates, and get the full-sized mobile and 4k versions of this wallpaper!

I apologize for not posting this sooner. It’s been a busy month, and Long COVID means I’ve dropped more than a few balls, but really, I could have left myself a reminder and gotten this done. Sorry about that!

My stamina is not what it used to be. I’m as fast as ever, but I wear out pretty quickly. Slow and steady, then. If you’ve ordered a sketch edition, it’s in one of these boxes stacked against the wall, and it might be waiting there for a while…

I’m also doing sketch cards for some of you. I’ve finished about 200 of those already, and another 270 remain to be done. Those take longer, but I can work on them from my zero-gravity recliner, which lets me work for much longer stretches.

How long will you be waiting for your sketched book? I do not know! One thing that I learned in 2024 is that I need to recalibrate my estimates. I promise you this, though: I’ll work on these every day, and I’ll pace myself carefully.

Well, the beginning of the answer to that question can be found in the date of this post. We’re two-thirds of the way through January and I’m only now finding the time and energy to write a year-end thingy.

The end of the answer is a bit bleak. In summary, I learned that I’m more disabled than I thought I was. I still make big plans with high hopes, but then I overdo it and end up “soft” crashing for weeks at a time. This has delayed everything, including the release of Book 18, which we originally planned to be shipping six months ago.

The middle of the answer, the meaty part, would be a retrospective itinerary of sorts, and I’m not sure I have the energy for that kind of detail.

The high points: I finished everything that was keeping Book 18 from being sent to the printer, and I started working on the Bonus Story for Book 19. I attended GenCon Indy, WXR 2024: Write on the Navigator, and Dragonsteel Nexus. I learned to prepare a wide variety of 6FED-friendly meals for Sandra, and because necessity is the mother of invention I invented a no-egg mayonnaise.

One thing I’m quite pleased with: I spent very little time adjusting, revising, or re-working my zero-gravity workstation. Similarly, I didn’t need to iterate my Technocane. I probably put 300 hours into those things during 2023, and those hours began paying dividends in 2024. I learned that there is enormous satisfaction to be found in consuming the fruits of a job well done.

I wish I’d done more, though. I planned to do more, but the chronic fatigue aspects of Long Covid are, to me, the plow described by poet Robert Burns when he bemoaned the state of the best laid plans of mice and men. My plans were big, but were mouse-sized compared to the churning, earth-moving disruption of this disability.

Bleak, perhaps, but let me play a hopeful note as we return to the end of the answer: I learned a lot about my new limits during 2024, and I began arriving at strategies to make the most of the narrower space within which I must work. I won’t make any promises for 2025, not yet at least, because one of those strategies is learning to take things day by day.

Today has been productive for me. I haven’t done all of the things, but even at my healthiest I was never able to do all of the things. I can accept that. I have learned to take the win, and then take a break.

For daily updates, you can follow us on BlueSky – howardtayler and sandratayler respectively. We’ll post pictures!

I can personally vouch for the principles and practices presented in this book, but that’s probably kind of obvious. Sandra has worked with many other people and organizations over the last decade, so this book is far, far more than just (!) the life experience of someone who wrangled a single cartoonist into profitability while managing her own career writing children’s books and short stories.

Follow the links above to read more about the project. It has funded, and just yesterday Sandra crossed the “we get to make an audiobook” stretch goal. The project closes in two days, though, so if you want to throw some momentum into it on the home stretch, now’s the time.