danielle corsetto – Lucy Bellwood

2021 in Reading: The Big List

Trying not to be precious about year-end stuff right now because I’m feeling stuck, but here’s a big list of things I read in 2021! Reading was hard this year for…well, you know. All the reasons. I needed a lot of comfort food to get through the upheaval of moving home, and for huge swaths of time I felt as if I’d lost access to the part of my brain that thrilled to Alberto Manguel or Le Guin in the first part of the year. I’m still sort of there.

Read a lot of comics (thanks, Danielle’s studio library and also The Actual Library) because I started drawing a graphic novel and it turns out reading more comics helps your brain think in comics??? Who knew. I still feel like I’m scratching my way towards figuring out what really makes a comic work for me. It takes a lot to get me excited about them, which feels somewhat icky as a person who knows first-hand how much fucking time they take. But there it is!

Started trying to track rough start/end dates towards the second half of the year because I got curious. I’ll probably stick with that into 2022.

Bubble and The Liar’s Dictionary both made me laugh out loud. The Creative Habit and Always Coming Home reminded me how I got to be the way I am. I’m sure there are other books I felt feelings about but I’m just going to HIT PUBLISH.

See previously: 2020’s Big List

Legend	Rough Guide to Ratings
🎭 – Plays 📝 – Poetry 📖 – Books (Fiction) 📓 – Books (Nonfiction) 💬 – Graphic Novels	❤︎ = Yes ❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes ❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes

📝 An Ocean of Static – J.R. Carpenter
📓 The Book of Delights – Ross Gay ❤︎
💬 Oksi – Mari Ahokoivu
📖 The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories – Ed. Mahvesh Murad & Jared Shurin
📖 Solaris — Stanisław Lem
📖 The Liar’s Dictionary – Elly Williams ❤︎❤︎
📖 There but for the – Ali Smith ❤︎❤︎
📓/📝 Bluets – Maggie Nelson ❤︎
📖/🎭/📝/📓 Always Coming Home – Ursula K. Le Guin ❤︎❤︎❤︎
📖 Never Mind – Edward St. Aubyn
📖 Bad News – Edward St. Aubyn
📖 Some Hope – Edward St. Aubyn
📓 A Reader on Reading – Alberto Manguel ❤︎❤︎❤︎
📖 Mother’s Milk – Edward St. Aubyn
📖 At Last – Edward St. Aubyn
🔄 📖 Guards! Guards! – Terry Pratchett ❤︎
📓 The Mother of All Questions – Rebecca Solnit
🔄 💬 Delilah Dirk and the Pillars of Hercules – Tony Cliff ❤︎
📖 The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien
📖 The Mezzanine – Nicholson Baker ❤︎
📓 Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert ❤︎
📖 The Two Towers – J.R.R. Tolkien
📖 The Return of the King – J.R.R. Tolkien (Finished April 20th)
📖 Wonder Tales of Seas and Ships – Frances Carpenter (April 22nd – April 27)
🔄📖 The Raw Shark Texts – Steven Hall (July 20th – July 27th) ❤︎❤︎
💬 Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan North, Albert Monteys (August 4th) ❤︎
💬 Lucky Penny – Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota (August 4th)
💬 Kodi – Jared Cullum (August 6th)
💬 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist – Adrian Tomine (August 8th)
💬 Girl Town – Casey Nowak (August 9th)
💬 My Life in Transition – Julia Kaye (August 9th)
💬 Bubble – Jordan Morris, Sarah Morgan, Tony Cliff, Natalie Riess (August 12th) ❤︎❤︎
📖 The Accidental – Ali Smith (August 23rd)
💬 Don’t Go Without Me – Rosemary Valero-O’Connell (August 24th) ❤︎❤︎❤︎
🔄 📖 The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil – George Saunders
📖 Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen (Finished Sept. 8th)
📖 All Systems Red – Martha Wells (Sept. 10th)
📖 Artificial Condition – Martha Wells (Sept. 10th)
📖 Rogue Protocol – Martha Wells (Sept. 10th-11th)
📖 Exit Strategy – Martha Wells (Sept. 11th)
📖 The Absolute Book – Elizabeth Knox (Sept. 30th? – Oct 17th)
📓 The Library at Night – Alberto Manguel (April 22nd – October 19th)
📖 Sphinx – Anne Garréta (Oct 28-30)
💬 Draw Stronger – Kriota Willberg (Oct 30)
📓 Goodbye Again – Jonny Sun
📖 The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Stuart Turton (Nov. 18th-20th) ❤︎
📖 Milk Blood Heat – Dantiel W. Moniz (Nov. 20th-22nd) ❤︎
📖 The Devil and the Dark Water – Stuart Turton (Nov. 27th-Dec 2nd)
💬 Piece by Piece: the Story of Nisrin’s Hijab – Priya Huq (Dec. 6th)
💬 The Legend of Auntie Po – Shing Yin Khor (Dec. 7th) ❤︎❤︎
💬 Treasure in the Lake – Jason Pamment (Dec. 9th)
📖 The Glass Hotel – Emily St. John Mandel (Dec. 15th-17th) ❤︎
📓 The Collected Schizophrenias – Esmé Weijun Wang (Dec. 18th)
💬 Tell No Tales – Sam Maggs and Kendra Wells (Dec. 15th-21st)
📓 The Creative Habit – Twyla Tharp (Dec. 22nd) ❤︎❤︎❤︎
📓 Intimations – Zadie Smith (Dec. 28th) ❤︎
📓 I Shock Myself – Beatrice Wood (Dec. 25th – Dec. 31st) ❤︎

Blog

The Legend of Curly’s Newsletter

Legend has it that I’ve been maintaining a newsletter for several years, although given that I last sent one in May of this year, I’d started to believe that the rumors weren’t true.

When I don’t write in a particular channel for a long time, my anxiety about saying something worthwhile gets amplified. This is extra true with the newsletter, which feels like a sacred space because I’m barging directly into people’s inboxes rather than waving to them across the crowded halls of social media (or muttering to myself in the whispering gallery of my own website).

There’s also the fact that when I sent my last newsletter in May, after changing service providers, my previously deliverable messages got sent to most people’s Spam folders. The newsletter went from having a whopping 90% open rate to something like…27%. Why did this happen?! I have a couple hunches, but I’m not certain. The truth is I don’t fully understand email. Then again, I don’t fully understand the algorithms on Twitter and Instagram either. I simply don’t want to spend my time learning those systems. I have other things to do. I just fling things out into the ether (very irregularly these days) and hope for the best.

But I still worry about making sure people have a smooth experience when they sign up to hear from me in their inboxes, because I want it to be an easy, enjoyable thing.

It is certifiably silly to worry many of these worries. These are people who’ve opted in! Maybe I worry that if I write to them, but the messages go to Spam, they will somehow figure out what’s happening and then be mad? At me?? For not delivering the things they want more effectively???

Wow I’m really on one here.

But this story has a happy ending because I did the only thing that ever seems to get me over the hump in these circumstances and enlisted help from my friends. Danielle (blessèd saint that she is) sat down with me on FaceTime because she also had a long-neglected newsletter to write, and we both tapped away at our keyboards until we’d managed to draft what we meant to say to our respective subscribers. It worked great. I love friendship.

A newsletter can be anything. The ones I like the most are very simple, either in content or delivery. Pome is just a brief poem—no frills, no discernible cadence, just seasons that stop and start as if by magic. Robin Sloan’s Society of the Double Dagger is wide-ranging in the extreme, but the newsletters themselves just contain a brief blurb and a link to a static webpage, which is where all the riches reside. He’s got channels, too. The man is onto something.

When I send mine so infrequently, they become repositories of news and status updates on my various creative projects which is…not bad, per se, but weighty in a way that isn’t always what I want. Still: it gives me a chance to sit back and look over the last six months and say to myself:

“Yes, this’ll do.”

Comics, News

GWS Guest Strips Up and Running

Big week, friends! While I’m still away doing Boat Stuff in Boston, my five-strip guest arc for Danielle Corsetto’s delightful series Girls with Slingshots begins running TODAY. Check back on the GWS site each day this week to follow Hazel and Jamie in their quest for reasonable underwear. I promise it will be a thrilling ride.

I’m also selling the original inked artwork from these five strips over in my store, so give ’em a look if you’ve been in the market for some Lucy Bellwood originals.

And if you want to come see myself, Danielle, and Erika Moen in the flesh, we’ll be doing an event at Bridge City Comics in Portland this Saturday from 6pm – 9pm. I’m honored to get to sign alongside these rockstar dames, and Bridge City is one of my favorite comic shops in town, so get’cherself over there and say hello! Here’s what we all look like in case you feel alarmed or confused.

Enjoy the guest arc and I hope to see some of you on Saturday when I’m back from the East Coast!

News

Thought Bubble Fundraiser, Girls With Slingshots Guest Arc, and the Oh Joy, Sex Toy Kickstarter!

Hey gang! So some of you may have noticed a new little widget on the side of my site. It looks like this:

I’ve put up a donation button because I’ve been accepted to table at the Thought Bubble Festival in England this year (WOO!) and I would absolutely LOVE to attend, but the airfare costs are prohibitively expensive ($1200 for a round trip ticket plus train fare and lodging — haroo). I’m setting aside as much as I can from every job I complete this summer and pursuing other funding options, but I figure every little bit helps!

Thought Bubble is one of those shows that I’ve been hearing about for years and wishing I could attend. It’s a great mix of independent and mainstream cartoonists, a hub for creative work in my home away from home, and an opportunity to dip my toe in the wider world of European festivals. If any of you feel like helping me raise the cash I would be eternally grateful. I haven’t been back to see family in England for six years (the longest I’ve ever gone without a visit) and this would be an amazing opportunity to bring my work overseas and connect with these dear people who I haven’t seen in an age — plus some new readers and fans!

So that’s that.

“But wait!” you say. “This charity stuff is all well and good, but what if I want to give you money and actually get something in return?” Well friend, I have exciting news for you.

One of Thought Bubble’s special guests, dynamite comics lady Danielle Corsetto, is taking a giant road trip tour this summer and has hired me to write and draw a fill-in guest arc for her amazing comic Girls With Slingshots. I’ve been reading this strip since its inception ten years ago and was totally floored when Danielle took me on as one of her guest artists. What a trip! My guest comics will be going up in late July, so I’m right in the middle of inking them right now. Here’s a sneak peek at the pencils for strip #1:

Okay so here’s where the money comes in: because Danielle is a rad professional, she’s paying all her guest artists a solid rate for their work, but she’s also running a Kickstarter to cover the costs for her summer book tour, and we’re really close to a stretch goal that nets all the artists involved a sweet cash money bonus. This extra chunk of change would take care of almost half my flight cost! So head over to the campaign page and check out the cool rewards she has lined up. It’s a great way for you to get some nifty swag and help me in my quest for international domination.

And as if that weren’t enough…

You guys like these Oh Joy, Sex Toy guest comics I’ve been doing, right? So Erika Moen is also running a Kickstarter to print the collected first year of OJST, and her stretch goals also include paying her guest artists (new and old) a higher page rate for their work. If you like sex, sex education, sex toys, Erika, me, ridiculous laser cannon boobs, rope, or any combination of those things, pre-order her fabulous book!

My first guest comic (a beginners introduction to rope bondage) will be included in the print volume, along with over 200+ other pages of prime content. Again: you get sweet rewards, I get a super-helpful cash bonus that makes traveling to the UK financially feasible.

EVERYONE WINS!

If you’re looking for a more sustainable way to support my work, stay tuned. I have something exciting to announce before the end of the month. Until then, thanks for everything!

(Especially reading this massive post. You’re all champs.)