It’s following you right now. It follows you into sleep and wakes you up. It’s with you at school, at work, in church, on vacation and while you’re with family and friends. It’s with you while you’re in the shower or going the bathroom. Even number two. Or maybe especially when you’re going number two. It torments you, excites you, motivates you and sometimes sustains you when you’ve forgotten to eat.

It’s your identity as a writer, and it affects every aspect of your life. It refuses to be compartmentalized. You’re a husband, father, wife, mother, employee, employer, geek, hipster, collector, reader, student, athlete, cynic, optimist, television addict, people watcher, world traveler, homebody. And you’re a writer. It’s part of your make-up, your being. You don’t become a writer the moment you win critical acclaim or get a paycheck for a script or go home with an Eisner. You became a writer years before that. It’s just who you are.

Hey, it’s who I am, too.

And that’s what this column is about. Not writing itself so much as the lifestyle, the worldview, of being a writer. How your family, friends, job, faith, time management, standard of living and sleep schedule are all affected by being a writer, and how being a writer affects each of them in return. Of course, in the midst of all that we’ll also inevitably end up covering the writing itself.

I’ve titled this column Making Good because it’s about making good on your vision of being a successful comic writer, about making good comics, and about making a good life for yourself as you go about it.

Who am I? Why do my insights matter? Just whose idea was it to let me loose in public with a column in the first place?

Those are good questions.

My name is Caleb Monroe and I’m a writer. As for whether I have the authority to speak authentically about every aspect of the topics I’ve mentioned above…well, I have some doubts about that as well. Which is why this will primarily be an interview column. I’m a curious person, which means I want to get as many views on as many of these subjects as possible. So I’m going to. Basically, I'm going to go out and get the answers to all the practical questions I have about being a writer. Then I’m going to share them.

And hopefully some of it, somewhere, somehow will help you in your own writer’s life. Which is the point of the sharing, after all. There will be a discussion thread for this column over in the Scryptic forums, and I encourage you to log in and participate. Give your own (constructive) views on a column, suggest future topics, share personal stories, feel free to tell me how I’ve changed your life for the better.

…But wait, there’s more!

Ground Floor

What's Ground Floor, you ask? Well, it’s a column-within-a-column here at Making Good. Starting right here, right now, I will be developing a brand new comic from scratch before your very eyes. I’ll share e-mails exchanged with the artist, I’ll share rough drafts, middle drafts, final drafts, I’ll share my rather random brainstorming/idea-coalescing process. Everything. From today straight on until the book finds a publisher. And maybe this is hubris on my part, but I guarantee to find a publisher. I’ll take this all the way to completion and you’ll get to see the entire process as it happens.

What’s the first step, you ask? Well this is the fun part, because at this stage I’m looking for input. At the top of this page you'll see a little header that says Scryptic Polls. Click where it says "MAKING GOOD - GENRE" right under the header to see the poll and place your vote. There are some genres I’m more comfortable with than others, but I won’t say which is which and will develop a comic in whatever genre wins the vote. I’ve listed the major choices for consideration, but if your favorite genre isn’t there, then select “Other” and visit this column’s discussion thread in the Scryptic forums and tell me what genre I’m missing.

The voting will be open for four days (until midnight Friday), at which time I will need to start brainstorming in preparation for next Tuesday’s installment of Ground Floor.

Be sure to tune in next week for the first of two columns covering writing short comics. I’ll be interviewing Phil Hester on the craft of the short form. See you next week!

Caleb Monroe bought Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #16 when he was 11 years old and it was all over after that. You can learn some more about him here.