Watching our girls crawl around the floor (and on each other), I’m struck that here — 10 months later — Tina and I are still alive. It is an amazing accomplishment given everything we’ve been through. A far cry from late last August when I was so overwhelmed with the burden of parenthood I had surrendered all hope for the future.

When depression hits me, I tend to do two things — 1) stop working and 2) play a lot of video games. Lately, I’ve done a lot of working and played few video games, so I must be on the mend.

I’ve been focusing on writing, again. Writing, which has dogged me my entire life, since I was young and typing out stories on my mother’s old manual typewriter. As a kid, I spent whole summers writing — short stories, comic books, fragments of novels. And yet, there was always something wrong, some intangible quality about my work that made me throw it out. I knew that although I was reasonably good at constructing a sentence, I wasn’t so good at coming up with original ideas. I lacked experience — both in life and as a reader — that kept me from creating stories I felt were good enough to show people.

After discarding thousands of pages, I made a promise to myself — that I would stop. Instead, I’d focus my time on living, on reading, on learning. I’d taken enough creative writing classes in colleges to see a mountain of terrible work, including my own — and that to distinguish myself I would have to bone up different subjects, I’d have to have a reservoir of knowledge, historical, trivial, pop cultural, to draw on. Without it, I would never create something I could be proud of. And when I was older — say around thirty or so — I would turn back to writing again. And so I have.

“The Alberic Heresies” was my first step back into the water. In some ways, writing a comic book is easy. I’ve read so much criticism, deconstructed so many comic books and learned a tremendous amount about storytelling from DVD commentaries and onlilne interviews, that I’ve found that putting out something that passes my benchmark for “good” hasn’t been so difficult. Now, as “Alberic” rolls ahead, it’s time to turn to that more elusive target: prose.

Over the past few months I’ve developed a catalog of stories in my head, notes typed hastily on my laptop, sketches capable of turning into something more substantial. But time is the problem, with my little girls taking up so much of it. I have the third issue of “The Alberic Heresies” to finish, as well as the first chunk of a graphic novel with artist Evan Keeling and a 10-page play about zombies for a contest sponsored by our friends at “The New Playhouse.”

Once my commitments are finished, I’ll begin work on several short stories. My plan is — if they’re good — to submit them to various markets. As publication is always an uncertain thing, it may be that you’ll have to read them here on Restaurant Fuel. Whether or not I’m successful at finding a publisher isn’t the issue — it’s the writing that matters. Just like when I was a kid, typing away on rolls of paper taken from the printing where my dad worked as a press operator.

The other part of the plan is to go to graduate school for writing. I’ve been sitting on tuition remission for nearly five years now and done next to nothing with it. It’s time to use it.