Lucy Bellwood

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Lucy Bellwood, whose blog can be found at lucybellwood.com.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

My name's Lucy! I call myself an Adventure Cartoonist, but in truth I struggle to stay faithful to any particular discipline. I write earnest reflections on mortality and draw goofy reviews of sex toys. I translate cutting edge oceanography into comics and give talks about "making it" as an author while being on food stamps. I carry both US and UK passports and can never seem to choose where I feel most at home. I spent many moons working as a deckhand aboard various tall ships. I built a life as a cartoonist in Portland, OR for twelve years before moving back to my hometown of Ojai, CA to become a caregiver for my dad in 2021. Since then my work and world have radically shifted to focus on community, care, and carving out a space for creativity in seasons of deep grief. I'm always trying to find the thing that will let me blend everything I love into one beautiful, messy, enthralling project.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started writing online in earnest in 2007 as a way to keep friends and family up to date during my gap year. (I just checked and that blog is still up? Nothing dies on the internet.) I was seventeen. Back in those days the comments were all from people I knew in the real world, the posts painstakingly uploaded to Blogspot from internet cafes across Europe. I kept it up for the year I was away, then fell off at the start of college. The first post on my current site in 2010 saw me trying to use the new blog as a way to carve out space for myself amid the endless rigors of my undergraduate degree. (Rereading it for the first time in god-knows-how-long, I'm struck by how my site still serves exactly the same purpose: to remind me that I can have a space online that is simply mine.) I've been writing there with variable consistency ever since.

These days (and increasingly more so since the decline of Twitter and my general withdrawal from social media), the site functions as the one-stop-shop for my entire career. This can be a challenge, since it encompasses creative experiments like Rambles (audio blog posts), online comics (whose gallery features constantly seem to be breaking), talks, essays, and more. From a branding perspective, it sometimes feels like a disaster. But I think that's okay! A blog isn't a billboard, it's a garden. It can be a space for everything.

Major structural updates often happen in frantic gluts of activity followed by total amnesia. I'm not sure I can even remember when I transitioned from a free Wordpress blog to a hosted site. As far as the design goes, I've only used a couple different themes over the years. I do make the odd adjustment to try and personalize the look of the place, but it's nowhere near what I'd like to be able to achieve. (I envy people like Robin who are always rethinking and tweaking and adjusting their sites in idle moments.)

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Blogging, for me, is all about letting ideas talk to each other. I'm always reading a handful of different books and obsessing about a couple different subjects at any given time. Inevitably there are echoes. Something slots into place or ricochets off something else and makes a noise. Whether I call it the electric pinball machine or the conspiracy string layer or something else, it's really just the realization that two (or more!) ideas could co-exist in the same container. And then you get to build the container for (and out of) those ideas.

Posts themselves take a couple different forms: for short stuff, I'll throw links or quotes or half-formed thoughts into Things as to-do list items or drafts in Wordpress to remind myself to get back to them later. (When my mental health is in the pits those collections get a bit out of control.) I'm big on breadcrumbs. Creative energy always, always comes back around, so when the mood strikes it's great to have stuff to jump off from.

For longer pieces I write drafts in Bear, which I like for its simplicity and markdown features. Snippets and chunks that don't seem to fit get cut and pasted to the end of the document, which I read through far too many times to be good for my eyesight. I don't have anyone else read my writing before it goes up, but I'll often frantically republish things immediately after posting them because of course that's when you see the typos.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

Absolutely. I love early mornings. I love my Logitech K380. I love a hot cup of Yorkshire Gold tea steeped for three minutes with a hefty splash of whole milk. I save brown packing paper and draw enormous mind maps on it in Sharpie. I sit in a hideously stained Humanscale Freedom office chair that I tore down and rebuilt from scratch after salvaging it from a Buy Nothing group in town. I get my best ideas walking and talking on the phone with a faraway friend or recording an audio update for my Patrons. I love being able to see the books I'm reading concurrently in a big stack on my nightstand. I usually write to oscillating brown noise or wordless music or silence. Given my druthers, I'd rather be outside.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I'm minimally tech savvy when it comes to websites, although blessed with patient friends who will help me pull things off when I have a specific project in mind. My blog runs Wordpress, hosted by Flywheel. My domain is registered with Godaddy, which I feel gross typing out, but I have a vague memory of trying to figure out what it would take to change it and then getting overwhelmed (you can see how I approach running a website, yeah?). For writing: I draft posts in Bear and then copy them into Wordpress in my browser. I run my newsletter (part of my blog, I'd say) through Buttondown.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

LEARN TO CODE.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

$35 a month! Man, I've never done this math before. I should get writing!

I spend a lot of time thinking about how creative people are supposed to navigate making a living online. Personally, I like keeping all the stuff on my website—especially my blog—free for anyone to read. Partly this has to do with the fact that writing isn't my bread and butter. As a cartoonist, it's kind of a novelty to even have a written blog. That helps me feel like it's "just for nice." I can afford to do this because I have a Patreon (which is a more explicitly gift economy-exchangey kind of place) that functions as my personal Universal Basic Income. I feel very lucky to have the support of those folks; it's what makes my whole freewheeling, experimental career possible. Over the years, I've come to realize that giving things away for free is a great way to eventually receive financial support from people, but it's not a linear relationship. That can be stressful.

I do love seeing more journalism coming out that's directly supported by readers, as well as watching friends launch paid newsletters and crowdfunding pages for their own creative projects. Whatever the platform, I try to be careful to think about relationships when I consider financial exchange for work—especially creative work—online. Am I respecting the people who are willing to come with me on this exploration? Am I creating clear expectations of what I will (and won't) produce? Most people can smell a get-rich-quick vibe from a mile away, but that doesn't mean all financial support has to be transactional.

Most of my outbound creative support these days goes to other folks on Patreon. (It's hard to notice how much you're spending when they just pull it out of your monthly payout.) And since I've got a small soapbox to get up on here, I'm going to come right out and say it: my pet peeve is supporting people on Patreon who pause billing on months when they're lying fallow. LET ME PAY YOU TO REST! I want to give you money because I want you to have the freedom to pursue your weird whims and curiosities wherever they lead! Including TO BED! Or ON A WALK! I want to give you money to specifically not always be working! CONTROVERSIAL! BUT TRUE!

Okay that's it that's the end of the soapbox.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

  1. It's not listed anywhere on the homepage, but I really enjoy this dictionary and RSS feed of new words I've learned recently. (Due to the vagaries of the plugin I use, if any of those words show up in a blog post, they're automatically underlined and defined. Hilariously, this only seems to happen when words show up inside other words, e.g. "aureate" → "laureate")
  2. If you're passing through Ojai, I offer sporadic open hours at my new studio (918 East Ojai Avenue). If the blinds are up, I'm in there.
  3. You can write me a postcard at PO Box 734, Ojai, CA 93024

Bye!