I’m a novelist—most of you guys know that. I’ve studied and practiced that particular mode of storytelling for around 15 years now. That creates a lot of habits and expectations when I sit down to work on a story.

But I’ve been thinking about branching out into comics for a long time. And it was while I was working on thinking up an idea for a newsletter freebie that I decided to finally commit to finishing a project. That project was “A Reason to Run: the comic.”

The idea was, I wanted to...