IT NEVER ENDS!!

When Simon Furman penned those words into Transformers #79 I imagine he had no real idea of how they would continue to resonate through the fandom for decades to come and in some ways define what Transformers means.

Or perhaps he did. Maybe he was smart enough to realize that most things in life are not a straight line, but instead a circle and we all come back around in the end, in one way or another.

Five years ago I stepped away from Transformers, after integrating them into pretty much every aspect of my life since I was four years old. I’d decided to move on, to start something new. What better way to do that than sell off the “ball and chain”, i.e. the collection I had built and curated throughout my entire life.

Gone were the Japanese exclusives, the rare one-of-a-kind prototypes, the figures I’d had in my collection for thirty-five years. Along with everything I’d built to display them. 

The museum was dismantled.

But I didn’t really quit.

I paused.

And I took a long, deep breath.

Part of what drove my decision was the fact that I had reached a point where collecting seemed…for lack of a better word, pointless. I’d obtained everything I could ever want (save one or two insanely rare items), I’d built my museum and curated a collection like nothing I could have ever dreamed. But once that was done I felt…dissatisfied.

It was glorious.

I’d reached my goal and I didn’t know what to do with myself. In truth, I lived with it for a few years, my collection sitting in that room. And I would go in and look at it every now and again. But the challenge of it was gone.

And I had other challenges on the horizon.

Ten years ago, I began a different kind of journey.  One that I knew would take a long time and might not work out, but fed my soul in a way nothing else ever had. 

I started writing books.

Now, the first four or five books I wrote were terrible. Absolute rubbish. But slowly I got better. I refined my process. And in 2018 I published my very first book. It’s no accident that my last set of posts on this blog were in 2017. Because writing had begun to take up a lot of my time. ALL of it, in fact.

I’m what’s known as an Indie author. That means I have no publisher, no one who sends me checks to publish my books. I do all that work myself. I hire cover designers, editors, translators, narrators and I oversee the full production of my books from start to finish. If something goes wrong, it’s my fault. If it goes right, it’s probably luck.

And let me tell you, indie publishing is not for the faint of heart. It is a long, tireless slog full of failure and rejection. When people don’t like your book, they let you know.

But I believed in myself. I knew I could make something of it.

Unfortunately, most people don’t make money right out of the gate. In fact, most indie publishers never sell more than a few hundred books in their lifetimes. But I’m a stubborn bastard. And when something doesn’t go the way I think it should, I just get mad and try harder.

Still, by late 2019 money was becoming something of an issue. I wasn’t on the verge of homelessness or anything so dire, but I wasn’t in a position to buy toys for a while due to my “regular” job destabilizing. (I was in property management originally, something I neither wanted to do or enjoyed. What paid well in the beginning ended up costing more than I could have imagined.)

But I liked not having to “keep up” with the race. To have the newest figures or go hunt for hours at my local stores. 

I was happy to let it all go.

So that’s when I began thinking about selling the collection. I’d had multiple sell-offs before. But that money had always been reinvested back into the hobby to…buy more Transformers. What else?

But this time, I thought why not just let it all go? That way I wouldn’t have to worry about it, and I could explore new horizons. I’d taken my collection to the limit: why not do something else?

So that made the decision for me. And even though it was difficult, once it was all done, I felt a lot better. I ended up selling off the entire collection in March of 2020, after spending a few months selling some of the more precious and rare items to collectors and friends.

All that work...in such a small space.

And we all know what happened in March of 2020.

Suddenly, the income I had coming in from my regular job disappeared overnight. The money that I thought I might use for a nice vacation became a lifeline, covering my expenses for the next six months while the world went crazy.

Had I not sold everything off, I’m not sure what would have happened. Because while I was writing heavily and consistently at this point (I’d published about 20 books by late 2020), they weren’t selling like I’d hoped.

So in a way, selling off the collection saved me.

And as 2020 and 2021 came and went, I realized that I needed another change. Up until then I had been writing sci-fi books, inspired by my loved of Star Trek, Star Wars and of course, Transformers. I even introduced the idea of a “race of robots” at the end of one of my series.

But it wasn’t sustainable. While I’d had some early success with my first sci-fi series, it had eventually fallen off and I was barely making enough to cover my production costs, much less make a profit. So I took the giant risk of starting over. This time with a new name, in a new genre.

I began from scratch again, writing a new series in the Mystery and Thriller genre and I poured myself into it, producing five books in six months and releasing just as fast. And for the first time since I’d begun writing as a profession in 2015…I found success.

So much success, in fact, that I wanted to ride the wave. So I wrote more, and more, as fast as I possibly could. In the meantime, I simplified everything else about my life. I got rid of all the mental clutter, all the physical clutter—everything that had been holding me back for fifteen years. 

I streamlined my life. (A big part of that was letting go of my old job and selling off all the assets.)

And finally, by early 2024, I found my headspace was clearing for the first time in a decade.

Since letting go of Transformers I had dabbled in other hobbies. I tried collecting Bourbon for a while, but the appeal wore off quickly. I then moved to LEGO, as that was the one thing I’d been a fan of longer than Transformers. 

Building LEGO is a wonderful outlet for me, and without any toy robots around, I found I could try many of the sets I’d always wanted. So I did.

You can literally build anything these days.

And yet...

When I sold off my collection, I didn’t sell everything. I kept the original run of US comics, G1 and G2. In addition to the IDW Lost Light series. I kept everything from Charticon—I couldn’t bear to part with that, not to mention the wonderful gifts I received from friends.

I kept my AFA figures, as I had a special connection to each, and it was only six figures after all.

And I kept all my guidebooks. All the “lore” I’d collected over the years. I thought it was very important not to let any of that go.

I’d kept all the stories, the most intangible parts of Transformers. Because that is what I fell in love with as a child. It’s what had sparked my imagination. The collection had been nothing more than a physical expression of that.

Which is why I don’t regret selling it all.

Are there a few pieces I wish I’d kept? Sure. The things I can never get back…SCF Skywarp, G2 Protectobots and Stunticons, the Botcon 2001 exclusives I pre-ordered and purchased at my very first Botcon back in 2001—the show that inspired Charticon.

But in the end, it is all just stuff. And I’m content knowing it went to good people, collectors like me who will appreciate them as they become part of their collections.

 

So then why am I back? Why post on this blog that I’ve “closed” so many times I can’t keep count any longer?

 

Because once it was all said and done and the dust had settled, I found I missed collecting. 

Don’t get me wrong, you can collect LEGO just as feverishly as you can Transformers, and people do. But LEGO takes up a lot of space. And once it’s built there’s not a lot more to do with it. You can admire it, but that’s about it. Unless you want to tear it down and build it again.

Collecting is in my blood. And Transformers have been a deep part of who I am as a person for most of my life. What I discovered after a few years was that to try and sunset that part of myself and move on wasn’t possible. 

So last year I decided to come back to Transformer collecting. Part of that meant posting on social media again. And while Instagram is great for visual, it isn’t so great for the “story”. And given I’m an honest-to-God writer now, story is the biggest part for me.

As if you couldn’t tell from the length of this post. (In fact, it was blogging that helped inspire me to take the leap to novels!)

Ever since coming back I’ve yearned for a place where I can share more than just pictures. And while the heyday of Blogger may be long gone, where we were all posting once a week or month and had built up a great community, coming back here feels right to me. I know some of you never left (looking at you Flywheels) while some will never come back (RIP Brr-icy). But really, I want to post here for me. I can’t tell you how many times I returned to this blog, just to relive the memories of posting about one figure or another, or to look something up I’d forgotten.

It's part of my history now too.

For now, I plan to keep using this platform to talk about the thing that gives me a joy in a way nothing else does. And while I won’t promise regular updates or even frequent ones, I do plan to stick around for the foreseeable future.

Transformers is in my blood. It’s a part of me. And it’s a part I will continue to share.

Thanks for reading.

-Eric (Arkvander)

It's (never) OVER, FINISHED!