I recently made a smug comment to my son about growing up in a time before mobile phones, but looking at this page from the 1979 Sears Wish Book… I can see how we got here.
What the heck is #4?! Space-sled-monitor-helmet-soda-siphon… I bet Elon had one of those.
For the longest time, I went to book fairs and zine fests to meet other creative folk. But recently the penny finally dropped: Starving artists are not my audience.
Where does my money come from? Doing illustration for a successful entrepreneur who coaches thousands of other successful entrepreneurs.
Notice the word “starving” is nowhere to be seen in this description.
Last month was the Charlottetown Zine Fest. I’ve loved taking part in this event, but I nearly skipped it this year: With fostering, I just haven’t had the time to make another comic book.
At the last minute, though, I decided I didn’t want to miss out. I would do it.
So I created two little zine-games, which didn’t involve a lot of illustration, but did include dice, so I could charge a bit more for them.
I also sewed a dozen pencil cases, filled them with my favourite art supplies, packaged them up with a notebook, and called it a “Comics Kit.” I swung out and priced it at $30. (Inside voice: “But no! Zines are cheap, like a dollar. What are you thinking?”)
And?
I cleaned up!
Everything sold, and I raked in nearly $500 that afternoon, when other years I’d be lucky to break the $100 mark.
For the longest time I’ve given away my advice and teaching in hopes that the loss-leader would — I dunno, guilt people into buying my creative work.
It doesn’t, and they don’t.
So this time I sold fellow artists what they wanted (capability), and the readers who came along bought the stories.
I’m about to ruin your life.
Okay, maybe not your life, but certainly your enjoyment of a lot of popular media, because once you see this principle I’m about to mention, you can’t un-see it.
I’ve called it Hame’s Law of Media Adjacency, and it goes like this:
When a story makes reference to its own or a similar media form, it jars the reader/viewer out of the story-world and into an awareness of its unreality.
Case in point, the latest series of “Stranger Things”: Okay, I get that the whole thing is a nostalgic love-letter to the stories and games that we GenXers hold dear. But it’s one thing to be inspired and entirely another to have characters constantly speak your influences out loud in the story.
I present Exhibit A:
Max: “Only, I wasn’t actually there. Not really. I was just… an observer. And that’s when I understood. I was trapped inside Henry’s mind, his memories. Like a nightmare prison world ruled by an evil, psychopathic piece of sh*t.”
Holly: “Like Camazotz.”
Max: “What?”
Holly: “Camazotz. From A Wrinkle in Time.”
Max: “Never read it.”
Holly: “You should. It’s amazing. Camazotz is like this dark planet that’s under the control of IT, which is this giant, disembodied, evil brain. Anyway, Meg’s dad, Meg’s the main character, he gets taken prisoner there. So, Henry’s kinda like IT, and you’re kinda like Meg’s dad.”
This sort of thing kills the vibe dead for me, instantly, every time.
Credit to the makers of this show that they still managed to get me back, particularly with THAT ENDING (zips lips) which surely gave a thrill of satisfaction to every one of us bullied nerds.
But it was awfully close.
So if you tell stories, please don’t do this!
Don’t lie to yourself. That’s been my lesson this morning.
On my to-do list is “Draw two Coachtoons”†. No biggie – tick, tick, done. But when I sat down to start, why did I feel that old ADHD push-pull?
(I’m trying to pay attention to these inner experiences lately, to understand them, rather than just shoving them to the ground and kicking sand in their faces – AKA “being productive”.)
The little foreman in my head was saying, “Don’t be a wuss. It’s just two drawings. Get your act together and just do them!”
But that isn’t actually true.
My brain is fully aware of *every single step* that I listed in this picture. So it’s disingenuous to suggest “Oh, you can jump over this nine-foot-high ball of yarn in a single leap,” and that unacknowledged dichotomy in my head creates paralysis.
The list, rather than making the ball of yarn more daunting, says, “Here, just pull this thread.”
I know, this is really old, tired news to anyone with ADHD: “Break the job into smaller steps.” Whenever somebody says this to me I want to throw a donut at them – or a box of Christmas cards covered in that transparent glitter you keep finding on your face until February. (Eff that stuff. The microplastic spoon in your brain is at least half composed of that.)
So now I’ve got my list and I just have to do one thing. That initiation energy is the toughest part to muster. Once I’m in, I love what I’m doing and the doing is easy.
The list is not the point, the honesty is.
Today, at least.
†When new hires at Strategic Coach make it through their three-month probation period, they get a custom cartoon to use in their socials. I’ve drawn nearly 250 of these (Holy liftin’!), and folks seem to like them – but it certainly wasn’t my idea to do this! “Here, new person. You don’t know me, but I’ve exaggerated your features in this drawing!”
Brace yourself for a very deep, very nerdy musical theatre cut.
I was walking the dog at lunchtime, listening to the Wicked soundtrack because we’re going to the movies with our son and his (wonderful) theatre-kid girlfriend tonight and I needed a refresher on the story.
In the song “What is This Feeling?” the lyrics describe Elphaba thusly:
“She’s a terror,
she’s a tartar…”
Wait a second, why did that sound familiar?
In high school, I was an usher at the Confederation Centre of the Arts here in Prince Edward Island, and as a result saw the show Anne of Green Gables: The Musical so many times that the lyrics got written into my DNA.
Sure enough, in the song “Did You Hear?”, Anne is described as such:
“She’s a terror!
She’s a tartar!”
Can this be? Is this a knowing callback from the creators of Wicked to an earlier strong-willed, misunderstood female character? I can’t believe this is an accident.
Okay, I promise to say something meaningfully on-topic sometime soon, but this stupid factoid set my ADHD brain on fire and I couldn’t be alone with it.
Anne: “Mrs. Spencer said it was wicked of me to talk like that, but I didn’t mean to be wicked. It’s so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn’t it?”
It does feel awful to even admit to these thoughts, but every day I don’t leave the house because we’ve got it in our heads that the dog can’t be on his own. And when we go on vacation, we essentially have to leave behind a suitcase full of money so that someone will live here with Doug.
So if you were expecting a fourth-panel twist where I talk about the joy and love the dog brings, er, well, I’m not quite there at the moment. And I appreciate that this makes me look like a horrible goblin.
Maybe my mind is using Doug as a symbol for my feelings of being overwhelmed by commitments.
On the plus side, should the End Times come, I’ll be able to suture people’s wounds.
And if it counts for anything, I used my insomnia the other morning as an opportunity to sew a sling out of an old rice bag to help Doug get up onto our furniture (and me from nine years ago would be asking, “Why would you help him do that?!”). This is love, right?
(I did not, in fact, stay out, but went home, had a quick nap, and am now useful again.)
I accidentally looked at YouTube without being signed in, and saw the raw, unfiltered sewage of the internet.
In other Hallowe’en-adjacent news, I made a pair of pumpkins to decorate our house, and to test out making cardboard cutouts for the outdoors.
Alas, my weatherproofing efforts were insufficient.
The images on the front were preserved, but the Thompsons WaterSeal wasn’t enough to protect the rest of the cardboard from getting soggy in the rain.
Back to the drawing-board!
On the weekend I saw a fella on Saturday jogging down my street while holding two bags of potato chips. I had so many thoughts.
We’d just had our weekly Family Meeting and chosen Alanis Morrisette as October’s “Artist of the Month”, so on seeing this jogger my husband and I naturally turned to each other and asked “Isn’t it ironic?”… then, of course, questioned whether this was, in fact, ironic — as we all do since people started snarking at that song.
~
It’s been a jam-packed year so far, and this site’s been up and down as I messed around with my server, but that’s matter for a future post. For now, I just wanted to come back and say hi.
Hi.
