Rather than stress myself about producing a web comic without any practice or experience at it, and rather than contrive some sort of storyline (which would take me back into the novel-writing wool-ball), I’m just going to start gently here by sharing pages from my sketchbook — like I’ve been doing, but with a bit more intention and (hopefully) regularity.
I’m calling it “The Ten Thousand Things” — an oblique reference to the Buddhist term for, essentially, “all that stuff out there”.
I had a great conversation with my folks last night. I told them about all the things I saw in London, including a John Cage quote with an exhibit at the Tate Modern: “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.” I thought that was so freeing!
I told them about Cage’s song, 4’33”, which is just silence, and Dad told me about a jukebox he remembered that had a track you could choose to buy a few minutes of quiet. Wonderful!
There’s a man here in the pub who wheezes as he comes in and then every time he so much as moves. I don’t know why, but I find it really disturbing to listen to.
I’ve been reading web comics — last night I went through one for hours while Craig did his ironing. I went from laughing out loud to really admiring the guy’s style to being completely intimidated by the work. There’s definitely a point where inspiration stops.
An article I read this morning talked about inspiration literally, saying that, like breathing, you can’t keep taking it in; at some point you need to create. [The writer muffed the metaphor there, saying that it’s only inspiration when you create, but clearly creating is analogical to breathing out. Pfft!]
When I just draw my world, I’m perfectly happy with my drawing style. [It only occurred to me last night that I have one.]. It’s only when I start looking at other’s work — which is good for learning from, to a point — that I start to doubt and think, “Oh, maybe I should draw like this person or that.” But that’s like wishing I had someone else’s ears.
What I did really like about this comic strip, though, was how the artist didn’t censor any of his ideas. Some of the things there were pointless or weird, but he just put it all in there. That’s a great recipe for getting a lot of material, rather than waiting for a worthy topic. I would like to make a strip like that. [I also found it fascinating that the strip’s creator suddenly leapt from drawing like a twelve-year-old to having a beautifully crisp and defined line quality.]
~
We went to London last week. I was there to sit in on Strategic Coach’s UK workshops, which really helped me reconnect with the reality of what it’s like to run an entrepreneurial business (scary, yet these folks not only survive, they come to these sessions to shake everything up, which is unbelievably courageous).
Craig joined me, and not only did we get to play in a nice hotel room, we caught up with my old pal Tim and saw him give a brilliant, funny performance in Rock of Ages. We saw some other good friends, and goggled at shop windows, restaurant menus, and estate agents’ displays. How can anyone afford to exist there? I envy the creative resources and outlets there, but there’s also this striving for status that I just can’t relate to.
What a pleasure, to come home to our cold little Georgian box of an affordable home. I must admit, though, that for some reason I feel strung out. Is it adapting abruptly to the change of pace? Is it brain-fog from the wheat and sugar I ate? Is it the challenge of catching up with my projects?
It certainly didn’t help to go from being courted by majillionaire entrepreneurs who wanted to hire my skills to doing a driving lesson and sucking utterly at it. I am firmly in what Strategic Coach calls “The Gap” about driving and about how much work I’m producing. It takes an extra step, a willingness, to step back from that stuck state and defuse it. It almost feels like there’s a nobility in holding myself to an impossible standard. I know that’s dumb.
Even though I work with these ideas all the time (and even *cough* write articles about it), there’s still a difference between intellectually understanding a concept and actually applying it. That’s why I’m not put off when someone talks about a particular Strategic Coach principle as “just common sense”. Yes, but we rarely practise all the things we know, so that support and accountability is the other half of what the Coach provides.
The flipside of accountability, it occurs to me now, is compassion. We’re not so good at that one. I’m great at creating structures for articulating what I should get done, but it’s that second piece that creates room for our own experience. That’s what I admired about the comic strip I read, how much attention this guy is obviously paying to the really little stuff that makes up our daily existence.
So, yeah, more of that.
Humour ties into this, too: There’s no oxygen for it in high-pressure situations.
Okay, geez, it’s time to work on other stuff. Thank you for reading all this. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this relationship between yourself and the things you want to do. It’s clearly a topic I’m fascinated by.
I have hours before it’s time for me to catch my train — hours in Inverness on a Sunday afternoon as all the shops are closing.
I’m looking forward to taking the sleeper car — romantic notions of old-time travel come to mind and I hope it’s like that at least a little.
So I get to go to London for a week and have the company pay for me to stay in a hotel — wow, I have arrived! And Craig is joining me, which is even better. My poor darling deserves a holiday…
[What I want this week to be about:] Using talents, connecting, identifying possibilities, and having fun.
There seems to be a strange job requirement for BBC Scotland’s weather presenters: pregnancy.
It’s great that there’s this opportunity for career-minded female meteorologists to continue working when they’re expecting, that they’re not swept away from the public eye, as pregnancy is a natural part of life. Except I’ve never seen a lot of these people before they show up pregnant.
I just finished working on a sideline project for a friend — a little job that, like most little jobs, turned into a huge investment of time. But because I decided to do this right, not just execute it but really bring all my talents to bear on it, I had fun doing it and am proud of the final result.
My pal Kirsten is a “travel author” who flits about the world to off-the-beaten path places and has the oddest things happen to her, which she then writes about. She rails against this idea of women traveller/writers all being about spas and lavender and falling in love; she prefers the weird, real life of unfamiliar worlds. So, with this in mind, she’s launching “Writers’ Expeditions” and wanted a section of her website to showcase this.
Like I said, rather than just getting this done, I decided to use my new-found interest in drawing to really customise this mini-site. Kis always gives me barge-loads of copy to incorporate, which is probably appropriate here, giving lots of background when it’s such a big investment for people to make. I figured I could break up all this copy and draw the reader’s eye around the page by including lots of illustrations.
It took me every spare minute to get this finished in time, and of course I never charge enough for these jobs, but I’m really chuffed about how this turned out, even though the page is busy as hell:
Doing this took me right back to my first days of getting a computer and discovering the joy of pulling my drawings into it and getting them to do stuff on-screen. Between the drawing, painting, scanning, and website design, I’m left feeling really charged and compelled to pursue two things:
I want to treat my work on paper like it’s art. I’ve got my first “gallery showing” next month — a local event that anyone can pay to be in. I’ve attended in the past, and there’s some remarkable, top-notch work by some masterful artists who just happen to have chosen to live up here, then there are some really Gawd-awful, childish messes hanging on display. So we’ll see where I fit into that; my work is certainly not like anything I’ve seen around here.
I would like to take advantage of these tools for myself. There’s all the web-stuff, like on Kis’s site, and that could be even more interactive. Then there’s a program called Hype that I’ve got and not touched which makes it possible — and easy — to create fully interactive, animated content (like we used to get on DVD-ROMs back in the days before everything was online); best of all, they’re HTML5-compliant, so they’ll work on just about any browser and device with no plug-ins.
What I want to do with these tools is bring stories and ideas and images together in a fun, interactive way. For some reason I can’t explain, I know there’s an energy in my drawings that comes across. It seems to give more to the viewer — and do it more quickly — than the novels did. So this seems like a way to do it all at once and have it be much more accessible, less of an ‘ask’ and more of a ‘give’.
And it’s fun. And it doesn’t take a year-and-a-half to excute each idea!
Driver’s education.
I’ve been reading web comics — last night I went through one for hours while Craig did his ironing. I went from laughing out loud to really admiring the guy’s style to being completely intimidated by the work. There’s definitely a point where inspiration stops.An article I read this morning talked about inspiration literally, saying that, like breathing, you can’t keep taking it in; at some point you need to create. [The writer muffed the metaphor there, saying that it’s only inspiration when you create, but clearly creating is analogical to breathing out. Pfft!]When I just draw my world, I’m perfectly happy with my drawing style. [It only occurred to me last night that I have one.]. It’s only when I start looking at other’s work — which is good for learning from, to a point — that I start to doubt and think, “Oh, maybe I should draw like this person or that.” But that’s like wishing I had someone else’s ears.What I did really like about this comic strip, though, was how the artist didn’t censor any of his ideas. Some of the things there were pointless or weird, but he just put it all in there. That’s a great recipe for getting a lot of material, rather than waiting for a worthy topic. I would like to make a strip like that. [I also found it fascinating that the strip’s creator suddenly leapt from drawing like a twelve-year-old to having a beautifully crisp and defined line quality.]~We went to London last week. I was there to sit in on Strategic Coach’s UK workshops, which really helped me reconnect with the reality of what it’s like to run an entrepreneurial business (scary, yet these folks not only survive, they come to these sessions to shake everything up, which is unbelievably courageous).Craig joined me, and not only did we get to play in a nice hotel room, we caught up with my old pal Tim and saw him give a brilliant, funny performance in Rock of Ages. We saw some other good friends, and goggled at shop windows, restaurant menus, and estate agents’ displays. How can anyone afford to exist there? I envy the creative resources and outlets there, but there’s also this striving for status that I just can’t relate to.What a pleasure, to come home to our cold little Georgian box of an affordable home. I must admit, though, that for some reason I feel strung out. Is it adapting abruptly to the change of pace? Is it brain-fog from the wheat and sugar I ate? Is it the challenge of catching up with my projects?It certainly didn’t help to go from being courted by majillionaire entrepreneurs who wanted to hire my skills to doing a driving lesson and sucking utterly at it. I am firmly in what Strategic Coach calls “The Gap” about driving and about how much work I’m producing. It takes an extra step, a willingness, to step back from that stuck state and defuse it. It almost feels like there’s a nobility in holding myself to an impossible standard. I know that’s dumb.Even though I work with these ideas all the time (and even *cough* write articles about it), there’s still a difference between intellectually understanding a concept and actually applying it. That’s why I’m not put off when someone talks about a particular Strategic Coach principle as “just common sense”. Yes, but we rarely practise all the things we know, so that support and accountability is the other half of what the Coach provides.The flipside of accountability, it occurs to me now, is compassion. We’re not so good at that one. I’m great at creating structures for articulating what I should get done, but it’s that second piece that creates room for our own experience. That’s what I admired about the comic strip I read, how much attention this guy is obviously paying to the really little stuff that makes up our daily existence.So, yeah, more of that.Humour ties into this, too: There’s no oxygen for it in high-pressure situations.Okay, geez, it’s time to work on other stuff. Thank you for reading all this. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this relationship between yourself and the things you want to do. It’s clearly a topic I’m fascinated by.
I have hours before it’s time for me to catch my train — hours in Inverness on a Sunday afternoon as all the shops are closing.I’m looking forward to taking the sleeper car — romantic notions of old-time travel come to mind and I hope it’s like that at least a little.So I get to go to London for a week and have the company pay for me to stay in a hotel — wow, I have arrived! And Craig is joining me, which is even better. My poor darling deserves a holiday…[What I want this week to be about:] Using talents, connecting, identifying possibilities, and having fun.
There seems to be a strange job requirement for BBC Scotland’s weather presenters: pregnancy.It’s great that there’s this opportunity for career-minded female meteorologists to continue working when they’re expecting, that they’re not swept away from the public eye, as pregnancy is a natural part of life. Except I’ve never seen a lot of these people before they show up pregnant.
Doing this took me right back to my first days of getting a computer and discovering the joy of pulling my drawings into it and getting them to do stuff on-screen. Between the drawing, painting, scanning, and website design, I’m left feeling really charged and compelled to pursue two things:
