Tag Archives | habits and patterns

Best Paragraph I’ve Read This Year

Posted on April 26, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

Start small. Very small. As small as possible. Thinky brain gets over-excited and has delusions of grandeur.

Preach it!

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Why Two Comics? A Tale Of Artistic Attachement.

Posted on March 30, 2012 in On Silent Suns, On Traces of Chaos, Thoughts & Musings

Maybe it’s a bit odd to work on starting a second comic when I have problems with keeping the first one going, but well…

Traces of Chaos is my baby.

The thing with us creative types is the second a work becomes your baby, you stop seeing it clearly. If you’re in love with something, you’re going to have a tough time seeing its faults.1 Assessing your own art is hard. Being attached to it makes it even harder. The creative world is littered with examples of works that took a quality nose-dive because the creator lost the ability to check their own work.

But I still adore Silent Suns.

Otherwise I wouldn’t bother writing and drawing it. The story feels solid, the setting entertains me, and it’s a certain kind of pulpy, dark humored science fiction fun you only get once a moon and which I am desperatly missing in the webcomic world. I’m pretty sure that Silent Suns will gain a far bigger following that Traces of Chaos ever will.

For starters, there are no icky furry things in SiS, which, despite being quite well liked in certain depths of the internet, are still putting off the majority of potential readers. Secondly, the female characters in SiS are more… classically attractive than Siendes. As much as I love Siendes2, I am fully aware that my attraction to muscle gals is not as widely shared as I’d love it to be. Thirdly ToC has a much slower narrative rythmn than SiS, which tends to be a deathknell here in the fast paced internet world.

SiS even might be objectivly better than ToC ever will be, simply because I’ll be much more capable of doing quality control on SiS than I am on ToC.

And you know what? I am fine with it.

It’s about pets and racehorses.

I love my cats and I go through a lot of bullshit for them, but that doesn’t change the fact that they have no real productive use.  They haven’t caught or even seen a mouse in their whole life. My cats, they’re for cuddling.

Same with Traces of Chaos. It’s a labour of love and I’m allowed to coddle it. If it takes ages to be completed, well, shit happens. There’s no compromise I am willing to do when it comes to the story and art, and well, I’m fully aware that no, this is not necessary a good thing. ToC’s a hobby.

But Silent Suns is going to be a racehorse. It’ll get everything it needs, too.  Racehorses, service dogs, all working animals need heaps of training and care, too. They’re often more expensive than pets, too, because it’s hard, directed work to allow them perform at their best. But perform they should. Just like Silent Suns should update thrice weekly and eventually pay my bills.

My pet-project spot’s already taken, afterall.

Footnotes:

  1. It’s not even a contradiction to the “my work sucks so much” many creative types suffer from. You can suffer from chronic self-deprecation and still grossly over-estimate the creative value of your pet projects; it just means that you miss what’s really good in your work because you’re blinded by your prejeduces. ↩
  2. And I DO. She and Chalcara are my favourite characters I’ve ever inveted. ↩
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Why Art’s Like Sex…

Posted on March 6, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

If you’re all anxious and cramped up because you live in the fear of “doing it wrong”, it’ll be – at best – an awkwark mess all around. At worst you end up seriously hurting someone.

In order to have fun you need to learn to relax and go with the flow, how to identify your own goals and desires and how to go for them in a pressure-free manner.

And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, that is a matter of practice. The more often you do something, the easier it is to relax while doing so.

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Happy New Year 2012

Posted on January 1, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

Well, hello there  2012. Fancy to see you.

I’m not a fan of new years declarations. Most of them are hollow. Feel good things made because, well, people should make them. It’s why the majority of them are forgotten in February.

Wanting things is hard. Declaring them as goals you take serious, that’s even harder. Actually taking action? That’s the hardest part of them all. I do not even want to talk about what I want.

So the only thing I did in preperation for 2012?

I bought a calender. Maybe I will use it to write down what I did for ToC each day. Maybe not.

Happy new year to you all!

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You know the serenity prayer?

Posted on December 13, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

You know, the one that goes:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.1

I am slightly less religious as your common quartz, but me thinks I really need something like that, just for not-dithering.

Goddamnit2. Stuff doesn’t have to perfect, it just needs to get DONE. *shakes fist*

Footnotes:

  1. Frankly, I wastly prefer the variation where the last line goes: “And the wisdom to properly hide the bodies”, but there you go. ↩
  2. The major drawback of being a-religious always has been the lack of interesting blasphemies. In my younger angry-atheist-days I screened and replaced them, but well, there’s only so much you can replace with fuck until you sound like an angry rapsong.
    Speaking of which, the best and most creative cursers I knew where Catholics. Go figure. ↩
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