Legacy… change is a sometimes mysterious animal. I often find that when I write for this comic… it is almost prophetic. I wrote this storyline before I knew my local paper had dropped me. Sometimes you get dropped into change, sometimes you get tired of the way things are and you CREATE change… and sometimes change drags you kicking and screaming.
Beetles… Ha! yah… I’m sure it is waiting right there for him. It probably has a strange odor of B-O and wharf…
anatman… true! There was that talk of a Tiki Bar mystery novel a while back.
dada… Yes, I know this feeling. I am reading several books right now… (I KNOW! Me? READ?) two are on creativity from Hugh MacLeod… “Ignore Everybody” & “Evil Plans”… I nearly stopped reading them when I came across the chapter “keep your day job.” To this I say… FUH!
Unless you’re Larry Niven it really is best to make sure that there will be enough funding to keep a roof over your head and lentils and rice in the pot.
(According to Larry Niven: “The best advice I was ever given was on my twenty-first birthday when my father said ‘Son, here’s a million dollars. Don’t lose it.'”)
Art is not something that should be done to make money, it is something that should be done to stay sane.
It is a lot easier to stay sane when you’re making money….
M. Lonie… He does have THAT novel. BUT, when Victor Hugo published a similar novel based on his friend, Cezanne, there ceased to be a friendship between them.
M. Lonie/Grump… What motivates you? Money? Things? Your passion? If you were not smart, like 19 year old Bridgett, you got into “stuff”… I got a credit card and bought things… which required me to work more to support this little habit. It was a big bad habit. My priorities were off. I had to work to pay for things that weren’t important. My Art was important, but I failed to see it at the time.
What I failed to see early on but see now: Art is my process with which I interpret the world. It is how I SEE and take in and respond to the world. Cartooning was not just a hobby. It was/is a mode of vision. If you can find ways to BE who you are with the talents and gifts you’ve been given, and USE them, you will find ways to make $ and thus be happy. $ is just a tool, it is not the goal. To be happy is the goal, money will follow.
So I ask again… what motivates you? Money? Happiness?
Ryan can continue following what motivates him without giving up the income that feeds, clothes, and shelters him, not to mention buys coffee for Randi. Or is he going to scrounge meals from Randi and Squish to make ends meet? Without income, his motivations will swiftly narrow down to getting food and shelter, not writing. Will he join Rudy? That will impede his writing more than working at the Tiki Bar does.
In a cartoon strip that you draw you can do anything you want, without worrying about plausibility. You can have Rye Bread quit his job and still eat, have an apartment, buy coffee for Randi, and put gas in his VW bug. Perhaps Ryan’s great uncle Skinflint McScrooge will leave him a million dollars in his will so he can become a full-time writer and sneer at people who work for money to keep body and soul together.
I well remember that a writer friend once told me that the average annual income of writers in the USA was $4000, which included both himself and Stephen King. If you want Ryan to be motivated not by money but by following his muse, well he still has to buy that muse the coffee she craves.
As for the Victor Hugo/Cezanne example, Ryan should use a pen name and never let Randi find a copy lying around his apartment.
Hmmm – I think that I have a disparity between motivations, and that disparity works in my favor.
I like painting miniatures and writing/running/playing role playing games.
For a while I made money painting miniatures and writing RPG material – and doing so took a lot of the fun out of doing those things. It added an element of needing to succeed that sucked the joy right out of it.
Mind you – those were not my ‘real’ job – which was working for a failing nonprofit. (Gone for over a decade now.) But they actually made me more money than my ‘real’ job.
So, I now work a job that I do not much like, but actually have more fun with painting miniatures and writing RPG material than I did when it was my primary source of income.
I feel better doing what I enjoy because I enjoy it than I did doing what I enjoy as a means of supporting myself.
Over time I have begun spending more time painting for commission again – which has led to me making a failed New Year’s resolution last year, and another resolution this year that is doing better. (It is only doing better this year because of some advice that my girlfriend gave me – thanks Megan!)
Later this year I will make another venture into RPG material – this time maybe under my own imprint.
But I will not make the mistake of letting it become the main purpose of my painting and writing ever, ever again.
The last few years I have been singing with my girlfriend – and have made some money doing so, but, again, I would not want the money to become the motivation for singing.
We started with a Celtic style punk group of five, then ended up as a duo singing in history classes of all things…. (We’re educational… no, really – we’ve sung about the French & Indian War, WWI, pagan roots, and Irish American history.) Now she wants to put the punk band back together. 🙂
(We actually started singing together before she was my girlfriend – a long and involved history that includes a failed seduction at a pagan retreat where I had been hired to run RPGs. She may have failed at the time… but two and a half years later we started dating.)
All that said – the best job that I ever had, for enjoyment, sanity, and for pay was teaching military science, military history, and role playing games at a program for the gifted.
Gods above and below I miss the Festival for Creative Youth.
Lil snarky there, Randy.
Wonder where this is going, very hard to write without being employed in some other fashion.
If Rye is saying that management takes up too much of his time, I’m sure the squid outfit is still around.
what better place for a writer to find material?
The little ‘creative’ angel and the little ‘go earn your paycheck until you die’ devil are duking it out on his shoulders (and mine, for that matter).
Legacy… change is a sometimes mysterious animal. I often find that when I write for this comic… it is almost prophetic. I wrote this storyline before I knew my local paper had dropped me. Sometimes you get dropped into change, sometimes you get tired of the way things are and you CREATE change… and sometimes change drags you kicking and screaming.
Beetles… Ha! yah… I’m sure it is waiting right there for him. It probably has a strange odor of B-O and wharf…
anatman… true! There was that talk of a Tiki Bar mystery novel a while back.
dada… Yes, I know this feeling. I am reading several books right now… (I KNOW! Me? READ?) two are on creativity from Hugh MacLeod… “Ignore Everybody” & “Evil Plans”… I nearly stopped reading them when I came across the chapter “keep your day job.” To this I say… FUH!
There’s also the fact that he’d like to date the bartender.
Prudence recommends that Rye Bread not quit his “day job” until he has managed to publish something, at least one novel.
He should stop mooning over Squish and write that novel about Randy he’s been scribbling about for so long.
Unless you’re Larry Niven it really is best to make sure that there will be enough funding to keep a roof over your head and lentils and rice in the pot.
(According to Larry Niven: “The best advice I was ever given was on my twenty-first birthday when my father said ‘Son, here’s a million dollars. Don’t lose it.'”)
Art is not something that should be done to make money, it is something that should be done to stay sane.
It is a lot easier to stay sane when you’re making money….
The Auld Grump
EofO… Yah. There is that.
M. Lonie… He does have THAT novel. BUT, when Victor Hugo published a similar novel based on his friend, Cezanne, there ceased to be a friendship between them.
M. Lonie/Grump… What motivates you? Money? Things? Your passion? If you were not smart, like 19 year old Bridgett, you got into “stuff”… I got a credit card and bought things… which required me to work more to support this little habit. It was a big bad habit. My priorities were off. I had to work to pay for things that weren’t important. My Art was important, but I failed to see it at the time.
What I failed to see early on but see now: Art is my process with which I interpret the world. It is how I SEE and take in and respond to the world. Cartooning was not just a hobby. It was/is a mode of vision. If you can find ways to BE who you are with the talents and gifts you’ve been given, and USE them, you will find ways to make $ and thus be happy. $ is just a tool, it is not the goal. To be happy is the goal, money will follow.
So I ask again… what motivates you? Money? Happiness?
Keep your eye on Ryan.
Ryan can continue following what motivates him without giving up the income that feeds, clothes, and shelters him, not to mention buys coffee for Randi. Or is he going to scrounge meals from Randi and Squish to make ends meet? Without income, his motivations will swiftly narrow down to getting food and shelter, not writing. Will he join Rudy? That will impede his writing more than working at the Tiki Bar does.
In a cartoon strip that you draw you can do anything you want, without worrying about plausibility. You can have Rye Bread quit his job and still eat, have an apartment, buy coffee for Randi, and put gas in his VW bug. Perhaps Ryan’s great uncle Skinflint McScrooge will leave him a million dollars in his will so he can become a full-time writer and sneer at people who work for money to keep body and soul together.
I well remember that a writer friend once told me that the average annual income of writers in the USA was $4000, which included both himself and Stephen King. If you want Ryan to be motivated not by money but by following his muse, well he still has to buy that muse the coffee she craves.
As for the Victor Hugo/Cezanne example, Ryan should use a pen name and never let Randi find a copy lying around his apartment.
Hmmm – I think that I have a disparity between motivations, and that disparity works in my favor.
I like painting miniatures and writing/running/playing role playing games.
For a while I made money painting miniatures and writing RPG material – and doing so took a lot of the fun out of doing those things. It added an element of needing to succeed that sucked the joy right out of it.
Mind you – those were not my ‘real’ job – which was working for a failing nonprofit. (Gone for over a decade now.) But they actually made me more money than my ‘real’ job.
So, I now work a job that I do not much like, but actually have more fun with painting miniatures and writing RPG material than I did when it was my primary source of income.
I feel better doing what I enjoy because I enjoy it than I did doing what I enjoy as a means of supporting myself.
Over time I have begun spending more time painting for commission again – which has led to me making a failed New Year’s resolution last year, and another resolution this year that is doing better. (It is only doing better this year because of some advice that my girlfriend gave me – thanks Megan!)
Later this year I will make another venture into RPG material – this time maybe under my own imprint.
But I will not make the mistake of letting it become the main purpose of my painting and writing ever, ever again.
The last few years I have been singing with my girlfriend – and have made some money doing so, but, again, I would not want the money to become the motivation for singing.
We started with a Celtic style punk group of five, then ended up as a duo singing in history classes of all things…. (We’re educational… no, really – we’ve sung about the French & Indian War, WWI, pagan roots, and Irish American history.) Now she wants to put the punk band back together. 🙂
(We actually started singing together before she was my girlfriend – a long and involved history that includes a failed seduction at a pagan retreat where I had been hired to run RPGs. She may have failed at the time… but two and a half years later we started dating.)
All that said – the best job that I ever had, for enjoyment, sanity, and for pay was teaching military science, military history, and role playing games at a program for the gifted.
Gods above and below I miss the Festival for Creative Youth.
The Auld Grump