Category: Blog

Getting Stuff Done

LittleFears97 Comments

Last week I published a post with a free course, How To Start A Successful Blog And Make Money 2019.

My good mate, Phil responded with:

My always sceptic says if it were that easy we’d all be rich and published and wouldn’t need to be motivational speakers in a van down by the river…

I’m kinda with Phil there. If it really was easy, we’d all be doing it.

There’s the rub. I personally feel anyone can ‘do it’. But very few people will. The biggest issues I face are drive and time management.

So, on drive. People see what I do, thinking it takes a few hours a week of doodling and writing. Then they say ‘hey, I can do that’. But then their not willing to put in the hours of promoting to local businesses, local papers, sharing to Buzzfeed and BoredPanda. Standing at car boots and markets, getting drowned in the rain, trying to sell prints. Going to shows trying to find clients to work for. Submitting to magazines and getting turned down over and over and over. The demoralizing graft. A lot of that’s less fun. It takes grit. Self-employment is rarely the happy-go-lucky care-free life people imagine. It sure as heck isn’t what’s on Instagram.

So, yes. Anyone can ‘do it’. But few folks will.

On time management, well, that’s a whole separate issue. In my experience, it can make or break you. If you can’t get your poop together and set out plans for your days and weeks, you just aren’t going to make it.

Personally, I use an A4 diary to make rough plans for what I need to do daily. More checklists than anything. But pen and paper help cement tasks in my head more than digital alternatives.

I use pomodairo type techniques. 50 minutes of work followed by 10 minutes break. Enough time for a pee and a fresh brew of tea. (shameless “Drink Tea” tenuous link to Threadless: https://littlefears.threadless.com/ )

#NoShame

So, I usually run that system from 7 am to 1 pm, break for an hour for lunch. Then work from 2 pm to 6 pm. I often come back in the evening as well. It’s a long day!

This week, I’ve been looking for digital time-management assistance again. Turns out, on Skillshare, there are two free classes from the Todoist team.

Productivity Today: Managing Attention in the Digital Age | Learn with Todoist. Kevin Siskar, Managing Director, Founder Institute.

The first I’ve done before. I really enjoyed this class. It’s not 100% Todoist centric. It’s more about getting into the right mindset managing your time more productively. I can’t stress how important mindset is if you’re hoping to go self-employed as a writer, blogger, artist, poet and music maker.

Productivity Habits That Stick: Using Time Theming. Mike Vardy, Productivity Strategist & Productivityist Founder.

This course is more Todoist-centric. It revolves around building a daily routine and task list. More like habit building, if that makes sense?

I can appreciate habit building courses. The first hour of my day is set in stone. Publish the morning’s story. Reply to comments on LittleFears.co.uk. Check if there are any relevant hashtags during the day I can get into with an old story on Twitter (such as #NationaChocolateDay). Go over everything in my diary for a given day and schedule all the work into 50-minute blocks.

If that first hour goes off without a hitch, I can smash through work like the Hulk punches holes in toilet paper. It gets me into the right mental place and I’m away! If I miss my morning routine, my whole day goes to pot.

For some of us, habits are essential.

So, those links again. These courses are free. Just sign up for a free account, ignore anything that asks you for a subscription option. Go to the course page and give them a whirl.

Productivity Today: Managing Attention in the Digital Age: https://skl.sh/2TeJPCv

Productivity Habits That Stick: Using Time Theming: https://skl.sh/2EvJ1Be

Thanks again to Barb of LetItGoCoach for buying me a cuppa Ko-Fi. Thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage.

Ko-Fi | Patreon | Etsy | Books | Skillshare | Threadless

DRINK TEA!

LittleFears104 Comments

Heck yeah! DRINK TEA!

My creativity is pretty much fuelled by tea. I drink at least ten mugs a day. Usually closer to fifteen. About one an hour. And my cups massive.

Like, fo real, look at that bastard! It’s bigger than a reindeer! It’s a double sized mug. Well, by British standards.

Whatever… It holds lots of tea! Back to the tea-tee.

Fuen holding a cuppa is for me, quite frankly, moods. She’s available from our Threadless store and here’s a link to it: littlefears.threadless.com

Ko-Fi | Patreon | Etsy | Books | Skillshare | Threadless

Here’s not there yet – Horned

LittleFears15 Comments

I often find myself saying “I’m getting there,” when asked how I am. Well, here’s not there yet, is it?

I am creating some different designs for my Threadless store while pulling off all my art prints. My prints haven’t sold Threadless. I’m also re-making all of the mockups. Dark backgrounds were the most unpopular mocks when I polled last year. Clean ice white backgrounds just aren’t Fears, but we can lighten the pics in other ways.

Here’s not there yet, is available on Threadless. https://littlefears.threadless.com/

Ko-Fi | Patreon | Etsy | Books | Skillshare | Threadless

Sizes

LittleFears8 Comments

“Hey dad,” said the child, “look at the size of them!”
“I know,” replied the father. “Tiny, aren’t they?”


Well, that’s a whole bunch of nope! A callback to an Inktober drawing, now on stupidly awesome acrylic paper and landing in my Etsy store.

Linky! etsy.me/2WcSmEL

The sprites and one of the whales have been drawn onto 240 gsm acid-free acrylic paper for some lovely texturing. They weigh in at a size of 7 inches tall by 10 inches across. Pens included in images for size reference only. They do not come with the illustration. Neither does the black table. It’s pretty minging. Also lopsided if I’m honest… They come with free first class shipping within one business day so will arrive on your doorstep in a speedy fashion.

And here’s a shop link if you fancy browsing some of my other arts.

Linky: etsy.me/2sHiY3a

Repair Work

LittleFears33 Comments

Super sorry if you’ve been getting notifications of old posts being published today everyone.

Went a bit mad this week as repair work on the website, post WordPress 5.0 update came to demotivated stand still. An hour or two a day of repairs until March wasn’t working for me. So I just spent the last three days working on repairing as much as I could. I’m 45 hours into repairs. About 5 more hours of repairs to go I think. Found a stack of extra problems with the Gutenberg import.

Also found if I drafted an old post then set it to published again it sent out a publication notice to every channel, email and social media with no option of not doing so. The usual bit you publish that has options to share to all social networks was actually greyed out. How silly is that. I published a few posts before realising they were appearing on my Twitter and Tumblr and people were leaving comments on the blog like they were new posts.

Pretty livid about the whole thing but the bulk of the work is done now. Crack a beer open with me and cheer as it means I’m going to have more time than expected to work on new Fears.

Cheers for sticking with me as always everyone. I’m so glad you all still enjoy a smidgeon of fear-filled humour every morning, with me, here. Have a great Sunday everyone!

The story you want to tell

LittleFears17 Comments

Sometimes you’ve got to tell the story you want to tell, even if you’re not sure it’s going to work. I’ve had that struggle with Brass, a post-apocalyptic road trip featuring two new Fears, Copper and Iron. A blend of horror and humour. The entire story is just over ninety stories long forming one continuous narrative.

I’ve been pondering on whether or not to publish this story online since August last year when I’d told the first of Lily and Sally’s Lost Leads stories. A thirty tale long narrative felt like the limit for an attention span on the Internet. Five stories a week would mean if I started today the story wouldn’t finish until June. Could the Little Fears focus on one story for that long? Heck, could I?

So the stories, sat, languished, and niggled. I want to tell the story, but I don’t feel it would work on the net.

Until this weekend…

My Internet friend and fellow blogger Lauren bought Copper and Iron as a print after my Etsy overhaul the other day. (You can visit her website HERE and my Etsy store HERE. Wink, wink.)

To quote Lauren:

“I just really liked their dynamic… something about em really appealed to me.” 

Me too, Lauren. She pulled me back to their story. I gave it a few read-overs and figured if I re-wrote about 40% of it and loosened off the connection between each days tale, I could tell their tales in my daily horror and pun format. It’s a big job, but, well, sometimes you just have to tell the story you want to tell.

It helps that I’m hoping to have my entire website fixed post-Gutenberg/WordPress 5.0 update by the end of February. Then I can rework the front page and side-bar with links to each complete story. Grey Moon, Seeking Hydra, Lost Leeds, Capricorn, January and of course, Brass. That’ll certainly make navigating my site easier. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with the current theme, but eh, can figure that out when the website’s been fully repaired.

So, thanks to Lauren for prompting me to return to Copper and Irons story. Thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage. And thank you to everyone else for the continued support!

Cheers, Fears!

Ko-Fi | Patreon | Etsy | Kindle | Skillshare| Threadless

Storms & Studios

LittleFears35 Comments

So I thought I’d share a photo of my not-Instagram-worthy studio today. Also, I thought I’d share what yesterdays Storm Deidre did to my new homes fence. Pssh. The fiend! The Fears are on hand to help drop a pallet on a salvageable panel that was pulling the rest of the fence down. Cheers Piscies and… Oh… Deer…

Now, there’s a studio pic. It’s a mish-mash of the cheapest furniture I could get with odd second-hand bits and bobs. It ain’t very stylish but it is very functional. The studio includes a spacious dog crate used as a desk extension (because apparently, my desk chair is nicer for pups to sit on).

The PC was a self-build and cost £300’ish for a 16gb ram, AMD Ryzen 3 2200G with a bunch of old hard drives in. I’ll cover the PC in a future post about the tech the Fears use.

I ended up with two small monitors instead of one big one. A £20 19″ monitor combined with a £4 “16 flat screen TV. Both second hand. The 16″ TV is absolutely dire. It has less than 720p resolution. The monitor is absolutely awesome. I know 19″ is too small for most people nowadays, but the picture is so darned crisp. It’s an odd one because I cannot find it listed anywhere. It has a 1920 x 1020 resolution. But no matter how much I search, I just cannot find any 19” monitors with a resolution that high. Maybe it was one of the first 1020p monitors that were too expensive to make? Whatever, It’s small, but I absolutely love it.

The lamps are of course, meant to help with future videos. The window doesn’t get much light as I’m around the back of the house. So when I’m videoing myself drawing I need every bit of light from my left that I can get.

Oh, that box against the back wall is a delivery of art-prints. I’ve had them nearly two weeks and haven’t gotten the buggers onto Etsy yet! Hopefully, this week…

Some hot-picks furniture links.

Phew. Ever put studio pics or other creative spaces photos online yourself? Leave us a link comments so we can have a perv over your own creative spaces and writing desks.

Fears at Work 2 – The WordPress update

LittleFears86 Comments

Have you tried the WordPress update yet? I notice a lot of people in comments are saying they’re scared of it but haven’t tried it yet. 

Well… Go try it. It’s an update that’s been coming for well over a year. We’ve had nearly a year to try Gutenberg, the new editor, to see if we like it or not. There are options for returning to classic editor, but ultimately, the new editor is coming (or here if you updated this weekend) and it’s here to stay. make a new account or if you self host, create a subdomain and use a fresh install of WordPress 5.0.

If you don’t like Gutenberg you can always try Medium.com for a brilliant writers website. From fiction to politics to lifestyle. It’s a social media built for writing and reading. If you need a homepage, try Squarespace, Wix or Weebly. 

In my opinion, the WordPress team are trying to make an editor that can in some way stand up to Squarespace’s and Wix’s website editors. It has a block functionality that allows you to add new and different things to your blog posts without the need for plugins or HTML. For some people, this new way of doing things is completely awesome. For others, it’s going to really mess with peoples workflow.

The old editor was pretty dated. Squarespace, Wix and Weebly have made website creation very accessible, WordPress was going to start losing a decent lump of new bloggers to the more modern website builders. Not everyone wants to learn HTML or website building to run a blog. Even if it’s just five minutes of their time. WordPress has always lagged behind in that respect.

The downside to this is you get people like me. I’ve been using WordPress to blog since 2004’ish. I’m well stuck in my ways. So the new editors an issue for me. I used WordPress because it was WordPress. Not a block-based web builder.

The reason my own website broke so completely is partly my fault. This website has broken numerous times over this last year and hasn’t even been fully fixed when I’ve done complete re-installs. So when updating to WordPress 5.0, it was a catalyst that blew up every bug, issue, code error and media problem I’ve had this last year. I back up once a month so had access to a folder with my media library, but when importing the websites XML it didn’t want to accept my media library was there. Even using plugins to re-attach all my media, I’m still having to go through and manually edit every single post.

I also have an issue with inline images no longer working unless made with the Gutenberg editor. So that little line of icons at the bottom of every post exploded across my screen and made a right mess. Again, every post on this site needs that edited out. 

My old theme also spat the dummy out and won’t function with WordPress 5.0 so I’ve spent a lot of today figuring out a new layout for the website. Almost there.

The amount of work I need to do on this website is going to take me weeks. It’s a horrific pain in the arse, that’s partially self-inflicted. I could have been far more prepared for this.

So, the thingy of this post. Don’t panic. There are good reasons why my website died so catastrophically. Gutenberg is coming. Like it or not. Go try it now. Don’t fear something you don’t understand. You might like it. You can revert to the classic editor through a plugin, but eh, Gutenberg is the way WordPress want things done now. Reviews on Gutenberg are pretty split. As is often the way with the Internet, it’s easier to rant than to praise.

One last thing. If you hate Gutenberg or find bugs, let the devs know. But have some humanity with it and don’t go abusing, threatening and being a dick to the developers. The internet doesn’t need any more abusive rage.

Stepping Sideways

LittleFears26 Comments

For the last forty-five days, I have been posting stand-alone doodles rather than my old panels. I’ve also been lacking videos. Mostly Inktober experimenting on what else can work for the Fears. I’ve come to the conclusion, mostly, it doesn’t.

I have really enjoyed doing them and I hope to post some of the larger pieces now and again. I think the smaller simpler pics would work better with a punchline on them. Like Modern Toss. A classic strip I love. It would also make the medium far more Internet shareable than my current image plus story text. I definitely need to sort and compartmentalize the Fears website before I start mixing them in though. They would out of place among the panel doodles.

Speaking of which. My old panels had a unique look and feel to them. They were a huge part of the Little Fears identity. The Fears all began with me doodling monsters on newspapers images. It’s a strong visual style I’ve really missed this last month. They’ll be making a return this week along with the videos.

I really didn’t do enough with the videos or work YouTube. As such, they never gained the following or views they should have. Now I have an office of sorts and a bit more time in the day I want to get back into making them. But, we can add in a few things. Sounds, some basic visual effects and with the longer stories, me. Sitting in a chair, a dog at my feet, a dog on my lap, biscuit in one hand, a cup of tea in the other and a book in the other hand. Narrating the tales via moustache movements. It’ll be awesome.

The last time I mentioned chair and dog based moustache narration I was asked if I’d narrate other peoples stories. Yeah, as long as it fits with what I do, I’d be up for that. Horror, humour or weird stuff. I’ll do a couple of my own first of course. Once I’m in the groove I’ll be up for narrating other folks stories.

After October, I was meant to begin a new story following Copper and Iron on a road trip through desolate Little Fears world. Filled with all the usual puns and a smidge of drama and horror. But I’m not sure if that’s going to work now. I ran some loose seven-story long arcs for Grey Moons days and then three thirty tale long story arcs for Lily and Sally. I think that was my limit on what I can get away with for longer narratives. The Copper and Iron road trip was penned at ninety stories long. Posting five a week that’s one story that’ll last four months. Would anyone follow the tale for that long? I doubt it. I’m not sure I would and I’m the one that posts them. So I’m going to go for some shorter stories and one-offs instead for a while. At least until I can separate stuff up on the website into storylines.

Oh god, that means tampering with the website again… Last time I did that I blew it up for 3 days and had to re-install everything. It’s still not working right either. Sigh I’ll get there. First things first though. Let’s see what Lucy’s been up too since visiting the Grey Moon bar all those months ago, in this weeks story, Levels. We’ll start with part one tomorrow.

In the meantime, if you love what I do, please consider clicking the links below where you can buy my books, art and tees. Or, drop a $1 into my tip jar on Ko-Fi or poke me on Patreon.

Fear filled books: amzn.to/2rVYXpC
Scary arts: etsy.com/uk/shop/LittleFears
Spooky tees: littlefears.threadless.com
The illustrators’ teacup: ko-fi.com/littlefears
Patrons to fear: patreon.com/littlefears

Thank you so much for following along on the Fears journey with me. I do hope you continue to enjoy seeing, reading and hearing my stories and doodles as much as I enjoy inflicting them upon you.

I mean telling them… Telling them to you… Kinda…

Cheers!

Door

LittleFears26 Comments

Introducing Door for this weeks #Colour_Collective. A cute wee missy, known for guarding a door. This weeks colour is Auburn.

The Little Fears website will be getting an overhaul this weekend. I adore my theme, layout, look and feel. But unfortunately, in Automatics infinite wisdom, their reader has never displayed featured images in their own WordPress reader. Baffling. Our largest followings can’t view our posts in full. This is a rather large job for me as it means I have to manually edit every post on the Little Fears to move the featured image to the first image in a post. 842 posts to be exact. Cripes. Wish me luck!

With special thanks

Weekly shout out to my $10 patron, Warren from IWrite. Without people like Warren, I wouldn’t be able to wake you all with my little fears and you’d probably cry a lot less in the morning than you already do. So please do check out Warrens blog.