No matter what you write, draw or create, people who view, read or watch what you’ve made will often come away with a different view than yourself.
My triffids have been seen as Demagogues (I still haven’t seen Stranger Things). They were also recently compared to a wind farm (hah, yes!).
At markets, when you see people face to face, you often find out where your art is headed. Red’s a popular one for children’s bedrooms. The insect queen gets compared to the Spotify logo (crab nabbit, she originally had an orange head and nobody said a thing!) Leo goes to cat lovers and Fuen and the chicks just get everywhere.
But the one that always baffles me, is the Buglies are regularly bought for kitchens.
I don’t… Get it… I mean, I kinda do. They’re cute, fun and playful. But why the kitchen? Do people see them and say, “oh hey, big insects! Maybe they’ll scare the mice off!” Why buy them to hang in the kitchen?
Well, if you want to hang a pack of bugs in your kitchen, or if you just enjoy my ham-fisted marketing posts, you can find them at the Little Fears Etsy store: etsy.com/uk/shop/LittleFears
OK, as usual, we have a new Threadless design available on hoodies, pullovers, tanks and a gazillion types of tees in a gazillion colours. Prices start at $15 a tee.
Not, as usual, Threadless is running a free shipping deal on orders over $45 across all designs. Get in!
According to my new header banner thing, Get Free Shipping! Use Code “FREESHIP3197cca8e” Order minimum $45. Ends Mar 31 ’19 11:59PM CDT.
The one thing I’ve refined is the brief. I feel getting everyone on the same page is insanely important at the start. I always worry it sounds super serious, but most people comment on how helpful the first email is. Awesome.
Set out your goals together. Outline what you want from the person/people involved. If you need to set deadlines at the beginning, do so in the brief. Ensure everyone knows of any word counts, genres, post types, social media sharing requirements and required image sizes are laid out from the start.
Someone once asked me to collaborate with them giving almost no guidance. “Draw me an image showing *XYZ*,” he asked. So I did. Took me 30 minutes, scanned it, sent it over. He replied, “not enough colour.”
God damn. Could you not have told me that before I spent 30 minutes drawing something for you? Suffice to say, I walked away from that one.
The flip side of this. If you send someone a specific set of instructions and they ignore them, send you completely unwanted content or repeatedly ask you questions answered in the brief, you know that collaboration will be more trouble than it’s worth.
I’m still taking names for collaborations, but that’s not the aim of this post. If you want to collaborate with me, please email me at fears@gmx.co.uk BEFORE you write anything. I don’t mean that to sound rude or mean, but, well… You know…
The aim of this post is meant to be informative and a sharing of a process. With that, I thought I’d share my current brief for the Sunday collaborations. This goes out in an email to everyone who’s interested in collaborating with me. It changes over time. People ask questions on all sorts of things and I adapt my initial email to include all answers I can.
Feel free to copy/cut/paste/tear apart/rehash for use anywhere for yourself. I figure it’s helpful to see how people run collaborations.
Dear Sir/Madam/Alien/Demon/Puppdawg
(Something personal to each collaborator goes in this space, and then…)
The Goal
I’m trying to break up my constant telling of my own tales by bringing in a Sunday collab in which readers submit their own fearful tales. I love what I do, I just want to mix it up a bit. As for yourself, I’m hoping this will be a fun jaunt into the Fears world for yourself and give you a bit of exposure (urgh, the E word!).
The Collab
I’d love for you to write a story up to 512 characters long. I’ll draw the panel and make a video for the story. I post it to the LittleFears.co.uk and share it across all my social media. I’ll include links to your blog or social media of your choosing in every post.
The Story
There’s no specific genre I would like. Humor, kooky, philosophical and horror all fit. Whether it has a punchline or not, if you could imagine it being an episode of the Twilight Zone, Outer Limits or Black Mirror, then your spot on.
The length should be under 512 characters. It’s not an arbitrary limit. But I’m hoping this can be fast and fun for both of us. No 12 page essays are required.
You’re more than welcome to use my characters or make up your own. The only characters that I do not want a story written for are Copper and Iron because they’re part of an ongoing story.
Once it’s written, get it over to me via email, social media direct message or however else you fancy.
The Image & Video
I’ll then draw up a panel for the story and email it to you. If you’re happy with it, I’ll make a video. I’ll email you the audio along with social media specific panels (such as a Pinterest long image). If everything is good with you, we’ll get onto posting.
The Scheduling & Post
When all the contents made and agreed we can decide what Sunday we want to post it. If you want to post the story, image and video on your blog too, we can schedule a specific time and synchronize the posting with links to each other’s posts.
In the post, I’ll include a link to your blog/social media of choice. When the story is posted, I’ll share it across all of my social media with links to you in everyone. My total audience is about 80k followers and subscribers, so I’ll hope you get a bit of exposure from it (urgh, the E word again!).
If you would like to include a link to my site or share the post across your platforms, that’d be awesome, but certainly not required.
The Next Bit
If you’re up for this, please do let me know and start writing a story. Again, any questions, queries or anything else, please do drop me a line and a query.
Thanks
Peter
Phew, right. I hope ya’ll learned something. Hey, if you did learn something super helpful, you can buy me a cuppa tea on my Ko-Fi page. The Little Fears are fueled by tea, and without it, we can’t survive.
“You’re a fool,” sighed Lucy. “There are some things even I don’t mess with. Aeya is among those things.”
~
A creepy lady with a bushy tail for a Saturday doodles.
I can imagine her being as tall as a skyscraper. Unseen by the human eye. Floating down city streets. Peering in windows. Filling workers with dread. Draining their souls without them knowing. More so than their 9 to 5s…
I’m hoping you’ve all noticed I’ve had a guest/collaboration every Sunday for the last month. It’s something I’d like to continue. It’s an enjoyable break from my own work for me and folks seem to like hearing readings and seeing doodles of their own stories.
We love horror, humour and weird stuff. Think of Christopher Lee and Lucille Ball having a child. In a haunted house. In the Twilight Zone. With a laugh track stuck on ‘groan’.
I always give full credit and link backs to anyone who does a story for me. I also send a pile of artwork/audio/social media friendly things back to whoever writes us a post. If you’re interested in writing a story for the Fears, leave me a comment below or drop me an email to fears@gmx.co.uk and I can get the specifics of what’s needed over to you.
It’s a simple skill. Dead easy! I taught a Skillshare lesson on it while practising my screen recording. How to convert a hand-drawn doodle into a digital graphic. (link! skl.sh/2G40lMs ).
It currently has 237 students with 100% review.
Wait… What? You mean this simple skill isn’t common knowledge? This silly little course is helpful and well rated? Huh… Who’d of thunk it…
But hey, there’s a lesson there right. Sometimes, if you work really hard, you too can be a sunflower.
No, wait, that’s not it…
If you put a character everywhere, you can fill a blog post with stupid amounts of links (link! littlefears.co.uk/?p=8458 ).
No… That’s still not it…
It’s something more like, we all have little skills we take for granted. Try putting them out there.
Also, this course is a premium course. Except for the next 48 hours. For the next 48 hours, it’s free. FREE! Enrol in the course, for free, any time before Wednesday evening and it’s free for life.
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.
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.
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.
I get a lot of emails from people asking for help with their blogs/writing/art/portfolio sites.
My first response is to always ask “what’s your end goal?”
If the answer is “I have no end goal, I just love doing what I do,” that’s awesome. I have no advice to give. Just keep doing what you’re doing and enjoy it.
If you do have an end goal, my advice would be different depending on what answer you give. I had a little ramble about this last night when I was doing yesterdays story panel.
A healthy dose of Aubergine this week for #Colour_Collective. On reflection, I should have made the face off-white. Textures on flat black or white are always rubbish.
No name for this lady. Also, no need to fill out the alphabet anymore. So I can name her whatever I want. Erm… That’s harder than having to pick a name to a specific letter, haha.
Well, not mine. Another free course on Skillshare find today.
James Stafford has just released a new class, and it’s free. He teaches blogging and has taught a few courses before. His student counts are into the thousands and his previous courses are well rated.
His new course has an SEO heavy title, so here we go.
Son of a monkey badger, that’s a title… I’ve watched a bit of it and he’s using WordPress and Gutenburg. So it’s pretty relevant to a lot of my WordPress subscribers.
The parts I watched so far were mainly about SEO. My word, that’s something I need help with! I’ve never ranked well for SEO. My front page has no text on so Google down-rates me. I don’t work at all to counteract that on individual posts and pages. So I’ll be returning to this course tomorrow to take it in better.
In the meantime, head over to Skillshare via the link below to get this course and two free months of Skillshare premium.
Little Fears 