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.
A very fluffy yellow portrait for this weeks #colour_collective. This week’s colour is Cadmium Yellow Pale.
Getting near the end of an alphabet with these names. I need to give this gal a name beginning with Y. Yuri? Yelli? Yurellow? Help me out here gang! haha.
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.
WordPress needs to have a parent page for drop-down menus on the website. So we needed a new Shop & Tip Jar page. Following advice I was given long ago, ‘artist, market thyself!’ Main page link: littlefears.co.uk/shop
“You’re right,” replied Fluffeh, “we have multiple shopping outlets and experiences for our fans.”
“Multiple!” gasped Masks. “I know we might get accused of marketing if you answer this out loud, but where can I visit these Fear filled shops and experiences?”
“Well,” pondered Fluffeh, “a lot of things, but obvious examples would be designing posters, creating unique logos, writing articles or creating book covers.”
“How many more ways can the illustrator say “said”?” asked Masks.
“I don’t think we should test that,” replied Fluffeh.
“I guess not,” laughed Masks. “But listen, if there was a way of personally supporting the illustrator, how would I do that?”
“You can visit his Patreon or Ko-Fiand drop a dollar or two into his tip jar,” said Fluffeh.
“Do you think anyone’s going to read all this?” asked Masks.
“Probably not,” sighed Fluffeh. “But you know the illustrator. He ain’t writing a normal shop and tip jar page.”
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!
Little Fears 