The Little Fears presents: Grey Moon, has now been released! Boom! And in case you missed the post title, the ebook is free for five days. The fifth book in the Little Fears presents series follows an all-female cast of Little Fears as they figure out their place in the world in-between, explore love and discuss picnics with alpacas. All within the confines of the Grey Moon bar. A wee bit of shpiel for you.
If anything is going to save the Little Fears from awful punch lines, it’s not an alpaca with a duck on its back. In Grey Moon, Great British groaners are the order of the day as the assembled Little Fears make their way through 84 tales of ornithology, penguins, rum, love and splinters. Reala offers an Animal Cracker; A pigeon races an aunt; A Roman makes a scene; Yuffie gets hitched; Fuen walks 500 miles. Written and posted with scruffy illustrations daily on LittleFears.co.uk. These brief vignettes (50 to 100 words) chronicle the continuing adventures of the Little Fears. With only a sense of whimsy and a deep love of old British comedy, Grey Moon will make you groan, cry and laugh until a bit of wee comes out, in a truly original, unoriginal, work of art and fiction.
Sounds typical Fears aye? This is the last book I wrote without thinking in terms of writing a book. If you’d like to grab a copy, go to the Kindle edition, it should show as £0.00 to buy. Grab it at that price and its free forever. If you enjoy it, please do leave me a review. Y’all know a 5 star helps an author.
OK, so, it looks like the sale of my house falls through after four months. ShitBuggerBumFart. I wasn’t prepared for my run of bad luck to continue into 2018. No worries. I’m now plotting out where the Fears, work, finances and I go or the next six to twelve months.
On the upside for the Fears fans, a series of plans that I had been delaying will now be crashing into effect this next couple of weeks. We have a Threadless free shipping sale. Digital rewards for my Patrons. The Little Fears studio, in which I offer design work. Including logos, book covers, website banners and anything else the Fears can help with. A new shop on this site where you can purchase my canvas paper Little Fears art prints. More Skillshare classes and of course, the release of the next Little Fears presents book, Grey Moon.
Hold your horses before you dash off to Amazon. As always, with the release of a new book, I will be giving the ebook away free for five days. The free ebook is intended for Little Fears followers and subscribers, a thank you for the continued support you all give me. You ladies, gents and those in-between are fecking awesome. Grey Moon is officially released, and free on Amazon, from Friday the 9th of February. I will post links to the Grey Moon ebook on the day.
My preview book arrived. My house sale date may have also come. I intended to spend a week reading through Grey Moon a hundred times before I released it Monday 5th of February. I don’t know if I have time for that now, so you all may have to wait a couple of months until I have a new house before I have time and a decent internet connection to release it. Sorry! In the meantime, yeah, Reala look pretty handsome as the leading lady.
Maya & Seth
I mentioned a couple of weeks back, Maya got me into a marketing course with Seth Godin. Holy heck is it hard! It narrows down who you are, what you do and what change you want to make. A slice of the course.
“My goal is to help people start the day with a smile.”
I want to make people grin in the morning. Make them groan at an awful cheesy punchline or give an “oooh” to a Twilight Zone’esqe plot twist. Help people start the day right. Like that first cup of tea (or coffee) of the day. Where you take a sip and say “good grief, I needed that.”
This Saturday at 9 pm UK time, Amberley (who won’t make lemonade), Alex, Layne and I will be watching the Twilight Zone episode, Cold Fusion. Followed at 9:30 pm UK time, by Theatre of Puppets, read by CreepsMcPasta. We’ll prattle along as always during the showing. If you’d like to join is, poke me on Twitter and I’ll be sure to @ you so you get in on the conversation early.
Properly surprised at how many people have taken the class and that it has a 100% rating. Apparently, this technique is more helpful than I gave it credit for. It’s going to remain free until the 1st of February. Once you have enrolled, it’s free to access for life.
A short, 11-minute class, using free software, to do exactly what it says on the tin. It’s free for the last week of January. Once you enrol in the class it’s free for life. In February it will be switched to premium. Premium access to Skillshare costs as little as $0.99 for the first 3 months and gives you access to thousands of classes on everything from writing characters, social media and watercolour painting.
I am a prolific doodle. I love doodling. On the list of everything, I do in life, doodling ranks quite highly. There’s something about doodling. It helps me relax, focus, create new characters and honestly, I’m a simple man, I don’t own much stuff, so doodling gives me something to do at home other than watch the telly and play on my smartphone.
Now every so often I doodle up a new monster that I want to use in one of my Little Fears projects. It could be an art print a Threadless t-shirt or a Colour Collective portrait on Twitter. So I take my doodles into the free graphics software program, GIMP, and turn them into high resolutions .pngs that I can mix up into whatever project I happen to have that week.
Do you doodle as well? Have you ever drawn a simple image and thought, man, if that were tidied up a bit, I’d love that as a website banner? But do your eyes glaze over when someone mentions raster vs vector? If that sounds like you, this course may be of help.
There is still no #Colour_Collective so a wee update on what’s to come over the next few months on the Fears website.
The preamble, I’m still in the process of selling my home with no end date in sight. Post sale, I’ll have 2-3 months of rented accommodation, or I’ll be at the missus family home. Not a suitable working environment and both will have, at best, my phones 3g internet with Scottish hills reception. A lot of my plans are on hold until I get the new house and some control over my creative setting.
Two things I want to release before I move. First, my next Skillshare course. How to turn a doodle into high-resolution digital graphics. No scanners required and the technique uses free software. I’ll offer the class free of charge for one week then set it to premium. A handy course for anyone that doodles that’d like a new social media avatar, blog banner or an interest in Threadless and Society 6. I use this method to make my book covers, art prints and Threadless tees.
Skillshare Premium gets you access to the entire website for as little as $0.99, not just my lessons. It just means I get a few pennies from students.
The second thing I’d love to get released is the next book, Grey Moon. Currently waiting on Amazon for that. Not sure when I’m going to get the first copy of the book, and I need a week or two to check it over a hundred times before release.
You may have also noticed a minor drop in posting frequency. I’m currently spending as much time as I can on building a library of videos on my laptop so I don’t need to do them in the 2-3 months where I will have no privacy. At one per day, I need between 90 and 120 videos to fully cover me for three months. For anyone who has ever done video creation, you know how much time that takes.
Semi-related, after this week’s YouTube announcement, I am not entirely keen on uploading to YouTube long term. I may need to take a leaf out of Miles & Crawford’s book and start uploading to audio/podcast sites like Podbean and Soundcloud. I would have never had a chance of YouTube monetisation myself. My videos are too short to get views counted correctly. It’s not just WordPress that can’t do stats right. But after all the drama of Logan the week before, YouTube responded by stepping on the small YouTuber while raising up the big’uns like Logan. I always felt YouTube represented an idea that anyone could have a go. Everyone can still have a go, but YouTube will make it hard for you unless you make it big. Not an ideology I like.
ComicsExplained has a trending video on why he’s looking at Patreon and other options. I, unfortunately, do not read comics anymore, except for the odd webcomic. Certainly nothing mainstream. But what he says about YouTubes decision reflects how I feel about the situation.
The last thing in this update is my schedule for the next three months and beyond.
Until I have my new house, possibly three months away, I’ll be dropping to one story per day and one blog post per week. I hope to keep roughly on this schedule.
Monday – Capricorn horror story
Tuesday – Grey Moon story
Wednesday – Grey Moon story
Thursday – Grey Moon story
Friday – January story, with new video
Saturday – Little Fears, Big Update
Sunday – Spiders story, with new video
Once I have moved, I can return to the busier schedule with my posts returning to the same level as the last few months. Seven new stories. Three old stories with new videos. One big update. One art/work in progress post. One long-form story. One blog on blogging or creativity. All of that, every week. Soooo many puns and punchlines!
Thank you very much, everyone, for sticking with me. You’re an awesome rabble of groaning, pun-loving and horror laughing oddballs.
I know those aren’t hugely comparable because I’m comparing Instagram likes vs WordPress views. Kinda interesting though. Not a single shared post between them. It’s nice to see a product shot in the top nine of Instagram. Also, horror seems to be more popular there?
Have you done BestNine yourself? Feel free to link to your Instagram or blog post below.
I have written and deleted this post six times. The fifth time it was 4,000 words long detailing my entire last year. An overwhelming urge to vent to the internet at large can take you sometimes, can’t it? That post had no place here.
The abridged version.
My 2017 has been pretty catastrophic. Land Registry lost the lease to my home. It’s wiped out my life savings getting a new one made. Just existing this year has cost me £70,000. $120,000 in American? I haven’t seen my missus or my dogs since July. My house sale’s on the rocks. If it falls through I may not see her for another four months or more. On account of property law issues, when my house does sell I’m going to have a three month period of limbo in rented accommodation and 3G internet in the Scottish hills. Three months is a lifetime on the internet. That’ll wipe out all the progress I have made with the Little Fears. I’ll be posting once a day, but I’ll be doing no marketing. Bandwidth will be restricted to one gig per month. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to leave comments on blogs or Twitter with that sort of restriction.
At the end of 2016, I was at the lowest point in my life. At the end of 2017, I’m worse off with no savings, and I don’t know how long it’ll be this way.
2017 doesn’t have me beat. I learned something. It’s possible to make £600 a month from the Little Fears as they are today. Currently taking four hours a day, six days a week. Once I have moved home, £600 will cover all of my bills. I can then drop my freelance work and odd jobs, which I currently can’t live without, and focus entirely on the Fears to lift £600 to a reasonable wage.
That’ll be awesome. I’ll be back with my partner and animals. Switching my flat in London for a 2-3 bedroom house in the Scottish mountains. Dedicating all my time to making people groan, cry and fear filled. You all know I have ideas for the Fears. I’ve probably had and forgotten more plans than I will ever manage to put into action.
I have dreams, hope and Fears. The future is bright.
From all the Little Fears and the illustrator, happy new year!
Quite like sharing my doodle pages, this may become a regular thing. A weekly page share. With some separated and digitized Fears to show where some of my doodles go.
Digitized Doodles
A bit rough, let’s digitize them. I’ve been wondering what I can offer Patreons recently. I could offer monthly postcards from the world in-between. More in keeping with the daily doodles on photos than art prints, but printed on a top-notch 220gsm card stock, post-card size. I could also offer the digitized monsters to Patreons to download. Patreon subscribers could vote on which they want out of a months worth of selection. I’d then send them a link to download the creature and do what they want with them. Non-commercial of course.
Thorny
Have you ever heard of a Tarasque? I think I had. Maybe from 80s Dungeons and Dragons. Yep, ya knew I was gonna be a D&D player right in my yoof right? Anywho, I think that’s where I had the mental image of this gal. Nobody mention the size of her bottom…
Wasp
A reappearance of Screeches head, but this time with a wasp’s stingy tail. If #Colour_Collective have a yellow theme again, I can fill in her segments yellow and she can go full stingy-stingy grr grr.
Terror-Dactyl
Speaking of #Colour_Collective, this week it’s white. While I was digitizing TD here, I tried inverting her colours. White body and red eyes. That’ll be this week’s portrait then.
I couldn’t help but google Terror-Dactyl. Turns out there’s an awful looking horror movie of the same name. Terrible special effect. Woeful plot. Made for TV I imagine… That’ll be a future film to suggest to Layne and Alex for a Saturday Twitter movie then…
The lady looks good on a Tee too. Maybe the next addition to my Threadless store. I have a lack of tees that would look good in black.
Pens & Paper
Switched over to the Kuretake Zig this week for the black. I do love my Posca’s but I can’t wait to be reunited with my supplies drawer. Six pots of Tipp-Ex await. Scruffy, messy and the mini cheese wedge brush. That’s my white that is!
A super short post, with some handy courses and links below. A comment to Mr Bongdoogle about Threadless the other day.
Ahh, OK. The service has been great. The quality took a drop about May this year on the Tees, however, it’s still the best out there along with Society 6.I can’t stand Zazzle and CafePress who use paper thin, Fruit of the Loom and Gildan. My sales are about 95% tees and 5% prints. I don’t know why the prints don’t sell from Threadless. I think I need to make a return to Etsy for the art prints and keep the Threadless store as tees. My store shows I have never had a returned item to Threadless.
Between Threadless, Redbubble and Society 6, there’s not much difference. I’m going to stick with my Threadless store as I still feel the Tee quality is good and I get regular sales from it. I get between $3-$5 per sale, Threadless get the rest.
For my art prints, they will return to my Etsy store. I do have some sexy as feck canvas effect 220gsm art print card. It looks awesome and everybody at markets loves them. If anyone has any requests, let me know in comments. Also, Layne, I haven’t forgotten about Cloud and Barn!
If you want to visit my Threadless store, click here.
If you want to visit my Etsy store, it’ll be back in a few days, link pending.
Below are a couple of courses from Jeff Staple. A creative entrepreneur who’s dabbled in t-shirt design.
Between his global streetwear brand Staple Design and renowned retail store Reed Space, jeffstaple has designed and sorted through thousands of t-shirts over the past two decades.
In this class, he celebrates the power of the “tee” by providing insights on how to concept, design, and manufacture a shirt that can form the foundation of your business.
This class is perfect for aspiring fashion entrepreneurs, designers, and everyone looking to spread a message in one of the most effective ways: a t-shirt. Learn everything you need to know about the types of tees available and what to expect when you dive in to making them.
As an added bonus, students who submit their actual t-shirt creations in the class have the opportunity to get purchased and placed in jeff’s store, Reed Space.
In this non-traditional class, you’ll gain access to a series of interviews that cover essential topics for the creative entrepreneur like marketing, design, and branding. These interviews were originally part of an initiative called The Board, which is a group of 100 creators that are working together to redefine the K-Swiss brand.
Blogger Natalie Suarez sits down with some top creative entrepreneurs to go through their experience building their businesses. You’ll learn from:
Sharmadean Reid, founder of WAH Nails over in London, will provide some pointers on developing your business plan.
Scott Sasso, founder of 10Deep here in New York, will speak on brand positioning, which will allow your consumers to distinguish your brand/business from everybody else.
Tyler Gage and Dan Mccombie – founders of Runa Tea, a tea company supporting indigenous farmers in the Amazon. They’ll give some tips on building community and conscience into your business.
The Fat Jewish, everyone’s favorite instagrammer, who gives some insight on social media strategy and how you can leverage today’s platforms to build your brand.
Rachel Wang, fashion director of Allure Magazine, speaks on the importance of your lookbook and Brand Imagery as a product company.
Jeff Staple provides tips on telling a story through your products.
K-Swiss is committed to outfitting and inspiring this generation of entrepreneurs. For additional creative inspiration and product updates, make sure to follow the brand on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The lead Fear of this weeks update. Awwww, the littlest of little fears. A teensy fear for this weeks #Colour_Collective.
Walker
The creature I showed off earlier this week. She’s now on a tee over on my Threadless store and she’s available from $12.95.
Semi-related, I’ll be sharing my experience selling tees on Threadless for Monday’s process blog post. If you have any questions about Threadless, let me know, and I’ll get them on the Monday blog.
Head on over to Patreon and pledge $10 or more a month and not only will you help with Hydra’s feed bill, but you will also get that weekly shout out with a link back to your site. https://www.patreon.com/littlefears
The second thing I’d love to get released is the next book, Grey Moon. Currently waiting on Amazon for that. Not sure when I’m going to get the first copy of the book, and I need a week or two to check it over a hundred times before release.
Little Fears 