Artists tend to ride the same storm in different boats – but the metaphor has merit. Artist is a broad term. It covers a wide range of creative endeavors. Writers, painters, sculptors, singers, actors, knitters, and on and on. Lots and lots of creative professionals are artists. Ironically, professional artist is a career often look…
Just because I am not a known quantity – I am not nobody. There are a lot of well-known authors out there. Many write in the same genres that I do. George RR Martin. Neil Gaiman. Andy Weir. Arthur C. Clark. Isaac Asimov. I’m sure you’ve heard of one if not all of them. For…
Communities are important for people who live inside their heads. Many artists – particularly writers, painters, sculptors, woodworkers, and the like – mostly work solo. What we do is inside of our heads – and the product of that are the articles, books, paintings, statuary, and various other creations we produce. When you largely work…
Workspace maintenance is important. I have yet to meet an artist who doesn’t have at least some clutter in their workspace. Some of them are necessary tools. Cooks have pots, pans, and utensils lying around; artists have scattered brushes, paints, solvents, and canvases; writers have notes, inspirational baubles, and the like around their desks. Sure,…
Choosing to be a professional artist has some unique challenges. All my career choices have been artistic. In one form or another, I was bound to be a professional artist. I am in no way bragging here – but I have a few different artistic talents and skills. It started with writing. At age 9,…
The speed you do your work at is the pace that’s right for you. For a long time, apart from regular blogs, my writing pace was nigh on glacial. Granted, there were fits of intense writing where I went multiple days at a time creating my work. But then they’d be followed by days, weeks,…
Sci-fi and sci-fantasy share many things – but differ in key ways. At nearly 5 years old, in May of 1977, my parents took me to see a movie that would shape my life in a lot of different ways. The opening theme boomed, the famous text crawl scrolled up, and then a ship came…
Our mindset, when it comes to working, is terribly skewed. I set a goal for myself to write a minimum of one blog post/article and 1500 words of fiction a day, six days a week. Because of a strict, self-imposed deadline – and, frankly, endless topics to choose from – I never miss the blog….
Never fear – but embrace your imagination. Even the most fictional notion of the imagination can change the world. All the modern technology that we take for granted was not-so-long-ago naught but the product of someone’s imagination. And I mean all the tech – because for about 500 years the progress of humankind was relatively…
How much time you take to create your art is irrelevant. The creation of any given art is a process. How much time it takes to create art is an often controversial, yet deeply personal matter. This can be particularly disempowering in the ultra-fast, have-it-done-yesterday society we live in. How many competitions do we see…
