#creative work

Someone may come to their parents and say "I want to write a book" and their parents will say "it's really hard to get published".

Someone might confide in their sibling and say "I want to sell my art on "x" platform" and that sibling will say "do you know how many people you'd be competing with? Do you know how many shops are even on that platform?"

I know a kid who once told his best friend "I think I wanna start a dnd podcast" and the friend was like "do you know what the word "oversaturation" means?"

Like, im a cartoonist. Just starting out, but already fairly successful! My comics are sold in a handful of states, i sell out of my works, and i even have been featured as a finalist in a couple awards shows AND have pieces bought by a cartooning museum. I still barely make a couple hundred per month off it IF IM LUCKY, and spend almost as much trying to print more. Oh yes, i have to print my own comics! And working for a big comic company, they generally require you to bring some level of your own equipment. Heck, even if you make it "big" as a cartoonist...you wanna know how much you get paid if your comic that you spent months of back-breaking labor on is adapted into a marvel movie? A one-time check for $5000. Out of the BILLIONS those movies make, in perpetuity for eternity, you are given $5k. Pre-tax. Pre-agent. Pre-lawyer. (Yes we have agents and lawyers too, quite often). There's hardly any cartoonists who can afford to quit their day jobs, and even those who do are never living above the lower middle class range.

🎉 Don't worry about making characters too over the top, or 'too much'.

🎉 Write characters who want big things.

🎉 Write characters with conflict between what they want and what they need.

🎉 Write characters who don't realize they are doing harm.

🎉 Write characters who don't know how to communicate well.

🎉 Write characters with people they love in the way of what they want.

🎉 Write characters with amazing abilities who use them in ways that unintentionally fuck them over.

I was shocked to find these very early lyric ideas for November, written in (I believe) early 2011. I didn’t finish writing it till 2016, then recorded it in bits and pieces from 2020-2023, and finally released it in October 2023.

On the fourth page, the “I think you think / I think too much” part is what became the instrumental between the first section and the “can’t pick them out” section. Sometimes the melodies for lyrics I don’t use end up becoming instrumentals (that also happened in Japanese Garden, for example).

The squiggle on the last line, before the word “touch,” means “touch” was the last word in a line where I didn’t yet have any other words (and I guess never did).

On the second page, I like how I crossed out “Meaningless”

Be kind to your older works, ‘kay? They aren’t bad. They aren’t stupid. They aren’t even cringe.

They are a snapshot of the best you could do at the time 💖

and when I did complete solo projects, I felt like I had to ask other people to review them before I sent them out. I needed that stamp of approval from someone in my circle before I had confidence in my own work. don't let this get you. send them out.