#cubeservations

Bit of a mini rant, but I feel like I should probably put this out. I've been getting a lot of asks and messages from people saying they want to make their own art/writing, but their work isn't 'ready yet', or they need to 'polish it some more'. Now, there's nothing wrong with taking your work seriously and wanting it to be ready before you show people, but you have to be careful not to give in to perfectionism. Because 'perfect' isn't just the enemy of 'good', it's the nemesis of 'finished'.

The amount that you learn from 'tinkering' with a work is completely dwarfed by what you learn and gain from finishing a work. For example, here's the first comic that I ever posted to r/Deltarune when I was still starting out making fancomics:

Now I'm not 'ashamed' of this comic exactly, in fact, there are still a few things I like about it. HOWEVER: the linework is messy, the colour is bleeding around, both Kris and Susie's designs look really rough and completely unlike how I draw them now, and there's a superfluous tail to Susie's speech box that looks really 'odd', etc, etc. I could see 50% of these flaws BEFORE I posted it, but it was still 'finished', and so I swallowed my pride and posted it.

Was it a massive hit? No, not really, it did fairly mediocre numbers. BUT, by posting it, I had 'ripped the bandaid off', and I had some of my art out there for people to see! This encouraged me to improve and put more of my stuff out there.

Maybe your work isn't perfect, maybe it has some of the same flaws that I spoke about in my own work here, but you should post it ANYWAY. The only way to get better is to finish your work and show it to other people. You can spend ages in your own space training and perfecting your skills, but you'll never gain the experience that a body of work actually grants you, and you're more likely to become dissuaded by a lack of overwhelming praise and attention once you do share your work.

I've got

A fifteen-page Snowblind comic I want to ink/colour

A longform multi-entry fic that I want to finish part one of

A 'Christmas in July' party, my wife and I are putting on

AND a pitching meeting for my novel that I need to prep for

...I then saw a comment specifically saying they liked every other design EXCEPT mine.

Been getting absolutely nowhere with pitching my manuscript to agents so get a bit excited and compile a list of publishers and reps to pitch to once bookings open

Bookings open

Every single one of my chosen publishers and reps have been booked out because certain authors got early admission because they went to an event

Look for my secondary choices that aren't 'technically' accepting my genre but are accepting 'commerical fiction'

In the nano second it takes for me to find them they get booked out too.