I like keeping my creative bank account full and fresh, so I'm always on the look out for cool/interesting/thought provoking/inspiring stuff. To keep track of it, I'm posting it here on my blog, so that a) I can access it easily, and b) so you can benefit from it too.
In that same spirit, if you run into anything you think I might like please share it with me, either in the comments or via my contact page. Thanks!
Okay, here's 5 cool things that came across my screen recently:
1) Roald Dahl’s Letter of Advice to a Young Writer.
Always interesting to see what advice successful creative people have for amateurs. Lessons learned from this brief exchange:
1 - Don't ask too much of them. You should have already studied their work, and the work that they studied to get where they are. Once you've done that, if there's any gaps in your understanding you can ask for them to fill that for you.
2 - Do your homework on the person you're contacting so you don't ask them for information that is already readily available. When you only have one shot to talk to someone you look up to you don't want to waste it on something that you already had access to.
I had no idea these things actually existed. What a brutal weapon! The ingenious part is connecting the cannon balls with a chain. Might be cool to put something like this in SkyHeart...I'm thinking on a bigger scale. Maybe the tengru use a massive version of this to level cities?
3) Yareta, the 3000 years old plant
Another thing I never knew existed! This was brought to my attention by Rebecca Dart who shared this on her twitter feed. Pretty cool to know that stuff like this grows on our planet. Might be good reference for an alien civilization. I can imagine tiny villages built on these plants, with little alien farmers harvesting them for food.
4) "I feared releasing something unimportant, so I didn’t release anything at all."
Short read about allowing your ego to get in the way of you putting something out into the world. I think they nail it. If you haven't created something and shared it with people in a long while, could this be the reason?
5) How to Work in Comics? The “Don’t Break In” Panel
I was a part of a panel at Emerald City and Comics Beat did a nice write up of it. In the panel we unpacked the idea of making comics on your own as a way to "break in" to the comic industry. Jason Brubaker, Lucy Bellwood, and I have all had success self publishing our comics. A great discussion, and really nice to hear three different perspectives on this topic.
That's it for this week. See you next time.
Jake
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