2014-07-16_oneway_9hgd2

Not a lot new in the last two days. Just working. Hung out with some writer friends and ate apple cobbler. No complaints.

Been thinking a lot about a quote a friend of mine posted online.

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”      —-Frederick Douglass

And I think there is a lot of truth in that, but also, it made me think about creating art. As an artist, I find the internal struggle similar. To keep learning and growing, you need to be willing to leave the familiar, to create things you don’t desire and which are out of your comfort zone, you need to avoid the the trap of repeating what you’re bored of simply because it is marketable. The limits of your craft are prescribed by the the endurance of the desire to cling to the familiar.

Anyhow. In my head a bit. Good times.

Oh, and don’t forget I have a PATREON site!

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07/16/14 Just A Nap

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7 Comments

  1. Oh, and sorry, the RSS feed seems to be down. Working on that one.

  2. The RSS worked fine on Newsblur.

    And it’s good to see someone being a bit more careful about leaving people outside the ship.

  3. I’m not saying Orion is an alien, but… She’s an alien. She sleeps too much.

    Chris, while you’re fixing the RSS feed, you might want to check on the missing followup email checkboxes.

  4. Struggle on, boss. Many writers seem to have just one story in them, which they keep telling over and over.

  5. Struggle in art is a good thing. I’ve seen too many potentially great artists find a gimmick that is “adequate” and never go beyond that. Strip artists do have the challenge of continuity, but many of the best have grown/evolved their style/designs to even greater success. Finding an idea/effect and running it out is a fine good thing, recognizing when it has run its course and anything further goes into repetitive hack work can be the tricky part.

  6. Or the quote could read; “You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein

  7. Coyoty, some people sleep 4 hours, other 10 hours and most of us 8 hours. Also anxiety can put you into sleeping too. So “alien” is the wrong word in my opinion.

    You can’t enslave a free man or woman unless they give up. But most won’t fight to the death. Now that would make it real hard to gain slaves. Even during the heyday of slavery fear of insurrection and rebellion were constant in the “Land of the Free.”

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