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part of being productive is disciplining yourself to do work. a great way to discipline yourself is to give yourself deadlines.

see where i'm going here? i now think it was a little arrogant of me to say i was above deadlines... and actually, i don't think it's such a bad thing to turn in mediocre work. as art teachers tell you, everybody is full of 23 million terrible sketches. you have to get them out.

there might be a "Progress" essay in this.

PROKOFIEV2000 wrote:part of being productive is disciplining yourself to do work. a great way to discipline yourself is to give yourself deadlines.

I can confirm that when I was canned from the school newspaper (and thus removed from the obligation of deadlines), my strip became as irregular as my Grandpa (who has been dead for more than 25 years).

PROKOFIEV2000 wrote:see where i'm going here? i now think it was a little arrogant of me to say i was above deadlines... and actually, i don't think it's such a bad thing to turn in mediocre work. as art teachers tell you, everybody is full of 23 million terrible sketches. you have to get them out.

Yeah, work 'em out with a pencil!

PROKOFIEV2000 wrote:there might be a "Progress" essay in this.

Excellent.

Hurrah for QPQ 3 days a week!

I didn't want to say anything at the time - as it would've been unkind to encourage you to set deadlines if you really didn't want to draw that much - but I find that the more comics I ask myself to do, the more I actually can and want to do.

That said, I'm going to end up going weekly for a while when I go to university. God knows what that'll do to my productivity.

yeah... it's weird, though. my ideas come to me either effortlessly (accidentally) or laboriously (intentionally), nothing in between. predictably, my best ideas are the formers... today's strip i essentially wrote as i was walking through the Panera parking lot to my car yesterday. i don't have the skill to write reliably on schedule; for me it's not really 'brainstorming' so much as standing out in the field with a lightning rod.

so this is why i thought it would be a great idea a few weeks ago to renounce deadlines. my laziness sort of caught up with me though. oh well.. experiment that didn't work.

i enjoy drawing comics much more than i enjoy writing them, so these problems are sort of damning. sometimes i wish i were collaborating with a writer, but even so, a comic strip done by a single person can be quite special.

Deadlines are my motivator as well. If I didn't feel the need to produce on a weekdaily basis I'd probably never get anything done at all.

Good to see QPQ back!