Vlog: 20170408 - Collaboration! (Patreon)

Yayyy managed to get one recorded before poisoning myself this week LOL

Transcript below:

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Okay, hello patrons it is Saturday! I'm trying this time to do my recording on Saturday instead of Sunday since that didn't work out so well last time... [ok good my dictation is working]

So I wanted to say hi. This week I went to the warehouse and moved a ton of books and a ton of Kickstarter stuff from my apartment to the warehouse. And that way it was able to join all of the new stuff that's been produced. I got to see the box for the first time-- [ah!... Well I showed it on Twitter, it's all the way over there] the box looks awesome, it fits the books great and it works really well. I'm so happy with it! It is really a dream come true. But boxes are done, books are done, (books one four and five). I dropped off bunch three, a bunch of two are coming, then they have the magnets, the pins, the stickers, the signed bookplates...! So much stuff! So it's really exciting to see it all come together and were gonna move into the final phase and that's exciting. It's been a long road.

Hopefully you've been enjoying the answers to the engineering questions that I asked you guys for last week. (Or I guess two weeks ago...) I've managed to post a couple of them. It's been nice to have something to dig into that isn't as stressful as some of these new projects I'm developing because when you're at the bottom of a big hill, let's say, it can be much much harder to get started knowing how much work there is to do. It's very daunting, and when you're already overworked and overstressed, it can be really difficult to get yourself motivated to do a little a work on something very big and it feels better to do a lot of work on something very small. (If that makes sense...) I have a few more questions that are gonna be posting next week, I think, if I manage to get them done. [I don't know if you can hear Trevor, he's on his discord server] 

And I am-- this weekend I think my big task that I'm gonna have to tackle is unfortunately taxes... which is so fun right? I always envy my friends who get their T-4 and are able to type that in and send it along, so easy and great. Because of the complexities of being a self-employed person it takes a lot of time investment and I won't say more than that but it's going to keep me from drawing I think for a little while longer... but we'll see, fingers crossed. Hope I'll be able to get through it fairly efficiently this time.

The other thing that I wanted to talk about was a little bit about partnerships.

So, the web comic model, let's say, as it was 10 years ago ... it was really well set up to support an independent person -- a solo creator.  And that worked really well for what it was at the time. I still think it functions really well and now an independent creator has a lot of tools that they can leverage, but I think our culture has set up itself to heap praise... let's say, it's the myth of the "lone genius".

I see this coming up again and again in a lot of different fields. A common story or meme that people seem to want to latch onto --[God my hair... it's peeking out at me from the side of the video and it's making me upset.] The myth of the lone genius is that there is one person who had a singular vision and they alone were responsible for the success.  And honestly, it pisses me off because almost no great success happens in isolation. And, you know, even if you ask the "lone genius" sometimes they're magnanimous about it and are able to say 'oh yes, of course it's thanks to my editors, my publishing team, and the whole network of people at this publisher who has published my work that I am able to be successful.' But more often than not they say 'yes, it was my work and my inspiration...' and the media feeds into that, you know, they hold up the lone creator as the sole architect of success.

And in business you see that a lot. For example, when there's news about Space X, or Tesla, it's always very focused on Elon Musk. And Elon has certainly been instrumental... but it neglects and discounts the contributions from the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who work at Tesla and Space X and are contributing to make that happen. So I think about this a lot when it comes to comics and the myth of the solo creator,  the myth of the "solo genius" perpetuating harmful working methods within comics. So as it has happened a "sole creator" *can* do all the work themselves and find a bit of success, but it isn't necessarily the best way to approach it, and it isn't necessarily the only way a solo creative has to approach it.

Thankfully we're really well set up in the world that independent solo creatives can collaborate on something and make something truly great.  So I've been thinking about this a lot, because one of my biggest goals in ending Wasted Talent and what I want to do next is increasing the amount of collaboration that I undertake.

I'm starting small, you know, I'm starting with a small ways that I can contribute to existing projects. The first one being Sfé R Monster's project for Beyond.  So... they created the Beyond anthology which is-- it's a stable of queer voices that are making science fiction and fantasy stories that really emphasize queer representation and I think it's an immensely important project that is doing a lot of social good. And they themselves have created a story but they needed someone to ink for them. And I was able to collaborate with them. So I'm working through this right now, working on the inks for that project, and that's really exciting. It's great to be able to touch base them on a regular basis and work with them to make something happen.

So I'm thinking of ways that I can bring this in for more of my own projects. As you all know from the recent post that I did about other future projects that I want to bring together, one of them being "Interpolation" which is about a team of engineers that visit-- or-- that become established in a small town in rural BC. And I was really interested in exploring those dynamics and the small town versus urban mentality in all of this. And I spent a lot of time discussing this with a couple of friends of mine. You may or may not know them.. their names are Layne and Alina and they are also the team responsible for "Weregeek". And they're friends of mine, and they grew up in rural Saskatchewan and have a very different life experience than I have had, and know a lot about this type of rural Canadiana and that I'm trying to express and bring to the fore. So I'm really excited that I-- I brought this up with them at a recent meeting and it sounds like they are interested in becoming co-creators on this work. And obviously, it's a long way out and we have a lot of things to discuss and a lot of ways to work out how that collaboration and sharing of credit and responsibility and reward is going to take shape, but I'm really excited to move forward with that. And I don't think that's the end for that project... I'm thinking of other people that I might be able to bring into the process to make the work even stronger and even better... and even more aligned with the vision of what I want to create for it. So that's it for this week... just small beginnings on future things that might be really exciting. And when everything is such a long road you-- I think it's important to stop and celebrate the small milestones along the way. And I feel pretty good about the decision to bring them in already.

I hope you are having a collaboratively amazing week and a good weekend. Next week: new Kickstarter update, moving into the fulfilment phase, more answer comics and I don't know what else but we shall see! Have a great weekend, I will see you on the Internet. Baiee!