Happy Bring My Friends to Work Day

A tour of my studio

Hello, Poetry Comic Friends!

Today we’re taking a look around my studio so I can show you where the madness happens!

the wind paints the night
bright with imagined battles
only leave are shed

Happy Bring My Friends to Work Day

My home studio is where I make most of my art, do most of my editing, and do about half of my writing. It took many years to get used to calling this place my studio because I didn’t feel like I was the kind of person who was supposed to have a studio.

Studios were for artists. I was a writer, but not the kind of writer that went to work in their studio.

After I published my first full collection of haiku comics in January of this year, I decided to get over myself and call my space my studio. That also led me to treat the place more like a studio. I rearranged the furniture to make it easier to work and I filled it with stuff that inspires me and that is useful for my work.

Here is what I have hanging on the wall opposite my desk:

These are Zen Pencils comics by Australian artist Gavin Aung. He became an independent comic artist by illustrating inspirational quotes. From left to right here are the quotes:

Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.
—Henry David Thoreau

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

—Theodore Roosevelt

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On!' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

—Calvin Coolidge

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