Notes for Chapter 6 of Real Artists Don't Starve – Joining a Scene

a.k.a. I Swear You're Trying to Kill Me.
This chapter deals with creating in the right place, near the sort of people who will encourage your craft, where you will make connections and help other people make connections.

Okay, I've had my teacher baggage dredged up, I've hauled my past failures into perspective, I've even gotten to work on projects that I intend to actually show people – and now you want me to be social, too?!?!

One thing I love about this book (it is turning into a rather painful sort of love) is that it's giving me solutions that I honestly have not seriously considered before. It's also showing me where I've wanted the myth of the Starving Artist to be true, because I'm much more comfortable when things aren't my fault. And my isolation as a creator and as a human being in general is my own fault.

Maybe in the past I had good reason to prefer solitude and keep everything I cared about to myself, but now those habits are only hurting me. And having that pointed out is painful too.

I suppose that if it's going to hurt in either case, I'd rather have the healing pain of dealing with it than the slow rot of pretending nothing is wrong.

I don't think that right where I am could be considered a Mecca of the exact thing I'm trying to get into – but one of the good things about being interested in many art forms and attempting to synthesize them into a cohesive and unique whole is that what there is around here, I can use.

Comic cons are interesting and full of passionate fans of everything. Even the relatively small local cons are increasingly about more than comics, branching out into gaming, various TV and movie fandoms, and animation too. True, I spend the entire event in my booth being an awesome vendor, but maybe I could make more of an effort to go to the peripheral events. And there is an arts community – in this rural area, there are still county fairs with art exhibits of various kinds, and there are writers, maybe not in my genre but very respectable in their own genres. I could try a little harder to find people who would also understand the value of art and creating.
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What about you? Do you have any sort of local creative scene you could get more involved in? And is that question as uncomfortable for you to deal with as it is for me? Leave me a comment and I'll enter you in the drawing to win a copy of Real Artists Don't Starve.