Inktober

And that one is definitely it.

And then there was a monitor lizard that I did during my Inktober last year.

And that one is absolutely gorgeous.

And that one, I don't, do you know Inktober?

yes um for our listeners that's the uh draw or do an art every day in october event right

Yes.

That's everyone, and I do mean everyone's, favorite unique deck game.

Uh, I am oddly nefarious JT Russell, and I do-- I, I know I've used this before, um, but I've got with me, uh, this evening the man who is so quick with the pencil that he fin- the pen, pen, excuse me, that he finishes his Inktober challenge in just 20 days.

I am of course talking about Quickdraw, Quickdraw3457.

How we doing this evening, Quickdraw?

I'm good.

I am not an artist, and no one wants to see my Inktober entries.

Mm-hmm.

Shout out to, uh, shout out to our friend who we love and admire, uh, Behawk, who is quite, quite the artist, and, uh, was... is who I learned about Inktober from, and didn't know it was a thing until I saw his Inktober offering that one year.

Uh, and then yeah, you could always DM us on Instagram, comment on any of the posts, and we'll get back to you.

Speaking about Instagram, really quick, so in October, for all my artist people out there, we got Inktober going on right now.

Yeah.

I'm participating in Inktober, so if you out there wanna follow me at JamesEvansArt on Instagram, do so.

If you're making your own, uh, Inktober stuff, like, tag the podcast.

Like, send it-

Yeah

I'm, I'm writing stories and stand-up and working on impressions and, and, and getting t- music.

I'm practicing different instruments, and I've been working on, um, Inktober, which I c- I can't draw at all, okay? And I'm ...

Tech- I take that back, 'cause I know my parents are gonna beat me up.

I don't mean I can't.

But he's like, "Yeah, but you could have.

You didn't, but you could have." And, um, it's important to speak that kind of positivity [laughs] into your life somehow.

But anyways, been drawing Inktober.

I'll put some photos up maybe if I can.

But obviously, that is only partially true.

So just to make it more specific for this month, I told you last time we spoke that I had this idea, well, you know what? Maybe it helps me to switch between the two stories, the novel that I'm rewriting, and then maybe something fun just to the short stories that I did last year during Inktober.

And maybe now I can write a children's book, etc.

And that's how the idea for the story about the monk and his cat uh his medieval magical cat was born and of course that was a and still is a great idea i love um developing that story but at the same time it was also um very difficult to contain that within the lunch hours that i had allotted to it because well during lunch i'm also walking in the woods so that means i can't write and i can't draw for inktober and that's what the project relied upon on the other hand i also don't want to give up on it because otherwise that would be another project that is great and has potential but it's left on the wayside because i have so many of these projects that are uh still unfinished it is i know that this is just the usual usual business for someone who has a pretty you know high degree of adhd um but at the same time i want to i know also that if i focus on something and i push it a little bit i do finish things this is how i do my job this is how i create podcasts so it's all about trying to tweak the routines and the habits so that they become actually sustainable for instance recording this podcast is something that is a sustainable routine i know that i want to do this in the middle of the week so i'm recording this on thursday because yesterday well i had the fantasy podcast i was working on um but i'm not gonna wait with the recording of this and with the accompanying walk because i know if i do it will i will start skipping episodes and then before you know it the podcast is dead and i don't want that to happen and i think the same is true for um a lot of other tasks i'm trying to um put them in routines like for instance email something we all fight with right so i try to have at least one hour each week towards the end of the week on friday and that's basically my um taking the trash out so i go through my email account and i just mark okay this is actionable and then everything that's not actionable goes into the archive so visually it clears up my inbox only leaves me with about i don't know 20 emails that i somehow need to still act upon and all the rest is gone it's not in my field of vision anymore that's very important for me to just once it's out of the way it doesn't occupy it doesn't live in my mind rent free and the less stuff i have in my mind living there for rent free the more i can focus at least that's that's kind of the theory um but when it comes to creative business obviously it is very difficult to contain creativity especially when it comes to storytelling well the project about the monk and the and the cat has led me already to so many rabbit holes which is weird because it's about a cat but i then asked myself well but this is an irish monk and it's based or it's inspired by this poem that an irish monk wrote in the 9th century um about his cat and he the cat is basically his mirror or his um spirit animal he has a job in that monastery to work on manuscripts and then his cat is also a worker his job is to catch mice so that the mice won't nibble on the on the manuscripts and won't eat the rice it's or the rice the the the food so um but then i was thinking huh okay 9th century where where was this monastery and turns out it was a monastery in current day germany but it was an irish monk who lived there but the monasteries at the time were very different from the monastic sites you would have in ireland in the 9th century monastic sites were like small villages where every monk or even novice had his or well her yeah if it's a female monastery own hut and then there would be small chapels but nothing like the big stone buildings that you would have in a continental europe at the time then that got me into researching okay so when if the 9th century is when when my story takes place is it going to take place in germany is it going to be in ireland if it's in ireland how can i transpose the story to ireland and what what did the monastery look like what did the work the life of a monk look like and and so and this happens all the time um i realize wait a minute i don't know enough about the world that i am uh that i'm building so i need to do more research and then very quickly i i love doing this it's you know it's research but it's also i mean it never ends i keep asking questions okay so well what would be the job of this uh of this monk etc etc before you know it i spent hours and hours just reading up on medieval irish history and it still has not advanced the story one single bit and i think it also worsens this temporal whiplash because then for hours every day my mind is in the middle ages and then even in the middle ages it is just hopping around from the early Let's say 5th and 6th century, when you have the most of these famous saints like St. Bridget and St. Patrick and you name them, St. Kevin, um, that are, in a way, at least the stories around them are the, um, the, the core material for my own stories, is this- this whole legendary early Christian vibe that I want to, um, translate to my fantasy novel.