Episode 221 – How to silence your inner critic

Click on the thumbnail above to view the full-sized webcomic!

True story. A few years ago, 95% of my creative efforts where going into my erotica podcast, Heatflash. The podcast was very well received, I loved working on it, and I poured just about everything I had into it. However…

When my kids started going to school, I began to lose work time. Though they were out of the house, my schedule was suddenly constricted by theirs. They had to be dropped off at certain times, picked up at certain times, there were after school activities to keep up with and of course, volunteer work for the school and said activities.

While I still had 8:30am to 2:00pm to myself, those hours turned out to be less than ideal for recording a podcast. I live next to an  Air Force Base, a NASA research center wind tunnel, a NASCAR speedway, and a neighbor who enjoyed racing RC cars at all hours of the day. I tried recording my podcast in the wee hours of the morning (4:30am), only to discover that the tree outside my office window was host to several families of baby birds. Recording in the closet did nothing to block out all the other noises, and besides, it would also wake up the Hubster who was sleeping in the bed next door.

My daytime hours were also consumed with other work… paying work. I had enough art commissions coming in to keep me tied up all day long. And while people loved the erotica writing, I simply couldn’t publish enough of it to make any significant amount of money.

The final straw for my erotica career came at a writers’ conference for small epublishers and e-published authors. Everyone there knew me. Most of the people there had either published my work, edited my work, or been in an anthology with me. And everyone said the exact same damn thing to me when they saw me…

“Hey Helen! How’s the webcomic going? I love your cartoons!”

Not a word about my writing, my books, or my podcast. They just all wanted to know about the cartoons. About the twelfth time I heard this, I realized I had been beating my head against a brick wall for far too long. Shortly after that conference, I finished off all my remaining writing projects and threw myself into the webcomics and digital art. I have not been unhappy with this decision at all.

But every now and then, my Inner Critic rears her head and demands to know why I don’t write the porn anymore. I have learned not to give a voice to her anymore. She’s got nothing important to say to me anyway.

For the record, I have no idea why I drew myself drawing left-handed in this webcomic. But I did, so there ya go!