Diary of a Trailblazer: Update

Not gonna lie, I've been in kind of a cycle of panic and procrastination for the past month or more.  There are like twenty things I need to do to get my art career off the ground, and each thing is huge and time-consuming and no one thing is more important than any of the others.

Some people, when faced with this sort of challenge, automatically pick one task at random and start beavering away at it; when the first task is finished, they'll move on to the next, and so forth, until everything is done.  Personally, my default reaction to multiple responsibilities is to spend all day in a coma of indecision while getting nothing done at all.

And the voice in my head goes, "JUST PICK SOMETHING AND GO WITH IT!  ANYTHING AT ALL!  YOUR SAVINGS ARE TRICKLING AWAY MORE AND MORE WITH EVERY PASSING MOMENT!!!" and I go "STOP YELLING AT ME, VOICE IN MY HEAD!  ARRRGH!" and then I'm so desperate to escape this endless internal dialog that I abandon all of the super-important tasks and make a blog post about humping my dog instead.  This provides a pleasant distraction that drowns out the Mean Voice in My Head.  So does looking at humour websites, watching DVDs, or anything else that keeps me from thinking too much.  Unfortunately, the moment I stop distracting myself (read: when I'm lying in bed trying to sleep), the Mean Voice returns with a vengeance.

It's been a rough time.

Mind you, posting here is a good thing; it keeps me connected to the fans of my art and maybe attracts new ones.  But I still feel guilty for doing the fun stuff (hangin' out online with you guys) when I should be doing the scary/tedious/difficult stuff (taking/formatting/uploading literally hundreds of photos; researching search engine optimization so my listings are more likely to come up in searches; etc.).  I feel even guiltier about some of the other stuff I've done recently, like stumbling across a cute BDSM-themed web comic and reading the entire archives in one day...in-between checking my blog stats every five minutes to see if I've suddenly become famous (answer: no). 

Good news, though: after weeks of constantly telling myself to JUST START DOING SOMETHING DAMMIT...I actually have!  This seems to be a feature of all my anxiety cycles: at some point I just get sick of my own mental twirlies, decide that enough's enough, and do the pick-something-at-random-and-work-through-it thing that other people would've done in the first place.  The other day I made a whole bunch of new Artfire listings; the store has 23 items now!  I'm not going to link you just yet - I'm waiting to do a big splashy Grand Opening post once more stuff is up - but I'm sure an enterprising person could find the store and see how it's shaping up if they really wanted to.  You know my store name and you know which site it's on, so...yeah.

Hopefully I can keep on powering through all the boring administrative stuff and GET MY ART OUT THERE!  Once the Artfire and Zazzle stores are fully stocked, my main tasks will be to promote the stores and to make more stuff to put in them - two things that I love doing.  It's just a matter of getting over the hump.  I have to eat my metaphorical veggies before I can have my proverbial dessert.