Every morning, I brew a cup of coffee. It’s not a couple of teaspoons of instant, swirled around in a hot mug of water with a dash milk at the end so that I can get to my work for the day. My cup of coffee takes 20 minutes to make (and that’s after the kettle has boiled). It’s hand-ground every morning. It’s hand poured through a hand-folded filter.

Some might think: 20 minutes? Hand-grinding? Hand-folded? Who’s got time for that? But for me, making coffee is a ritual, it’s a daily habit in which I find an immense pleasure. It’s a multi-sensory experience – I smell the beans before they are ground, and afterwards, and as they react to the water. The sound of the beans being ground by own steam, the weight of the grind as it moves through the grinder. In fact, the drinking of the coffee at the end is less important than the making of it.

Ritual is the art of turning habit into pleasure. – Chiyo, Memoirs of Geisha.

There are boring bits in every person’s day, all the time. Stuff we ‘just have to do’. But, what if they were rituals, not chores? Might that change that boring stuff – the studio clean up, the emails, the newsletter writing – into something we could take pleasure from?

I’ve been thinking about this copyright versus open-source thing for a while. Is it better to offer ideas for free; a gift to the commons? Or is it better to protect your ideas and demand payment for their use and/or replication; what’s mine is mine until you pay enough.

For years, I’ve erred on the side of the latter, afraid to upset an industry like publishing and the people who work so hard at protecting ideas so that artists can make a living. But my heart (and my experience in the software world) is telling me that gifting the commons may simply be better in the long run.

This week, I finally followed my heart and released This Generous Earth. It’s a gently philosophical graphic short story about the human story of separation from nature and how we might re-think that story in order to live more meaningful lives.

I guess you could call this self-published, but it’s far less structured than what the marketing boffins would advise you to do. I didn’t use some flashy and strategic marketing campaign, I just put it out there, “Here, I made this. I like it. I hope you do, too.”

I sweated for a days on how I should price it. $10AU? $6AU? $4AU? I flip-flopped between “I value my work so others should too” and “But what if you can’t afford to read this but it’s an idea that unlocks something in someone.”

So, I’ve taken one step down a path of my love of free ideas – pay what you can. Suggesting a price lets others know I value my work at some monetary level, but it removes any of the barriers of access that emerge from socio-economic disadvantage. As I’ve written before, the biggest threat to the arts isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.

I’ve always trusted that if people had the money, they would pay for creative work. Now, I’m putting my money where my mouth is. This Generous Earth took me almost 100 hours to complete. And, I know it ain’t going to win awards or top best seller lists. But, it’s a story and form I love, and so I’m trusting that others will love it, too.

Releasing This Generous Earth has also had one unexpected consequence – it released me from it’s grip. It’s changed my primary question from, “What will I do with this story?” to “What’s next?” And that’s more liberating and exciting than any best seller list has ever been.

William Stafford’s poem, A Course in Creative Writing, does what great poems often do – reveal to us a truth that we’re too caught up in life to see.

A week or two wouldn’t pass without an email in my inbox – how do I get into children’s publishing? And, the internet is full of helpful (and expensive) courses, masterclasses, & tutorials that promise to teach storytelling for children. Yet, the emails still come.

My story is not like the others. I never followed any of the advice. I never set out to fill a market need. I never researched publishers. I never even thought about children’s publishing as an end goal. All I did was make stuff I liked, then told people about it. The rest isn’t history, it’s a career.

Whilst I do believe that there are some fundamental skills one can learn when it comes to storytelling – structure, character development, the mechanics of writing and drawing – what cuts through is originality and authenticity. How does one find that? Well, perhaps William Stafford already has the answer?

I’ve had a 150 week writing streak going. My writing software has been very pleased with my progress, giving encouragement, awards, and badges for every week I’ve used their software again.

But last week, I broke it. And, at first, I felt bad – oh no, I never wrote anything last week! But then I realised something else; 150 weeks of writing probably isn’t that healthy for me or good for my writing.

The break was glorious. I watched whales, swam in the sea, ate and drank incredible food and built personal connections with small communities. When I write that down it feels like I’ve lived a little – become more human.

And now, with a week off, I’m ready to write things again – write things a lot like this. But it’s no longer about writing streaks for me. In fact, if unbroken streaks are a sign of anything, it’s that, perhaps, it’s time for a break.

This week, I’m by the sea. And, as I gaze out across the turquoise waters of Hervey Bay, I see an island in the distance. I can’t tell how far away it is, or even how to get there, but I know I’d like to visit it; and that got me thinking – things we seek in life are like that.

Long-term goals are easy to define but difficult to attain – a new house in 10 years, a college degree in 5, and so on. These sorts of long-term goals need a lot of things to go right in a world that we have very little control over. Our health, finances, & relationships all need to be in the right place at the right time over that long period in order for us to achieve what we seek. But, the only thing constant in life is change. When things get uncertain and a bit wobbly, our instinct is to tighten our grip – control more of the variables. But is that the best way?

Might it better to seek a direction rather than a destination? An attitude that says, “that house would be nice in 10 years, but not necessary.” Maybe it’ll take 15 years. Maybe 5? Maybe it won’t be a house, but a unit? Or a townhouse? Maybe I want 3 bedrooms and 1 bathrooms but what I see and fall in love with is 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms? Maybe, within that goal, what I’m seeking isn’t a house, but a home – a place of security and safety where I feel I belong. Maybe all I need to do is get to know my neighbours.

If we think in directions, not destinations, we remain open to the very likely possibility that, on our way to what we think we want, life will give us a few other things along the way; things we didn’t expect but may fulfill a different part of ourselves we didn’t know existed.

Whenever I tell people that I make picture books, one of the first questions they ask is, “Do you write and draw, or just draw?” And, I don’t know whether they mean it like this, but it’s the ‘just’ draw bit that gets me.

My knee-jerk response when people ask whether I ‘write or just draw’ is to rush to say, “I do both,” as if I have to justify myself or prove to someone that I can be as clever with words as I can be with pictures. They then go on to ask whether ‘there are any that they would know.’ As if, amongst the millions of picture books printed and distributed since humans could print and distribute, mine may be one that they had have seen before. But, I can’t help myself, looking for some sort of validation, I say that I’ve worked with Jackie French, Jimmy Barnes, and Peter Helliar and 9 times out of 10 the response I get is, “Oh, no, I don’t know those. Do you know ?”

Maybe it’s because I feel I got lucky, that I shouldn’t be here, that I’m somewhat of an imposter in this world of writing and drawing and ‘being published’. But, rushing to prove myself to other people – I write, and draw, and work with people who are ‘successful’ – feels like a response worth letting go. The goalposts of “success” or validation in any professional endeavour will always change – the first book was a milestone, the second was another milestone, winning awards, being published internationally, the bar keeps being raised so it’s always just beyond reach. But, it’s also not like I’m ungrateful for the journey so far – this work has been fundamentally life-altering for me; not from a financial perspective but through the way it’s changed the sort of person I’ve become and continue to grow into.

Maybe, instead of justifying my ‘success’ to those that enquire about it, I should just respond with, “Yes, I’m very lucky to be able to do this work – is there a book that you hold dear from your childhood?”

I’ve never done this before is a scary thing to have to admit. Because, if you’ve never done it before how do you know you’ll be any good (or even competent?) If you’ve never done it before, how do you plan? how do you reduce risk? how do you decide that it’s the right thing to do?

I’ve recently agreed to take part in a charity art auction that requires me to do a 1.5×1.5m canvas painting in a medium I’m unfamiliar with. I’ve never done this before.

Doing things you’ve done before is safe. You’ve made mistakes and have since corrected them. You’ve understood your limits, and the limits of the materials you’ve worked with. You know what not to repeat, and what to do again.

But, at some point, the thing you know how to do so well now was a thing you never did before. That could be about making art, sure, or it could also be about making pizza, meeting a new person, visiting a new city, or simply sleeping on a different side of the bed.

If almost everything we know how to do was something we had never done before and, most of the time, it’s worked out OK, then maybe we owe it to ourselves to try the new thing we’ve been putting off. After all, doing things we’ve never done before, whilst scary, can also unlock new pathways and passions in our lives that we’ve also never had before.

If I ever ship a piece of art, I always get the same question from the post office, “Would you like insurance with that?” The idea is that if the postal service loses my work, or it gets damaged, or it just doesn’t make it to it’s destination, they’ll pay me some money for my loss. But when it comes to an original piece of art, how much is it worth?

The easy answer to a question like this would be to say, “Well, if I sold this piece on the market today, I’d ask for X dollars, so I’ll guess I’ll insure it for that much.” But, monetary value (or exchange value), is just one domain of value and, to be honest, it’s not one I really ascribe to a piece of paper that contains my time, accumulated skill as an illustrator, and, let’s be honest, my heart.

I always refuse insurance because when something I care about that much is lost, money doesn’t make it better. Sure, I can buy enough materials to replace the loss in a physical material sense, but money can’t buy the time, place, and emotion that was present when I was making the work – art just doesn’t work like that.

When I think about what painters should paint, a few things come to mind immediately: flowers (or still lifes), vast landscapes (i.e. mountains, rivers, lakes, valleys), & portraiture. It should be in a semi-recognisable ‘style’, fairly representational (i.e. look like the thing it’s supposed to be), and beautiful. To me, those things are what comprise a ‘painting’.

Or are they?

What about the ordinary things that others don’t notice because they’re part of the everyday – malls, hardware shops, rubbish on the side of the road, a homeless person. Are these the sorts of things painters should paint? Would they sell if they were painted? If they didn’t sell, does that mean they are bad paintings?

What about photography? What should people take photos of?

I’ve recently discovered The New Topographics – a photographic movement of the late 60s and early 70s in America where photographers started taking pictures of the unextraordinary – and, I mean, the really unextraordinary. When we look at these photos in today’s image-saturated culture, it’s easy to think, “What’s the big deal? People can take photos of whatever they want?” But, at the time, these were photos of things people thought you shouldn’t take photos of.

What the photographic artists were doing, of course, were creating images they thought were important – reflecting on the sprawl of human habitation into places that humans had not been before. But to people ‘used to’ looking at ‘photographs’, these images could be described as banal, unphotographic, and ordinary.

Similar leaps into the unextraordinary also happened in Japan at similar times – photographers like Daido Moriyama and Toshio Shibata were making photographs that no one in Japan had seen before: prostitutes and industrial infrastructure. Capturing these images was not what photography was for, but they did it anyway. They caused a stir.

In both of these cases, these Japanese and American photographers moved photography on. As one expert described – they gave us permission to take photographs of new and different things.

And so, when I look at what’s going on in Children’s Literature, I can’t help but think, what should an illustrator illustrate? Happy children interacting with happy animals? Bears in bow ties, elephants wearing pyjamas? What about diversity – able-bodied kids of colour? Same-sex parents? What’s too far? What are we not ready for?

What we’re not supposed to draw are children with missing limbs. Children who may be improvising their way through life with low vision or blindess. Children dealing with chronic illness. Children interacting in the ‘real’ world – a world of climate change and natural disasters, rising homelessness and inequality, a world of prejudice, bias, and one where where humans and robots co-exist. A world as it exists, with all it’s messiness, joy, sadness, happiness, excitement and despair.

But what if we did? I’m not sure anyone would buy it, but would it do what The New Topographics did for photography? Would it move us on? Would it give us permission to draw things that have not been drawn before? Maybe it’s worth a try.

Some people prefer crunchy peanut butter, other people prefer smooth. It’s not that one is better than the other, they’re just different. And, no matter how compelling-a-case I could put together for why crunchy is better, I will never win over devotees of the smooth variety.

Same goes for art. While some types/styles of art may appeal to a bigger audience than others, there will always be a smaller audience for a type of art – some like crunchy, some like smooth.

So, when we’re judging ourselves and our work based on quantitative metrics like how many sales, how many followers, how many likes, and so on, we’re looking at the wrong metrics. If you’re trying to sell smooth peanut butter to crunchy fanatics (and no one is buying it), it easy to think your smooth recipe sucks rather than what’s really going on, you just haven’t found your people, yet.