Describing why I started the Art showcase Blog Carnival.
Anyone who has ever started a blog knows that it is very hard to find your audience. You tell your friends. You link to your site from your social bookmarking site. You try to digg yourself.
But with all your efforts you may be lucky if you can get a steady audience of a few dozen people.
For the last year I’ve been featuring a series of artists. But by the nature of the way you find information on the Web, most of those artist were well established. Working for years with their own following and a large number of paintings/drawing/sculptures.
I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to show the work of a few artist who, just like me, have only just started on their journey. Artist who are still learning their craft.
Artist who are juggling a day job with their need to show the world the images and feelings they have in their head and heart.
For that reason I’m starting the Art showcase Blog Carnival.
If you draw, paint or sculpture and you write a blog and you would want to extend your audience, posting an article at Art showcase will be just the thing for you.
Other art Blog Carnivals might demand work of a certain quality, but since you’ve just started you can’t give that. Some Carnivals may seek work of young but promising artist but nobody can say about himself/herself that he/she is promising and to be honest neither can I.
I’m interested in your growth as an artist: Growth in your drawing, painting or sculpting skills. The process by which you find subjects, the way you work with them and learn from them.
You can submit two kinds of articles:
- Articles in which you show your work either with or without comments. Preferably two articles so you can show where you was a while ago and where you are now. (Enter the second link under “remark”.)
- Articles in which you talk about your creative process. (For instance articles about: Where you find your inspiration.With what kind of subjects you work. How you develop your skill. etc.)
When you find that I’ve listed your work in the Art Showcase you might feel tempted to link to my site. To show your appreciation and/or to show your friends that you finally got some recognition.
Don’t! Google frowns upon two way links because spammers use them a lot to sell their V*something. (Angering Google will hurt your ability to gain an audience.)
I would, however, appreciate it if you would bookmark this article at any social bookmarking service you use. By doing so you will not only show your appreciation (which is nice), but you will also be helping other starting artist to find the Art Showcase (which is even nicer!).
If you don’t use any social bookmarking service, might I strongly advise you to start doing so. Not only is it a lot of fun to show people links to what ever subject that interests you, but it will also help you to promote your blog.
This being the Internet you’ll find that nobody is interested in a list containing only links to your articles. But there are a lot of people who are interested in the same kind of things that interest you. While looking through your list of interesting websites/articles they will also find your blog.
If you feel that your blog falls in the category of sites that would benefit from a listing in the Art Showcase blog carnival, head over to the entry form and submit your work.
Describing why I started the Art showcase Blog Carnival. Anyone who has ever started a blog knows that it is very hard to find your audience. You tell your friends....
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Accepting comments selectively
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday October 26, 2008
Dealing with anger by selectively listening to comments.
The series about what I learn in cognitive behavior therapy consist of the following parts:
One of the assignment of CBT two weeks ago was to find the psychical sensations associated with feeling angry.
Seeing as how easy it was to find the psychical sensation associated with feeling fear I didn’t expect that to be very hard. But it turned out to be impossible.
Although I’ve been angry several times in the last two weeks I never noticed that I was angry until the anger passed. So I did notice that being angry causes you to raise your voice. And I noticed that I have trouble expressing myself when I’m angry. I kind of loose the ability to talk.
But I don’t know how it feels.
Talking about this with the psychiatrist, he suggested to investigate whether I have some thought or feeling just before I get angry. So if I can’t recognize my anger by the psychical sensation I might at least be able to recognize it by the thoughts I have just before.
That assignment turned out to be far more easier then I expected. You would think that if you aren’t aware of your feeling of anger you wouldn’t know what happens just before you get angry. But that turned out to be obvious.
I’m always commenting on myself. Or actually I’m always imaging people commenting on me.
Turns out that when I imagine someone talking me down, I feel scared. When I imagine someone giving me a comment in which he tells me that he didn’t listen to something I had to say, I feel anger.
After I found that, I figured I should go to the next level. Knowing what scares and angers me, I should be able to avoid getting those feelings altogether.
But I’ve tried for years to stop myself from imagining people who are commenting on me. I’ve never succeeded and I really don’t know how I could. Further more the comments I imagine that people are giving me are based on comments I really get from people. They frighten and anger me just as much when I get them for real as when I imagine it happening.
Thinking about something a Steve Pavlina says somewhere in his blog: You can decide for yourself which comments have meaning for you and which don’t.
Sometimes people are only commenting because it’s easier for them to let you do the work then to do the work themselfs.
I decided to only accept two kinds of comments:
This is the point I reached last wednesday. After living with these rules for two days it seemed as though all my problems were solved.
I came across several situation where my feelings about myself improved significantly after using these rules. Some of those situations only existed in my imagination while others were actually happening.
The most important one was when I told my father that I had found out that something I used to fight about with my mother really wasn’t my fault. Most autistics have this problem.
But he didn’t believe me!
That horrified me until I realized that it really didn’t matter anymore. This isn’t something I can change, whether he believes me or not. It’s not my responsibility to decide what he believes. And last but not least I been living on own for the better part of 30 years so he can’t really hurt me.
I really expected that this would be the end of my problems. That I would stop talking to myself and start drawing and writing art reviews again.
But it didn’t. The talking to myself has actually gotten worse. I can’t find the energy to draw and to write reviews. (Although I will be publishing the blog carnival next wednesday.)
But the anger and the fear are gone!
I just have to figure out what’s next.
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