my creative secrets (take notes)

I find my creative process is usually faulty but also fluid once it gets going. To begin, my work progresses mostly off of ambient thoughts or impulses I have over subjects i like or feelings I have at the time (like 90% of everybody else) Its never too thought out as say "I want to do a sci fi mystery with a team based character set" or something, it often comes off more randomly. I find the biggest fault in this because is that it leaves the projects easy to abandon because I came into them so whimsically. I usually flesh out all principal plot points and story elements in my head first, as I notice i rarely put anything down on paper until late in the game. I think I get nervous about putting anything down because as soon as I do I feel immediate obligation and guilt to make sure and complete the work, and normally I'm just too lazy for that. The concrete evidence of the ideas on paper usually support that they are never going to look as good as I want them to either. One sees the classic case of "as long as ideas stay in my mind they also stay perfect" (its a very pussy cop out/thought pattern) Anyway, getting to the fluid part, once I've saturated a standard notebook with a healthy dose of ian patented story notes i leave time to go through and edit myself three to four times OR I sometimes skip all this and go straight to the boards and start drawing rough pages immediately adding story as pictures appear OR I just combo the two like a wendy's meal (no tomatoes). I have no hang ups about beginning in any particular fashion, so a plus for me is that its helpful that i don't have patterns I have to adhere to (though I dont know if that is a popular problem or not for cartoonists). Once you put anything down on paper and accumulate some momentum there's always an increasing chance it will keep going until its complete ( unless it shows itself to be unsalvageable and an affront to the art world) For environment i tend to work off my kitchen table (editors note: ian no longer owns a kitchen or the aforementioned kitchen table) or drawing board. I also prefer to head to my long boxes for research. It seems to be popular to google on the spot these days, but its distracting and takes me longer as I lose the artistic zen and slow down, so I like to rely on m' comics. Ive gone through a couple projects now and one thing I think that does teach you is time management (maybe), especially if its centered towards getting it done for class (kinda maybe). I find I don't even need to write down my time table much anymore, my instincts can mostly tell me when to put turbines to speed or tighten up asneeded (mostly) So you could say my instincts are like a well trained wild bearded bear trapper of the woods, except the bears I'M trapping are a proper creative comic book work schedule and time managment. dig it. (editors note: I don't where the post went there at the end)