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Gapingvoid lands a book deal…

It’s been twenty years when Hugh McLeod started drawing his “squiggly” cartoons and a decade when he decided to draw them on the back of business cards. It was the consequence of a “creative bug” he had. For him, this bug led to a lot of great work and experiences, yet this isn’t a guarantee that it will turn out successfully for everyone. After all, it IS a bug. So in 2004 he decided to write a piece called ‘How to be creative‘:

All I was thinking about was a short, practical, real-world list of advice that would come in handy to somebody say, 10-20 years younger than me, somebody with the same “creative bug” I had when I was just starting out in the world. I was just trying pass along some valuable, pain-saving lessons to the next generation that I had learned along the way. No more, no less.

This list - full of eye-openers - has been download a million times now and inspired tons of people, including me. Especially his remark that creative people should have a “sexy” and a “cash” job helped me a lot. Some work you do is just for the sake of paying the bills, the other is for fun - it’s your creative outlet. When I build a blog for a company, I just do it to pay for my groceries. When I write a post on The Next Web or this blog, I do it because I love it. McLeod:

As soon as you accept this, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career starts moving ahead faster. I don’t know why this happens. It’s the people who refuse to cleave their lives this way- who just want to start Day One by quitting their current crappy day job and moving straight on over to best-selling author… Well, they never make it.

McLeod now landed a book deal, which makes absolute sense. When I had read his article, I passed it on to everybody who has the same “creative bug”. They all loved it. So it’s absolutely worth a hard cover. The blogger annex cartoonist now lives in South Texas to focus on his writings. How romantic does that sound? His book will probably be released in the beginning of 2009, and just as Mr. Gapingvoid himself, I can’t wait.

• Read the article on www.gapingvoid.com

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