Feed aggregator

Have a great day every one :D

submitted by StarScale1928
[link] [5 comments]

submitted by SmirG3l
[link] [34 comments]

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer. Lost on Dark Trails, by Rukis. Illustrated by the author. Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, January 2015, trade paperback $19.95 (312 pages), electronic edition $12.95. This is a mature content book.  Please ensure that you are of legal age to purchase this material in your state or region. […]

submitted by aLovelyTwitch
[link] [19 comments]

submitted by Rikku-Panthera
[link] [5 comments]

Long post ahead—really more of an essay—but stick with me. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about commissions and I'd like to try to open discussion about how these problems can be alleviated. If you commission art, I want you to take a moment to imagine something with me.

Imagine for a moment that you work at an office making ten dollars an hour doing clerical work. Every day you work eight hours typing reports, filing documents, sorting, e-mailing, blah blah blah. It's a job.

Now imagine at the end of the day, your boss approaches you and informs you that, while most of your work was good, there were some issues here and there and he needs you to stick around until you fix them. So now you have to work a few hours overtime.

Oh, and it's unpaid overtime. Oh, and he does this to you every day. Sometimes the problems are your fault—little typos, misfilings, what have you—but sometimes, he just flat out gives you the wrong instructions, or fails to give you a resource you need. Sometimes he gives you a deadline but then goes on vacation and isn't available when you need him for something to meet the deadline.

Your forty hour work week becomes on average a fifty hour work week. Oh, and because you want to try to minimize the number of errors you make, you start to double-check and triple-check everything, creating a workflow where you can't make progress until you confirm the acceptability of your work with your boss, which means you complete individual tasks much more slowly, which means that your workload as a whole builds up, which means that instead of doing one task at a time quickly and efficiently, you're forced to take on multiple tasks at once, jumping from task to task as you're able to acquire what you need to complete each one, and what seemed like a good way to prevent errors turns into a clusterfuck of errors and the emotional weight of being buried under work all of the time. Your fifty-hour week becomes a sixty-hour week, and because you're not paid extra for the overtime, your $10/hour job has become a $6.50 per hour job.

Sounds like a nightmare, right? Well, now you know what it's like to be a commission artist.

Nearly all of the commissioners that I've encountered—both those that have commissioned me and those I have heard from in other forums—hold to the general sentiment that once money has changed hands, the artist owes the commissioner the artwork they paid for. On its surface, this sentiment seems reasonable, except that it also seems to entail that if the commissioner is in any way unsatisfied with the finished work, it is the artist's responsibility to make adjustments with no further pay until the work is completed to the commissioner's satisfaction.

See, I hear it said over and over again that when you commission an artist, you are buying a product, but I beg you—I beg you—to understand that you are not paying for a product, you are paying for time. Commissioned art is a service, and I'll explain why.

When you buy a product, it has already been made—meaning that the cost to make the product has already been determined, and the listed price of the product is guaranteed to turn a profit. If I've made a scarf, I know how much yarn went into the scarf and how much time I spent making it. I know precisely what to charge to turn a profit.

When you commission an artist, though, no product has been made. The cost to produce the product is uncertain until the product has been completed. In the case of digital art, the only thing that needs to be calculated is the value of the artist's time and labor, but for physical art, an indeterminate number of materials are going to be used, shipping will cost an unknown amount, and unlike digital art, it's very difficult to back up if mistakes are made or changes are requested, sometimes even meaning that an entire work would need to be scrapped and restarted. All of these factors mean that the cost to create your work—and thus the value of the work to the creator—can't be known until your work is complete.

So I have something to ask of commissioners and something to ask of artists. To commissioners: please, please understand that if you were charged a flat rate for a picture, anything that you do to slow down or lengthen or add work to the process causes the artist to make less money per hour of work. You are literally cutting their pay. If you need extensive changes to a piece at any time during a commission, please ask the artist if the changes will require significant time and pay them for their time. It's only fair.

To artists, I ask two things. First: Please stop charging flat rates and switch to hourly rates. I know that there are reasons to charge flat rates—it makes it easier to know if a commission is affordable, it makes making sales easier, etc.—but I believe that flat rates are enforcing a misconception about what you're paying for when you commission an artist. Use hourly rates—even if you only want like a dollar per hour, list that dollar per hour. If you want to help your viewers, have estimates for certain kinds of pictures, but make sure your commissioners know that you are charging them for your time.

And that leads me to my second request: if halfway through the work your commissioner discovers they need more of your time, unless you feel that you legitimately screwed up, charge them for the changes. Charge them for the additional work, because the hours you're spending making the changes they're asking for could be spent working on other people's art and making money. You are entitled to compensation for your time, so ask for it! And if your customer is dissatisfied with the artwork that you created in good faith and with care and effort, but is unwilling to pay for the work it would take to change it, leave it be and let them be dissatisfied. A customer who asks you to work for free is a bad customer, and better to lose a bad customer than get more bad business.

That's my two thousand cents, so let's have a discussion. Leave your thoughts, questions, comments, and rebuttals below and I'll address them when I can.

submitted by ArcaneTheWoof
[link] [comment]

submitted by DenDenator
[link] [12 comments]

submitted by Rikku-Panthera
[link] [comment]

submitted by HuskySilver
[link] [5 comments]

New Members

Welcome to our newest members Sean Cleary/Gödel Fishbreath, John Van Stry, and Bill Kieffer!

Member News

The furry site [adjective][species] published their first poetry feature in April, including works from several of our members and forum friends. Well worth a read, even if you think you’re not into poetry — you just might be surprised. (We also have a new poetry section in our forums.)

Several of our members also have stories and poems up on QuarterReads, a site offering flash fiction and poetry for just 25 cents a read. See this thread for more info.

Eduardo Soliz recently released Super-Short Sci-Fi Stories 2.8, available for just 99 cents at Amazon and other fine digital bookstores, and Donald Jacob Uitvlugt‘s “To Sail the Winds of Song” is online at Another Dimension. Patrick “Bahumat” Rochefort’s “From Winter’s Ashes” continued with Chapter 2.1.

In book news, Friday’s first book Learning to Go will be available very soon from Jaffa Books, Weasel’s Cigarette Burns is now available from Kool Kids Press, and Austen Crowder’s second novel The Painted Cat is available for pre-order from FurPlanet. Congrats, everyone!

(Members: Want your news here? Start a thread in our Member News forum!)

Market News

Upcoming deadlines:  Trick or Treat 3 closes to submissions on June 1. For conbook deadlines, Megaplex’s conbook closes on May 22 and Maltese FurCon’s on June 15.

Remember to keep an eye on our Calls for Submissions thread and our Publishing and Marketing forum for the latest news and openings!

Guild News

Nominations for the Cóyotl Awards are open through June 1. Members, now’s your chance to recognize the best furry fiction from 2014. If you need a refresher on what’s eligible, check out our 2014 recommended works thread and be sure to add your favorites!

The FWG now has a Goodreads group! (Thanks, Munchkin!) That means we also now have a bookshelf featuring books by our members. If you’re on Goodreads, feel free to add any members’ books we’ve missed so far (see the instructions here on how to do that).

We’re always open for guest blog post submissions from members — good exposure and a great way to help out fellow writers. See our guidelines for details.

Need a beta reader? Check out our critique board (you’ll need to be registered with the forum in order to view it).

Want to hang out and talk shop with other furry writers? Come join us for the Coffeehouse Chats, Tuesdays at 7 p.m. Eastern, Thursdays at 12 p.m. Eastern, and Saturdays at 5 p.m. Eastern — all held right in the forum shoutbox. More info here.

As always, our forums are open to everyone, not just FWG members. Come register and join the conversation!

That’s all for this month! Send an email to furwritersguild (at) gmail.com with news, suggestions, and other feedback, or just comment here.

submitted by Saamstraat
[link] [comment]

Kind of off topic.(It's off topic :P ) So, there's been 50+ posts about people favourite music, but I haven't seen on favorite favourite song.

So, yea. What's your favourite song(s)? Mine are Rick Astley - Never gonna give you up

and Guns 'n' Roses- Paradise City

EDIT- Kasabian-stevie

submitted by VilkoVilka
[link] [72 comments]

submitted by Bowsersshell
[link] [30 comments]

submitted by Greypuppy
[link] [12 comments]

submitted by Greevixor
[link] [3 comments]

submitted by Moosebutts
[link] [4 comments]

Bad Katz is “… a San Diego-based company that sells premium 100% organic, pesticide-free catnip cat toys. We launched the Bad Katz brand in the late summer of 2014 and we are going to take that boring cat toy aisle by storm!” All well and good, but what caught our eye is their toony advertising art! Bad Katz have hooked up with a local San Diego artist to create a whole line of original cartoon cats (and a dog) to decorate their hand-crafted catnip bags. According to them they just might produce some original comic strips with the characters on their web site, and maybe even some character clothing for humans in the future. But for the moment, only your pet kitty gets in on the fun. Literally!

image c. 2015 Bad Katz

submitted by Neohexane
[link] [5 comments]

Just figured out that I am a Furry. Now what? Do I need to draw my lupine form?

I must learn the ways of my people!

Also, this totally explains why I seem to be the only person who notices eyebrows on dogs.

submitted by Puffymumpkins
[link] [5 comments]

submitted by HeiBlackReaper
[link] [16 comments]