Tom McHenry on five years of daily sketching and the value of deliberate, continuous practice:

Drawing comics with the drawings reinvigorated my interest for a while. When you have something that you do every day you can’t help but improve. Then you get bored. Then you try new things and improve. Then you get bored. Daily work is the best solution that I’ve worked out to make the big emotional swings of that cycle to drop down to a low discomforting blips. You become too slippery for your own emotional melodrama to grab on.

If you’re not regularly chipping away at the work you want to do toward your capital-D Dream each day, your Dream quickly fills up venom sacs of guilt and shame. Ugh, I should really get back to doing ____, I’m such a lazy piece of shit, I’ll never be a ______, you’ll think and then your eyes are there and not in your skull and in the moment where you are alive.

And:

If there is a thing you like to do, find a way to do a little bit of it each day. Don’t overdo it — maybe it’s only 5 minutes worth for the first three years—because some days you will be drunk, tired, sick or in Personal Circumstances. This is not a way to get famous, it is just a way to practice and to care for yourself.

My work on Neat Hobby is absolutely in the realm of "self care."