Caitlin Moran (1975-) is a British author, TV presenter, music critic, journalist and outspoken advocate for women’s rights. She currently writes a variety of columns (most of which are hilarious) for The Times UK.

Moran was something of a child prodigy. After being home-schooled (she left school after a few weeks when she was 11) she had her first book published at 15, had columns running in the Observer and Guardian at 17 and got her gig at The Times when she was 18.

This quote is taken from her best-selling memoir How to be a Woman. Her new book, Moranthology, has just been released.

Unlike Moran, I went to Catholic School for 12 years where my head was filled with all kinds of fanciful stories that I blindly accepted. Only when I left high-school and starting reading more books about science and evolution (mainly by Carl Sagan) did I begin to re-evaluate what I had been taught for all those years.

RELATED COMIC: Make the most of this life.

- Caitlin Moran’s official website.
- Thanks to Barclay for submitting this quote.

A few readers have complained that they can’t find the right-sized frame after buying one of my prints. And getting it custom-framed can be super expensive. So I thought I would show you how I frame them for family and friends – it’s easy to do yourself and is pretty cheap too. The frame and mount you see above cost less than $30 AUD.

When you can’t find a perfectly sized frame, the next best thing to do is buy a slightly larger frame and mount the print. That’s when you have a nice chunky piece of cardboard surrounding the print. It actually looks more fancy and ‘ooh la la’ than a frame that is the exact size of the print.

A friend of mine recently purchased the Gandhi print in the large size but couldn’t find a frame for it. So since I offer a complete top to bottom cartooning service – drawing, printing AND framing – I offered to take care of it for her (This is a joke, please don’t send me your prints to frame ).

The print is 18″ x 28″ so I found a cheap 20″ x 28″ frame to use ($20). In Australia, there are affordable homeware or bric-a-brac shops in every shopping mall which sell cheap frames – I’m sure there are similar stores where you’re from. IKEA is also a good place to look. The next thing you need is a piece of mounting board, which I got from an art supply store. I bought a super large sheet for $8 which is big enough for two of these frames. I chose white because I think white always looks best, but you can use a different colour if you like.

You will also need a decent ruler, cutting blade, cutting board, pencil and masking tape.

First, cut the mounting board to fit the frame exactly, in this case 20″ x 28″. Your art store might be able to cut it to size for you, so ask them first. 

Check to make sure it fits in the frame. Next, mark out (on the BACK of the board) the size of your mount border. Place your print roughly in the middle of the board and mark out how wide you want your borders to be. Make sure to allow at least an extra 10mm of mount all the way around the print. You want some leeway when positioning the print later. In this case I measured 25mm from the top and bottom and 45mm from the sides.

Now cut out the border you’ve marked. Please be careful when you’re cutting – don’t slice your thumb off!  Take your time – I’ve cut my hand pretty severely using a blade in the past because I was rushing. When you’re cutting, make several pulls with the blade, don’t try to cut through the board in one slice with all your force. These blades are sharp, but they’re not Hattori Hanzo steel.

Your mount is ready:

I secure the print on the back of the mount with tape. You don’t have to do this – but it just makes it a bit easier to handle. Make sure you use masking tape, which won’t damage the print.

That’s it! Place the mount and print into the frame and you’re all done. A professional looking framed print and mount for a fraction of the price.

On a side note, I would just like to thank EVERYONE who has purchased a print from my Society6 store. The prints make up a large part of my income at the moment (along with the advertising), so without your support I probably would have to find a real job … and we both don’t want that, do we? Much love!

Sarah and Chris have quit their jobs and gone on the road to give away free pie across America. Yes, you heard me right … PIE! Take it away Sarah …

Our project is named Pie it Forward (or OccuPIE) and we’re currently six weeks into our six month tour of the US, giving away free pie in multiple cities and inspiring people to be kinder to each other.

Our purpose with this trip is simple – to inspire people to recognise how their own successes are dependent on the unsung contributions of thousands, perhaps even millions. We hope to get people thinking about how they can “pie it forward” in their own lives by sharing their resources, talents, or time.

The trip is funded with donations and our tax returns, which were pretty meagre. We started out the trip with a couple thousand dollars, which was all spent on gas and food very quickly. Luckily people have responded well to our mission. Fans have given us bags of flour, sugar, apples, baking supplies and of course, the much appreciated hot shower and laundry combo.

We both quit our jobs for this project. Chris was working a very demoralising job for a company that will remain nameless, so he was happy to go. I on the other hand was working at a homeless shelter, and they’ve said they’d be happy to take me back if we decide to return to the area after our tour. I miss all my old coworkers and clients a lot and they were very supportive of me while I dreamed up this project.

Every time I check Zen Pencils, I find a new comic that’s even more relevant than the last. “I would rather be ashes than dust” really hit home for me. All my life, I’ve heard people telling me to be more cautious, to plan carefully, to wait, to plan for fun 10, 20 or even 50 years from now. When I shared my last big dream with my family, they said “Sure, go ahead and do that, after you’ve had a career, put your kids through college and saved up enough for retirement.” I didn’t even have children at the time (still don’t) so why was I being told to shelf my dreams?

I’ve had enough. Life is too short, too unpredictable, to not spend every available moment making it better for ourselves and those around us. I know anything could happen, and I can finally say I’m living without regrets. If World War III breaks out tomorrow, I can die peacefully knowing that I’ve brought happiness to every single person who got a slice of our homemade pie.

You can visit Pie it Forward’s blog here. If you have an interesting story to tell and would like to be a reader of the month, then send me an email. – Gav

Howard Johnson (1887-1941) was an American songwriter and lyricist who has been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
M-O-T-H-E-R is a song written by Johnson in 1915.

It seems so right that I do a quote about mothers this week (besides it being Mother’s Day on Sunday). I’m currently back home in Perth, staying with my parents in my childhood home where my mum is doting on me like I’m a kid again. I recently attended the funeral of the mother of a good friend of mine and I’ve also been spending time with my sister-in-law and two young nieces. So this week has been about loss, nostalgia and hope for the next generation of mothers and children, which is all represented in the comic I drew.

Playing the Game is a poem from an ‘Anonymous’ author. I find it hard to believe that such a great poem has no author. Does anyone know who the real source is? Thanks to Colin for submitting it.

This comic is a continuation of the Poetic Justice saga. You can read the previous instalments featuring the same boy and his father in the following comics:

PART 1 Invictus
PART 2 If
PART 3 O Me! O Life!
PART 4 A Bird Came Down the Walk

I don’t have a name for the boy so I’ll just take a leaf from one of my favourite authors, Cormac McCarthy, and call him ‘the kid’.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) was a Dutch Post-impressionist painter. Although he had a passion for art since a child, Van Gogh’s first career choice was to become a minister. After studying for a year, Van Gogh failed his entrance exam to a theology school in Amsterdam and later a missionary school in Brussels. Unable to join the Church, Van Gogh decided he would devote himself to art. Although his work was exhibited in his later years, he received no recognition for his work during his life, lived in constant poverty and died having only sold ONE of his paintings. Today he is considered one of the most important artists in history and his vibrant, powerful and expressive paintings sell for millions of dollars.

Van Gogh was the epitome of the ‘tortured artist’. He lived a very sad life and seemed to fail at everything he tried. Besides failing to become a minister, Van Gogh had a disastrous love life (most women found him repulsive), his friendships never lasted (after threatening friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin with a razor blade, Van Gogh famously cut off his own earlobe) and his art career never went anywhere. He even failed at committing suicide – when Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a pistol, the bullet missed his vital organs and he was able to walk back to his house where he rested and smoked his pipe. He eventually died the next day after an infection took hold.

Van Gogh was in and out of mental asylums his whole life and it’s unsure whether he suffered from bi-polar disease, schizophrenia, epilepsy or some other kind of mental illness. Throughout all the difficulties in his life, the only thing that gave Van Gogh any kind of peace was the passion he had for his art:

“The work is an absolute necessity for me. I can’t put it off, I don’t care for anything but the work; that is to say, the pleasure in something else ceases at once and I become melancholy when I can’t go on with my work. Then I feel like a weaver who sees that his threads are tangled, and the pattern he had on the loom is gone to hell, and all his thought and exertion is lost.”

Even though he is considered a master today, Van Gogh was plagued with self-doubt and always strived to be a better artist. I thought this quote was great, similar to the message from Ira Glass’s Advice for Beginners:

“It constantly remains a source of disappointment to me that my drawings are not yet what I want them to be. The difficulties are indeed numerous and great, and cannot be overcome at once. To make progress is a kind of miner’s work; it doesn’t advance as quickly as one would like, and as others also expect, but as one stands before such a task, the basic necessities are patience and faithfulness. In fact, I do not think much about the difficulties, because if one thought of them too much one would get stunned or disturbed.”

The quote I used in the comic is taken from one of hundreds of letters Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo. The discouragement he was talking about was a period of extreme poverty and bad luck.

A few readers have emailed me and said that Zen Pencils has played a part in them taking up drawing again, which is probably the best compliment an artist can receive. Have you recently rediscovered your childhood talent, or taken up a new creative hobby? Let us know in the comments

- What’s your favourite Van Gogh painting? Mine is probably Starry Night Over the Rhone, although it’s hard to pick just one – he’s always been one of my favourite artists.
- Thanks to Gabriel for submitting this quote.

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Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) was an American poet most famous for her collection Poems of Passion, which contains her most well-known poem Solitude. Like The Winds of Fate, many of Wilcox’s poems contain uplifting language and promotes positive thinking as she was an advocate of the New Thought movement.

- Thanks to reader Jeffrey for submitting this.
- Check out my latest Reader of the month.

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I needed that extra burst of inspiration because I was running on empty. I was preparing to sell most of my carefully collected worldly posessions, studying for and taking the GRE (Graduate Requirement Exam) to study philosophy and women’s studies, and anxiously waiting on a definite confirmation for the next phase of my life, which I have now gotten. In May of this year, I will be moving to Burma (Myanmar) to teach English for a year. It’s something that, with every piece of the cultural puzzle I attempt to fit together, and with every reminder of how vastly different my life is about to become, I actually feel a wave of peace wash over me because this is what feels right in my life. Not scrambling to find another job temping in an office, not measuring my life by the accomplishments of my peers, not rushing to see how many people remembered me that day, no. None of those things have given me the oceanic serenity that this pending adventure has. It’s the very reason that Marianne Williamson’s quote Our Deepest Fear has resonated with me for some time. Through this decision I will really be testing this theory: that “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.” It’s the same kind of connectedness that this comic translates to me, the universal oneness of hope and moxie that shines through individual people changing the world despite a social group’s (or religious, or governmental, or whatever) insistence we cannot. And I was excited to see the quote used from the democratically elected representative in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi (Freedom From Fear) who was held under house arrest for the duration of her term (and then awarded a Nobel Prize for her efforts to heal and help her country).

Finding a beautiful, inspiring quote, can lift us up like a close friend. Zen Pencils has been, in my short acquaintance with the site, a source of inspiration for someone who aspires to live in the same ways that have inspired those words.

You can help Kaitlyn’s move to Burma by supporting her IndieGoGo campaign.
Do you want to be a Reader of the Month? Do you have a interesting story to tell? Has Zen Pencils helped you make a big decision in life? Do you use your talents for good, not evil? Then let me know via my contact page.

To my fellow Melburnians: I’ll be at the Supanova pop culture convention this weekend the 13-14th April! You’ll be able to buy a personalised sketch or some signed Zen Pencils prints, posters and stickers. Hell, you don’t need to buy anything, just come around for a chat. I’m really excited to meet some readers because I’ve been so caught up in creating content for the site that I haven’t really had a chance to meet ANY of you. I’ll be in the Artists Alley area, so if you’re around, come by and say ‘hey’. We’ll pretend that I’m the reason you’re attending when we all know it’s because David Hasselhoff will be there.

Jack London (1876-1916) was an American writer best known for his short stories and magazine fiction. This quote was London’s life ‘credo’ as retold by his literary executor in an introduction to one of London’s book collections. There are disputes as to whether these are London’s own words or embellishment by the executor. I haven’t read any of London’s work, can anyone recommend his best fiction?

I thought of an unbelievable story for this comic: An alien randomly finds a magical object that gives him incredible powers. He seems to be made from the very universe itself! He’s capable of amazing feats and can fly all over the galaxy at warp speed. Imagine all the fun he’s going to have – imagine the great adventures, the great triumphs and great love he will experience. But there’s a catch. He knows the power only lasts for a limited amount of time – once that magic timer expires, that’s it … BOOM! So knowing this, the lucky alien realises he better make the most of his precious time.

But what about this unbelievable story? YOU are randomly born into this beautiful world. YOU are made from the very universe itself, from stars that exploded billions of years ago. YOU are capable of amazing physical and mental feats. YOU can fly anywhere in the world on aircraft that are travelling at near-supersonic speed. Imagine all the fun you could possibly have – imagine the great adventures, the great triumphs and great love you can experience. But there’s a catch … in fact, there’s a double catch. Not only are you alive for only a limited time, but you don’t even know when your time is going to run out! It could be 50 years from now or it could be tomorrow. So knowing this … how are you going to use your time?

Thanks to Alastor, Marika, Sara, Antonio and Robert for submitting this quote.

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