he best things you can do for your creative career is join a group of others who have your same dream. If you can't find one, start one and do it now. With the web as great as it is, it easy to set one up and find others. About 8 months into my process of being able to work from home I was invited to join a critique group. It was a small group of other children's illustrators and writers who shared their thoughts and work via an email group from Yahoo. I learned a lot from that group and when the time came for me to move on, I started up another group inviting a few illustrators to join me. We set up a private message board which seemed to work out much better than the email group previous. My hosting company had a message board I could host on my server so it was really easy. It is totally private so you are free to talk. We share things from our personal like and career life. We have our own website for promotion and we combined our mailing lists and send out postcards quarterly, each splitting the cost of the printing and mailing.

To set up a group, remember to keep it small. You want it to be intimate and you probably want each person to have different styles just so no one feels as if they are competing with the other. Find some people who you would like to be in a group with (google illustrators, photographers, designers, etc) and look at their sites. Read their bio and look at their work. Do they have a blog? That might help you see a little of their personality and see if you think you will mesh with them. When you have your group together, let them know that you all will have a trial period to see if you all can converse and get along with each other. Let them know they are not locked into this group. Sometimes people don't mesh and that's ok.