One of the most common but also most useless creativity tips I’ve even been given, given to someone else, or seen literally anywhere is “you just gotta do it!” I’m incredibly guilty of giving that one out, even if I do try to couch it in terms of building discipline and creating a routine you can rely on. It all boils down to “just do the thing!” in the end. It’s not a very good explanation and building it piecemeal via the whole “make time to write every day, and slowly challenge yourself to write more in that time or expand that time so you can create more” is a bit more helpful, but it ultimately doesn’t really do much beyond make you capable of the mechanics of the work you’re doing. Generally, you need some kind of goal or target to inform why you’re creating in the first place since just wanting to create (or to have created) isn’t always enough to push you through the difficulty of forming good creative habits. You need something that speaks to you or that creates drive within you to help you over that hump. Once you’re in the habit, though, it gets a lot easier. Discipline will carry you as long as you maintain it and maintaining it is so much easier than building it. Unfortuantely, you might wind up in a situation like me where you’re maintaining your discipline just to keep your discipline working rather than because you’re trying to make progress towards a specific goal and you wind up writing just because you are in the habit. The habit fuels itself and its own maintenance, even if the larger purpose it once served is no longer there.
Continue readingMusing
Burnout And The Joy(lessness) of Creation
I haven’t actually enjoyed writing these blog posts in a long time. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that in any of my posts reflecting on my current burnout or creative process or whatever. I don’t really enjoy doing these. I don’t dislike writing them and I do still get a sense of satisfaction out of writing them, but I haven’t really felt the joy of writing in a while now. I’ve done it because I’ve felt the need, to help figure out what’s going on in my head, and to provide myself with a sense of satisfaction after a day largely devoid of anything resembling that. But I haven’t felt any of the joy or passion I once I did. I’ll be the first to say that it’s better to rely on discipline than passion or inspiration since discipline will never abandon you like passion and inspiration might, but I think it’s worth considering that enough discipline will also enable you to actively harm yourself if you force yourself to keep performing past the point where your body is telling you to stop. I don’t think I’m there yet, but I can’t deny that my burnout hasn’t gotten any better in months or years and that I just don’t really enjoy any of my creative pursuits anymore these days.
Continue readingWeary After A Weekend Of Not Enough Rest Despite My Best Efforts
This past weekend (as of writing this a week-ish before it gets posted) was not as restful as I would have liked. Between the on-going but slowly dimishing symptoms of my antidepressant withdrawal and the absolutely debilitating emotional journey of the Final Fantasy 14 content I was playing, I am going into my final day of “a restful weekend” feeling like I’ve gotten even less sleep than usual. I know that this is the fatigue from the withdrawal compounding what would have been an emotionally draining weekend no matter what, but it still sucks to have so thoroughly overestimated how much I could handle. I mean, I barely did any chore, spent most of my time sitting around in my apartment or trying to cool off my office without turning my AC on, and slept as much as I could, but I’m still starting this Tuesday even more tired than I started my weekend. All of the socializing in-game probably didn’t help, since social interaction has been incredibly draining during this period of withdrawal. It also didn’t help that I went through two heavy days of emotionally draining (in a good way) story quests in Shadowbringers and then followed that up immediately by getting absolutely wrecked by a side-quest (in a bad way) before pushing through it to do some social activities that were fun in the moment but were probably not a wise thing for me to do at that point. I had the distinct thought that I should probably shut the game down early and spend some time dealing with the experience I’d had and instead chose to avoid that and only shut down the game when the maintenance was about to start.
Continue readingKnowledge Does Not Always Bring Relief
Well, I’m rewriting large chunks of this a couple days after I drafted a meandering series of complaints about how I was feeling since I finally came out of the brain fog enough to realize just how bad it was on Monday (a week before this posted, when I wrote those unfortunate paragraphs) and am feeling mostly clear enough today that I am not as concerned with my ability to string together coherent thoughts. As it turns out, what I wrote about just a few days ago (as this post is being published, anyway) was actually the beginning twinges of withdrawal from my previous antidepressant. Apparently, it can take as long as a week to start and last multiple weeks (or even months) beyond that. Thankfully, since I spent a month reducing my dose before stopping it entirely, I think I’m on the mend and will be fully recovered by the end of the week this post goes up or maybe sometime during the weekend following that [unfortunately unlikely, given the increasingly slow recovery I’m experiencing]. It is difficult to imagine how I could be doing any worse than I was from pretty much Saturday night through Tuesday afternoon, but I’ve got no guarantee that things won’t suddenly get worse again or that things won’t get bad in an entirely new way. I’ve never suffered withdrawl like this before. Caffeine withdrawal, sure, but I’ve spent my entire life avoiding any other substances upon which I might become dependent given that I’ve been consciously treating my depression with caffeine for over a decade now, so this is all a first for me. Even the caffeine withdrawal was carefully managed after the first unfortunate day of accidentally going cold turkey.
Continue readingDwindling Daydreams Of Just Less Work Are All I’ve Got Left At My Day Job
Sometimes, as I’m standing at my desk and sweating while I try to focus on my dumb little tasks on days that I’m feeling particularly frustrated with my job, I let my mind wander through potential futures or alternate timelines. Twelve years ago, when I graduated college, I had very different plans for my life. I’d spent the four years of my college education finding out what I was interested in, what I was good at, and what I cared about, and planned to eventually return to scholastic pursuits so I could earn myself an advanced degree in some kind of writing thing and eventually further that with some kind of further degree focused on medievalism or the development of language or something. I was going to work for a few years, pay off my student loans by the time I was thirty, go back for more education, and spend my life burying myself in my beloved writing and research and education (of myself and then of others). That, of course, didn’t happen, but my dream of living a life of telling stories lasted until pretty recently and now I find myself adrift with no future I’m really working toward beyond being debt-free, no attachments to my present (geographic or occupational) and so I wonder what kind of life I might be living if I hadn’t been shackled by debt or might yet live should I find a way to remove my need to spend most of my time and energy on being a cog in a machine that does not value me.
Continue readingDoing Little Tasks At My Job (Bad) So I Can Go Home And Do Little Tasks In Final Fantasy (Good)
It has been nearly a month since I last wrote about Final Fantasy 14. I started the subsequent expansion not long after my last post (and might have dipped my toes into it just before that post went up), but progress has been pretty slow. It’s not a lack of interest mind you, but perhaps because of an abundance of it. I’ve been consistently putting off certain bits of progress in the main story until my friends could play through them with me, which has sometimes meant needing to wait a day or two to get through the next plot-blocking dungeon or trial. I also took a bunch of time away to level up a class so I could do all of the combat job quest lines simultaneously, and getting something from twenty-ish to seventy is a significant undertaking. I’ve also had a lot of little money-making tasks to pursue, some crafting to do, attempts to update my character’s various glamours, more wrestling events, and so on. I’ve played PLENTY, I just didn’t get back to the Main Scenario Quests until last week on account of all the other stuff I’ve been doing. Even now that I’ve been back at it, the going has been a bit slow as I’ve had to level up additional jobs every night so I can do their quest lines, which means I’ve been poking at the MSQ in small increments here or there every night once that is all done. I also did some raids, took most of a day off Final Fantasy, and gotten back into working all my usual overtime at my job, so I’ve just not been able to bring my focus to bear in the way I’d like to.
Continue readingThe First Casualty Of The Summer Heat
Somehow, despite the temperature hitting the upper 70s (or 26ish for you Celcius folks), my employer hasn’t turned on the air conditioning yet. In fact, given how warm and stuffy my office is, the heat might still be on. The temperature gauge outside my office says it is 75 in the lab, but I can feel the temperature drop a couple degrees the instant I exit my office door, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that my office itself is 80 or higher. I mean, I can’t even stand around my desk without sweating a little bit, despite having a desk fan running on high (which doesn’t count for as much as I’d like it to since I need that thing running constantly just to counter how still and stuffy my office gets without it). Honestly, it’s so warm in here that I’m having a difficult time not falling asleep immediately any time I sit down in my chair or when my attention starts to drift while standing at my desk (have you ever dozed off while standing up? It’s quite startling but apparently not so startling that I won’t do it again within five minutes). It’s almost unbearable and the only thing keeping me from leaving the office to work at home is that my apartment won’t be much better (though the air will be moving a bit more than it is here, which isn’t nothing). And, you know, the fact that I’m sure it’d become a thing with my coworkers.
Continue readingA Perfect Morning Ruined By Casual Reality
Last week (today, as of writing this, I guess, but over a week ago as of this getting posted), I woke up incredibly peacefully. I’d gotten decent sleep and struggled to get out of bed because the temperature was perfect for staying beneath my blankets as I listened to the sound of the rain outside. It was, perhaps, the best morning I’d had in a while, especially because I was able to haul myself out of bed before long and get ready for work without too much of an issue. It was pleasant, that first hour and a half of my morning as I ate breakfast and got ready for work, but it quickly spiraled downhill from there. You see, when I went to go get into my car around half-past-eight, I discovered that my underground parking garage had flooded. Nothing terrible, or disastrous, mind you, but it was at least ankle-deep water that had backed up out of the drain and I don’t have shoes waterproof enough to handle something like that. So, I returned to my apartment and planned to work from home for an hour when I remembered a conversation my boss and I had a couple weeks prior during my yearly review. Apparently, people had been taking notice of how often I worked from home for a couple hours in the morning or how often I was gone part of the morning for doctor appointments–enough that they’d spoken to my boss about it. While my boss understood my reasons and knew I was getting my hours in and my work done, he suggested that I do what I could to cut down on how often it happened at least for a while. I didn’t say much in response because I was processing the fact that my coworkers formed opinions about how often I wasn’t present in the office but chose to speak with our manager about it rather than see if there was any kind of reason for my time away from the office. I didn’t exactly have the bandwidth to bring any of that up yet since I was still reeling from learning this and hadn’t gotten to the point of being able to express why it upset me so much.
Continue readingSubtext And Performative Extroversion Are The Key To A Good Work Schedule
On top of everything going on, all the woes of society and my on-going issues with finding a decent antidepressant that works for me, things at my job are picking back up again. Our project has been announced, we’ve gotten through all the manufacturing hurdles, and it is officially released to production as of a couple weeks ago. Which means that development can finally resume. That’s right. It’s released and actively being sold, but we’re back to working on it again. This isn’t terribly unusual for a lot of products (especially on stuff with lead-times as large as ours are–multiple months). A lot of things will be announced, get demonstrated or marketed, and have their designs shipped to factories to be produced long before development will stop working on them. Some of that work is, of course, designing future versions of the product, making improvements, and incorporating feedback based on customer experiences. A lot of it, though, is just the same work that’s been done the whole time but now focused solely on trying to remove as much material from the project as possible in order to bring down the cost of producing it. Sometimes that means chasing down ideas developers and engineers had but didn’t have a chance to try out during the initial development phase. Sometimes that’s just making choices to combat newly discovered problems that only came up after the product existed and was being used long enough. Regardless of the specifics, I’m now entering into what is going to be the longest period of heavy physical labor on this project, albeit at a much different pace than I was doing it earlier this year.
Continue readingThe Economy And Society At Large Are Failing Artists
Recently, an… associate? Community member? Friend of a friend? Recently, someone I know vaguely in that way you know people who are in your community but with whom you’ve never had much of a direct interaction published a graphic novel (or second of three collections of a comic they’re publishing on the internet, depending on how you want to define things) and got not only zero support from her publisher but a string of such unhelpful responses that it would be easy to suggest that she was actively hindered. I’m not going to name the person, the publisher, or even the comic because I don’t want to drag any mud into her business, but it was absolutely infuriating to hear about what a shitty time she’d had in the publication of this latest book given that the one freaking thing a publisher actually does, aside from making the editing and printing aparatuses available to creators, is help to sell the book! All they’ve done so far is make sure copies show up at businesses and that’s the bare minimum for a business! You’d think that a company that was going through the actually significant hassle of receiving, editing, proofing, and printing an entire graphic novel would also spend some time and money marketing it so they can, you know, make some money of the damn thing! But no. This released with no fanfare, the creator was absolutely stonewalled when she tried to get the ball rolling, and she’s been left to do any amount of marketing by herself via social media. It’s absolutely infuriating.
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