Or, at the very least it makes me sick.
Maybe it is just me, but I doubt it. Until something is done, it gnaws at me. It turns my stomach. The words almost demand to be spewed across the page.
I’m not sure that there is a bad way to be creative, unless you are an industrious serial killer, but I do think that there are better ways to do it than others.
And I think that, because I’m pretty sure the way I do it is wrong.
The outcome doesn’t have to be monetary to be successful. Though, sometimes that doesn’t hurt.
I think what makes it a “less good” is whether you are able to appreciate it when it’s done. Good or bad.
For me, I’ve got 19 things going at any given time.
I’ve counted.
To be honest, if I was found dead today and people saw the journals strewn around the house the way that they are, they would undoubtably be looking for buried bodies. “It looks very Zodiac in here,” they might say.
With that many things going on, I usually only focus on the fires that demand my immediate attention. When one project gets done, there isn’t a sigh of relief, or an appreciation of what was accomplished, it’s just on to the next fire.
There is no stop and smell the roses. There is just the constant scent of smoke as you sprint with the water bucket hoping your headed in the right direction.
It’s a decent way to get a lot done. Even better if you want to have a handle on a lot of different facets of creative avenues.
But that doesn’t make me a master of the situation.
Just a pain in the butt.
If that sounds familiar, join the club.
You’ve have become a combination of Murphy’s Law and Chaos Theory.
Welcome to my life.
Every leg of creating a story has its own hurdles. Whether it’s writers block, forgetting what characters you are dealing with, neglecting the real people in your life to get it done, or just running yourself ragged trying to keep up with everything.
I have an unquiet mind. Maybe a spider crawled in at some point and spun a web to try to contain the frenzy? If I see it crawl out, I’ll ask if it wants to write the next post.
Somewhere in the years behind me, I made the decision that it was healthier, for both me and those I interact with, if I could get the chaos on paper rather than keep it in my head and wait for the lid to pop off the kettle.
I don’t know if it’s actually better. But it is different.
When Tyler and I first started writing the projects for what is now called Pendragon Ink, I created a spreadsheet to keep track of them.
Not the titles that we are working on.
(Those are the notes in those Zodiac journals.)
The titles that are completed.
And it just keeps growing.
For us, I think the celebration is the new company. It’s a place to put what we’ve been working on in a venue where they can be seen (and hopefully celebrated).
Doers and getitdonenomatterwhat’rs are rare.
When you find them, make sure you team up. You may not always win, but you won’t have to compete against them.
More than any singular story, I’m really happy with our team of creatives and I look forward to seeing it grow. We’ve got some very talented art in the works for some stories that I think all of our writers are proud of.
If this post doesn’t make sense to you, that’s okay. Most things in my head don’t really make sense to me either.
For what it’s worth:
Whatever you’re working on in that Frankenstein lab of yours.
You’ve got this.
We can’t wait to see it.
-Zeke