Days of Shades

2014 was a bit of a roller coaster. I did a HUGE amount of work on my house, but I didn’t finish my remodel (I’d honestly thought, in early spring, that I might move into the studio by autumn). My band played some great gigs and made some big improvements, but we also had to cancel to really exciting gigs because I broke a finger. I broke a finger. My neighbor staged the Terrific Goat Mystery, aka Goatdorf. I did recording for a thing that’s now an album! I drug E to my mom’s parents’ place in southern coastal Oregon for the first time. I coped with a few unsuitable-for-tumblr (i.e., involving other people whose issues are not mine to share) crises in an adult way, and while that was exceedingly difficult, I’m proud of myself. I filled up my sketchbook in a year, instead of the two it’s been taking me. I practiced and improved both my guitar and my voice. I wrote, including coming up with original fic seeds.

And I tracked it all.

The ‘Creativity Tracking Log’ spreadsheet that I started on a whim last New Year’s Day survived, against all odds, the entire year. It didn’t transform me into a perfectly productive monster, but it helped — sometimes in ways I wasn’t expecting. Not only did having a little color-change reward help motivate me to do more regular practice, but the diligent recording of both creative practice and really good excuses helped ameliorate the occasional depressive bouts. One common symptom of my down periods is looking back at my last day or week or month and berating myself for ‘not doing anything.’ With a fairly objective record of what I’d actually done always to hand, I couldn’t do that. Depression could not use that particular lie.

I still had a lot of times when I felt I should have done more, or more often, WISHED I could have done more… but it was easier to see where that was reasonable and the many times where it wasn’t. It was easier to balance the bad with the good, since I had it right there to look at. That’s a benefit that I’d never considered and deeply appreciate.

For me, this descriptive tracking seems to be a better tool than prescriptive goals or rules (like ‘don’t break the chain’ or word-a-day minimums). I’m absurdly thankful that I stumbled on the word-tracking spreadsheet that was my log’s genesis — THANK YOU, professional author who’s name I don’t remember!

I’ll post about the actual numbers later, but I suspect that’s only really interesting to me, while the ‘how it worked’… well, that might just help someone else, somehow.

I’m starting a new sheet for 2015, naturally!

The last week or two has seen a significant decrease in my creative output (as tracked on my super nerdy spread sheet!)  and, while there are some good excuses -- a trip to Seattle, working on the studio -- a lot of it is that I hit some serious stumbling blocks with my writing, and lost momentum summoned in the nigh inevitable crash. I do tend to a bit of a go-go-go-go-STOP cycle. I can be very happily almost overloaded with projects for quite awhile until I feel them all crashing down around my ears. I don't want to get stuck in the low spot, though, so I've been really, seriously working at pushing through.

Monday night I cancelled my normal game time with Emony42 and used the time to make a decent dinner with enough for lunches, fold some laundry, write, and practice voice for twenty minutes. It was only twenty minutes, but making myself get up from the PC and go do it was hard. That's the crash -- I don't feel bad, exactly, I'm just seriously craving real downtime, preferably in front of a video game. That's really all I want to do.

The spreadsheet is helping me push through, though, with that reminder that even fifteen minutes nets me a little bronze-star reward. It's what got me out of the chair Monday night, and what's keeping me pushing on with writing, especially over the rough spots.  I usually don't have a lot of writing-oriented self-doubt, but there's something different in what I'm doing right now -- it's more plot focused, with more changes to canon -- and I'm getting less of the motivating review-crack. More importantly, I'm now getting negative responses, especially this one over-zealous person who seems to want me to write an entirely different story. It's hard to stay motivated when that's the first response you get every time you release something new.

On t'other hand, writing the Giant Thing seems to help motivate me for other projects. It's probably related to the go-go-go-go-CRASH cycle -- when one thing's workin', everything's workin'. Episodic fiction also lets you get something 'in the can' regularly, which helps give little rewards for a long project, and those little rewards help push everything along. Which again explains why having the little reward fall through (either because something just didn't work or because of negative responses) is so demotivating, I suppose.