kirabug’s idea files

The world is trying to shake me at my roots, and I’ve been resisting.

I read an article years ago called The Sex & Cash Theory which says, in short, that if you want to be happy with your life you have to balance the things that pay the bills against the sexy, creative stuff. If you let your life swing one way or the other too far, chaos will ensue.

I’ve never had the problem of letting my life swing too far into the creative endeavors.

I get up, take care of the dogs, go to work, try to solve problems and occasionally create things that are useful. I sometimes feel like I’m genuinely making things better. Whether I succeed or not, it’s exhausting work of juggling competing priorities, competing egos, varying interpretations, and menacing deadlines.

When I’m done working, I come home, take care of the dogs if Nighthawk hasn’t beaten me to it (some days run, well, loooong….), source and prepare some sort of foodlike objects, and try to find something that will take my mind off of the work I left and the work I’m going back to the next day.

If I’m lucky, I get six hours of sleep. If I’m really lucky, it’s not filled with nightmares about work. Then it starts over.

(As an aside, have you ever tried to type around a dog? Chance says hello.)

Even as little as two years ago, I had the energy and drive to create after work. I drew a comic. I worked on the five novels I’ve got written in various pieces around my hard drive. I knit. I cooked crazy-ass things. (I’m pretty sure the peanutbutter fish story has never actually made it into this iteration of the blog. Someone remind me someday…)

But slowly those things have been sliding out of my life. The novel writing was displaced by the comic authoring (except for every other November). The comic was displaced by martial arts. That, in turn, has been forcibly displaced by injuries, health issues for Nighthawk, the holidays, more back issues, more health issues for Nighthawk, a conference, family vacation, and just when I thought I’d be going back, a strained shoulder. And a work deadline schedule that pushes and pushes and pushes. Oh, and more health issues for Nighthawk.

Slowly I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m not where I’m supposed to be, mentally, physically, or emotionally.

Nighthawk’s health has recently provided me with an extremely large burst of nervous energy. On May 12th he’s having oral surgery, but not like the nice friendly “let’s pull a tooth” surgery. More like the “let’s put the lung patient on a respirator, do all the work, take you off the respirator, and give you soft foods for at least a week while trying to keep your calorie count above 3000/day and your blood sugar normal” oral surgery. Not. My. Favorite. Kind.

What do you do with a nervous breakdown on the edge of your peripheral vision? Well, if you don’t have a creative outlet for it, you take it to work and try to get it to be useful. This is somewhat akin to putting a bellman’s uniform on the most violent rabid dog you can find, and chaining him up outside your cube, where he’s in charge of greeting everyone. Not necessarily successful, and generally requires a mop.

The universe has decided to combat this insanity by making April into “Kirabug reassesses her values” month.

The first shake-up came from the conference at the beginning of April. An Event Apart re-fired my desire to create, but not my ability to find an outlet. The inspiration-with-no-outlet problem made everything else worse.

The next shake-up came as a Studio Ghibli movie watched on my iPhone while I was feeling burnt out and sick and tired. Whisper of the Heart reminded me that creation is hard work, and you don’t get better from hiding from it.

When I started writing the thyroid cancer part of the comic, which Christ knows I’d never intended to write back in 2004 when I started the comic, it got hard. No, let me reword that. It got haaaaaaard. I lost the enjoyment of the craft because I was frustrated at my lack of skill. And I lost focus when a new sexy toy (martial arts) caught my attention.

But creating stories is what I was born to do. I create stories in the shower, on the way to work, in the comic. Some of my best web design was expressed in a comic strip, not a wireframe. New ideas are literally scrawled in every file and on every note of every piece of paper I get my hands on. I haven’t stopped creating stories, just because I lost time and motivation. I just started drowning them out in news feeds and bad TV and RSS feeds and comic strips and timewasters.

(By the way, Whisper of the Heart is my new favorite movie. It requires two things: one, that you remember how it felt to be sixteen. Two, that you forget how it feels to be your current age. If you get those two reversed you’ll think it’s horribly corny.)

So I threw out a bunch of distractions. I cut from 78 webcomics to comics folder to 36 core stories I’ve been following for years and still love. I threw out all but 15 RSS feeds (down from 50-ish.) Repeat ad nauseum through Twitter and Fark and Facebook ad nauseum.

Progress. Still, I felt lost, like I’m not sure what I’m creating for.

But tonight Nighthawk and I watched Train (or How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design. Now, Nighthawk turned me on to Brenda’s twitter feed months ago. He happens to know that I’ve wanted to write RPG video games ever since I discovered Final Fantasy in high school. And game design is a bit of a passion for him as well.

Brenda reminded me tonight that I create to grow. Not everything I create is going to be pretty. Not everything I create is going to be valued. Certainly not everything I create is going to be useful. But everything I create helps me step forward.

I have neglected the pruning. The grass has overrun the garden, and the important branches have been left to wither.

I need to walk away from martial arts. It’s a great experience I will return to, but I can’t fit martial arts, work, and my home life all in the same jar. I certainly can’t do all those things and add any other form of creativity into the jar.

I need to leave work at work.

I need to do hard things again, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

I need to reconnect with my characters and find out what they have to say, before I forget how to speak their language.

I need to give this nervous energy someone to chase that doesn’t wear a tie. Figments of my imagination are suitable candidates.

I need to listen to the earth, stop resisting who I am and what I do. At least for a little while.

• Kentucky Fried Chicken infiltrates the UN. Good to see our security is in excellent shape.
• 80 photo manipulations to ignite your creativity
• Why you can’t stop playing Bejeweled, an interesting article in the ways that games like Bejeweled keep you engaged.
• Microsoft ditches Family Guy special…. for being Family Guy. So, um, M$ wasn’t paying attention before?
• Off the face of the earth, the story of a group of Holocaust survivors in the Ukraine who hid in caves for three years to escape the Nazis. This one is a good read.
• An interview with Mark Holmes, Pixar Graphics guru.
• When you think tech support, you should think…. Florence Hendersen?!?
• Just in time for NaNoWriMo, Every ruler who ever lived, back to 1700
• What direction should your ceiling fan be running for winter? (In the “signs I am getting old” category…)
• If air travel worked like health care, then I REALLY wouldn’t fly.
• Lose/lose is a true no-win situation in gaming. Makes you think about the consequences of being the aggressor.
• Five second test helps you test other peoples’ web designs… and each test takes maybe 30 seconds because you’re only allowed to see the web design for 5 seconds. Great to help out developers, also handy to test your own pages.

Little Wheel

OK, that’s enough for tonight.

For those who may be interested, National Novel Writing Month kicks off in less than a month. That’s right, your chance to write a 50,000 word novel is approaching!

As for me, I struck a deal with the husband this year to take a pass for 2006 as long as I get to work it in 2007 instead. Seems fair to only torture him every other year

11/26/05 random babblings of someone who has too many words to write. (Cut and pasted from a TextEdit file I was making notes in while writing…)

10:28: was going to update my word count and go to bed, but now I’ve lost Internet access. Makes me pissy. Now I’m going to have to concentrate on the novel and not start playing Chuzzle like I’d planned.

10:45: still no internet access. up to at least 3167 words. (there seems to be some debate between my word count and NaNoWriMo’s count, but theirs is in my favor, so I don’t mind the discrepancy.) Want desperately to be distracted so I don’t have to listen to these characters fight in my head anymore, but I’m out of luck.

11:03: Still no ‘net access. If I was really at a breaking point I’d go reboot the router to make sure the problem’s not us, but suddenly I’m on a roll. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the literary figure I want to use as a metaphor. Goddamn it, I want my google back!

11:05: It was Casanova. My husband is snoring so loudly upstairs that I can hear him, and I’m on the sofa in the livingroom on the first floor.

11:15: I just had a character go off on a cursing spree. It’s in character for him, but I’m feeling a little guilty for using the word “shit” six times in succession – it gives the impression that I’m buffering my word count.

11:33: the dog’s now been whining at me for a solid fifteen minutes. But I’ve added another thousand words or so in the last 45 minutes. At this rate it will take me approximately 22 hours of full-on work to hit deadline. I have roughly 72 hours. Maybe this is doable after all.

It’d help if I didn’t start at fuckall late at night each night though.

This dog’s like an oven. But at least when she’s lying next to me on the sofa she’s quiet.

Oh, and I’m pretty sure it’s the router that’s causing the problem, because I can’t connect to it. I’ll investigate that shortly. I need to go to bed by midnight because I have to be up at 9 to go to lunch with a friend at 11.This has been a very social weekend.

12:02: Rebooting the router seems to have done the trick. I’m going to upload this, update my word count, and then go to bed.

(ps: 35,106 words! Whoo! Less than 4 days! Hell!)

So I didn’t go to bed at 3:30 the way I said I was going to. I stayed up to grab a shower and did a little more writing before finally crashing around six. Slept until ten, got up, and sat around like a catatonic vegetable until it was time to go out to dinner with Matt. Had a great time there – something I definitely want to do again – and now I’m home again home again jiggidy jig.

Problem is that my plan was to nap this morning so I’d reset my sleep cycle and crash tonight around 9 or so, but here it is, 9:00, and I’m wired like my neighbor’s Christmas lights due to all the caffeine I ingested at the Red Lobster.

So, we’ll see where this takes me. I still have 19,000+ words to write. I’ve written about a third of that in one sitting in the past. ‘Course, it was horrible horrible melodramatic crap, but it was words, and I built a pretty damn effective story out of those words later.

This post? I’m priming the pump, getting the synapses firing and all that. Time to go smack some characters around.

So I was writing – but I didn’t start until after 10 and sometime around 1 an old friend popped online to say hi, and well, one thing led to another and the next thing I know I’m reading his blog until 3 am. I can’t say I followed all of his writing – seeing as I’m not up on either the latest political scandals or on off-Broadway theater – but he’s still very well-spoken and entertaining. Oh, and he linked to this and this which I thought y’all might find interesting as well.

On a totally different note, the web usability geek in me was amused at the serious cognitive dissonanace I hit when I first started reading Matt’s blog, because he’s using the same Blogger template as my friend Ginia and the two couldn’t be much more different. So, backgrounds and fonts and such really do make an impression – guess I’d better get off my butt and finish tweaking the design and layout for this place. The forum template I’m desigining is functional but essentially a disaster.

And it’s obvious that I’m rambling at this point (I think I’m allowed; it’s 3:20 am after all), here’s a quick wrap-up of the Thanksgiving holiday for those who are interested.

First, I forgot to take pictures. My apologies.

Wednesday I made the mashed potatoes and the sweet potatoes, an act that was punctuated by my overheating my favorite Corning dish empty on a burner I thought I’d shut off and then attempting to pick up the superheated ceramic – which resulted in a small burn on my right hand and my favorite dish in razor-sharp shards all over the kitchen floor. But since it was superheated, they were melted to the kitchen floor. High quality linoleum in the kitchen, obviously. I’m still damned pissed at myself for the carelessness, but have stopped beating myself up because I’m the only one hurt and that’s minor.

Thursday was Thanksgiving itself, which went off pretty much without a hitch. Alton Brown’s turkey brine recipes are excellent, by the way. My family and Nighthawk’s converged here to eat and I think everyone had a pretty good time.

Friday, both Nighthawk and I felt run over by a bus – exhaustion, stress, etc. and slept in late, accomplished nothing. Sinus/migraine all day, possibly dehydration, hard to tell ’cause I can’t concentrate through the pain to analyze it.

Now it’s 3:30 Saturday and I need to sleep. By Tuesday (my next day back at work) my sleep schedule will be total hell. Whee.

So, uh, we were without a database for a little while this evening, but it’s back now.

…

I, uh, think I’m gonna go run some backups, just to ease my nerves.

Which reminds me: if you’re in NaNoWriMo, or you’ve done anything else of note in the past few weeks that you don’t want to lose by freak accident, this is a good time to back up. Yes, right now, while you’re thinking about it.

Go on. I’ll wait.