Last Friday I release “TDO-Forum Wordpress Theme“, thankfully. It was a piece of code that burst out of me, cut through my on-going writing/roleplaying project and other coding projects, stopped me from blogging, demanding to be finished. It even bit into my work during the day (but so does the lack of sleep from having two small kids). The only time it didn’t swallow was when I was with my family (shows you my true priorities I guess).

Do you ever get that? A piece of writing or coding that demanded to be finished, that consumed you until it was done or you managed to pull away from it?

I’ve read about many writers who claim that a book or story forced itself out of them. Though coding isn’t the same as writing, I think the abstract mental creative-process is the same (the skill-base is obviously different). I think it’s something different to “the flow” (I’ve written about it before and here is the wikipedia entry on the flow psychological state). Certainly the flow is an accelerator or enabler of creative bursts, and coding and writing neatly fit into the model of the flow.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that the piece of writing will be exceptional or the code perfect. Though I do think they benefit from the obsessive neurotic drive of creating it.

Does anyone else have difficulty separating the author from the book?

I prefer to know little or nothing about the author of a book before I start reading it. This equally applies to roleplaying books and it’s a roleplaying book that I’m having difficulty at the moment separating the creator (and his/her actions/opinions) from the writing. I don’t have a problem with dead authors. Once they are dead, everything about them is becomes simply “context” (historical).

The FudgeList has awoken and it got a bit heated there for a little bit. But I saw a comment from a writer on a blog about when the whole “Fudge is dead” debacle started. He hadn’t gotten involved in the list or this particular argument and had no idea what he was talking about yet he said something nasty about the Fudge community. It was only one line. However, all I could think was “asshole!” It’s a pity, because I would have bought one of his forthcoming books, now I won’t. I’ll probably never look at his work. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him, but that opinion has tainted my perception of his him and his work. If I pick up a book of his, I’ll remember the comment. I could get over it and let it drop, but the problem is that it creates a barrier to overcome and therefore it makes reading one of his books effort. Why should I bother reading a book if it’s just going to be work instead of enjoyment?

I think Fred Hicks was right when he talked about prompting RPGs and always being positive. A single negative can lose you a customer and then the power of the internet is that if you hit the wrong person, it can have a much bigger impact then just one dropped potential sale.

It’s another reason why I find it hard to objectively read the work of friends. I see my friend’s personality in the work and it, well, becomes hard to separate my opinion of my friend from my opinion of his writing. It becomes especially difficulty if the writing is in a field of shared interest like roleplaying, because more than likely we’d have argued and discussed RPG design issues and I’ll see that shining through their work.

Which is perhaps why it’s a good idea for me to keep some distance from many of the RPG design forums like RPG.net, theForge and story-games. My perspective of people’s work will become tainted by my opinion of the them, not their work. (TBH I think it’s more than likely that I have a tendency to shy away from very large online communities), I guess also perhaps that’s why I’m quite closed about my writing and my ideas. Afraid they’ll judge me rather than the work itself.

Anyone else feel the same about books?

I was at the gym and I started musing on a story in my head. The gym is one place I do a lot of thinking and imagining while I work out. I played the whole story out, right up to the end. It was a fully concieved story, several main characters, background, mythos and a plot. Then those words appeared. I could see them as the last lines to the novel. I don’t know exactly what prompted it as I normally envision stories in my mind’s eye like movies, not text in a novel. The story I was imagining was certainly about destiny, how once you accept it, it consumes you totally but if you try and fight it or ignore it it will also destroy you. Destiny and fate being something much larger than the small lives of men, their hopes and fears.

I tried to analysed my thought processes that lead to it and I know, in part, the text is actually a warning against religious zealousness, though the story had little of that.

Today I discovered White Wolf’s newest line “Scion: Heroes”, (thanks to matt’s accidental discovery of it).

From the White Wolf’s web page for it:

Sounds great huh?

I’m not saying White Wolf are evil, don’t get me wrong. It is just that my big RPG project (LH) is based on scarily similar themes. (I’m not accusing White Wolf of stealing my ideas, I’m not paranoid and there is sufficient fundamental differences in my work and what I have seen so far of White Wolf’s). The issue for me is emotive, even if my LH ever does get out there into the wild, it will be compared to it and I, full-time working father, cannot compete with an army of freelance writers, fanboys, artists, editors, etc. and a company that knows how to market. It’s enough to nearly give up the game.

But I won’t. Not yet at least.

What makes it so tempting to quit, back up the files, and focus on other things, is how frustrating my “time management” is these days. It’s hard to get a big enough gap of time to sit down and write. Even when I do, I often have to stop and run off to do something for five minutes right in the middle, breaking the precious flow. But that’s to be expected. With a new baby only two months away… I guess my passion these days is my family. Gaming takes a second place, will always take a second place to that. (Well actually third, our Nintendo Wii is coming in second these days).

I think I’ve managed to beat my procrastinating. I’ve started doing the necessary work for Reboot over the last week. However my pace is a bit slow.

The problem is, I’m still itching to do some coding. TDOMF is crying out for me to jump right in, I want to do some work on MOC(my roleplaying group’s webpage), Game Crafters’ Guildand have a number of ideas for some cool plugins for Wordpress. The danger is, when I code, I get wrapped up in it and swallows all my creativity. Reboot would be lost.

Apparently this is a psychology state called the Flow.

From Wikipedia:

I do get into the flow when I write too however coding has some additional “hooks” that make it worse. Two of the qualities of the flow are:

When I’m coding, I find it flows so easily and “effortlessnessly”. Given enough time I feel I can complete any objective I set. And with a lot of my PHP projects, the rewards are fairly instant. Code a little, see the results. Code more, more results. It makes coding addictive. While with writing, I have to write a bit and then read and rewrite. The process doesn’t come off as effortless. It’s an uphill process. And I’m not a writer by trade. The task of writing seems more difficult than coding.

When I’m in the flow it’s hard for me to switch tasks, almost impossible. If I start coding and get into that state, forget writing. In fact, more than once, I’ve caught myself in the flow with a personal coding project in work and find it very difficult to break out of it. I tell myself, on the hour I’ll stop, at fifteen minutes after the hour I’ll stop, etc. Also the flow sucks for debugging non-linear problems. You get lost in one thread of investigation and it becomes hard to switch to another thread, even impossible to explore multiple threads at once, which is often what you need to do.

Also interesting, when I looked up the flow on Wikipedia, there was this link at the bottom.

The main point of Kevin Chiu’s article is that you should break up the task your procrastination about into multiple tasks that you can order by perceived difficulty (easiest first). This falls inline with the way the flow works.

And, unsurprisingly, this is how I conquered my procrastination over Reboot. I started by listing all the things I wanted to do, then started inserting the new headings I wanted to fill and then I started writing…