Yes, It Is All My Fault!

We are valiantly fighting the good fight of having the collaborative project eat our brains by allowing at least one hour in every 24 for our personal projects.

Ok, perhaps I hyperbolize a bit here.  Now that I don’t have to worry about two presentations back-to-back, I can get down to the simple life of owning a business, coordinating a massive online project, and writing a novel  and some short stories.  Simplicity incarnate!

There go those hyperboles again.  Time to develop a new plan of action, since the goal is still to have a finished draft of the novel by the calendrical year’s end.  Note that not specifying a GOOD draft done will speed up the process quite a bit, heh.  And I think there are a couple of stories lying around that need cleaning up before being kicked out of the nest…

But right now I think I’ll continue to obsessively reload certain blogs to see if new content appears.  Oh, and super-squee happiness for other-world characters commenting on our household blog!  The cool parts just keep growing!

When working on a big project and trying to come up with cool ways to draw people into your created world, it’s sometimes hard to guess which line to straddle in how much and how fast you disperse your information. You want to make sure any early adopter fans are in on it soon enough that they feel their specialness, but you don’t want to escalate so quickly that you run out of entertaining content too soon or overload yourself.

On the one hand, when you’ve been cooking a big project for a while and it’s time to start manifesting the results, it’s very easy to want to spill everything all at once. “And here’s this cool thing I did, and this one, and this too, and ooh shinyoverhere!” But while you might hook in some people with the elegance or intricacy of your scaffolding, for most people you’ll catch their interest with the thing itself first. Peeling back the draping comes later.

On the other hand, it’s also difficult to get an outside perspective on how subtle or obvious to be when scattering project references that you hope people will put together to find your baby. Something that looks incredibly obvious to you, the people working on a project for the last n months, might not have such readily apparent connections to those encountering the ideas for the first time.

Part of the fun of creating little tidbits for people to find and geek over is watching the reactions as they encounter and interact with your work. For the creators, it can diminish the fun slightly to have carefully balanced hints and clever approaches only to have to go back and slap a big neon blinking glowing pointing finger sign all over your efforts. The reaction enjoyed by someone watching someone else find an in-character email isn’t at all the same when the first person has to ask “so, didja get that email?” (And in that example, you might not even know whether there was a tech trip-up that caused the email in question to not be delivered, or whether it was caught by a diligent spam filter on alert for unrecognizable origins.)

However, if you’re trying something new, and especially in the early stages, sometimes you have to do a little more hand-holding than you might otherwise be inclined to do. This doesn’t mean swing the pendulum all the way into showing everything you’re doing all at once, but does mean that you have to be willing to launch with a simpler and more obvious approach if your well-crafted more devious plans fall short of your goals.

I’m not sure whether these will be of interest to anyone else, but they’re some of the thoughts flowing through my mind as I attempt to patiently wait for people to start noticing our little venture. It’d be nice if I did more posts like these; I should consider that thought.

…Well, it’s busy season up at work.

…We’re about to launch our 10th anniversary sale special which will hopefully make it even busier.

…Working like mad to put the finishing touches on the paper we’ll be taking to Arse Elektronika this year. There’s more detail over at the household blog, Words Words Words, here.

…Working like crazy (a really fun crazy) on the collaborative creative project, which you’ll start seeing signs of any day now.

…Having my brain torn apart by my novel I’m figuring out I’m going to have to redraft, and the question now is simply whether I’ll do that before or after I get through the last few chapters.

But more literally…this weekend I’ll be enjoying the hills and experiences of San Francisco with Kit, and in a couple of weeks I’ll be taking a version of talk and paper to Israel, traveling with Steve to ICON festival in Tel Aviv.

And then, hopefully, staying home and finishing about 6 projects before the end of the calendar year.

I’ve had very little online time lately, but I’m adjusting daily routines so I can spend more time on my computer. I love comments and blog interactions, so readers keep in touch!

Well it feels that way, but only because the projects I work on are so huge. We finished the second, much longer pass of the business models monstrosity gargantua paper, yay! Now we only have to follow up on all the tangents and make another complete pass through it before my mom comes down with flowchart and red pen in hand. In two weeks or less. Then another for the rest of the paper. Then we’ll be traveling, so better damn well be done. Argh, so much to finish before travel upsets the creative routine again! Wait, chill, panic is another post.

I’ve got about 2.5 more things to catch up on at the shop, which is good improvement there as well. And not falling to pieces more than a few times a week, which is an improvement from 1+ times daily. And, hmm…ah, the maid service thing for the house was totally some of the best money we have chosen to spend to help our family out. Really, any of you families out there that don’t just totally bond lovingly over housework and can save enough pennies for should look into it, at least to help with the deep cleaning and little tidying details that daily life often makes difficult to keep up with. We have them over twice a month, and it’s quite affordable especially when you calculate the time it would take for us to do the same amount of work.

This week I’ve gotten the dining room to a state of completeness lacking only the tabletop and bookshelf organization to be done. My room is down to one bookshelf’s amount of boxes to unpack, (plus laundry to put away) and we hung all the large pictures in the main room (and I’m a third of the way through re-hanging Steve’s book-cover pictures so they look better) so that room is done except for any small finishing touches we think to add.

There’s still so very much to do, but that’s for another post as well. This post is about taking the time to appreciate the minutia of progress.

*tap, tap, twitch*

Okay, enough of that for now, back to work!

PS - I rolled a 1 last night and actually talked about my novel with Kit. That’s a short step away from writing on it, so should be considered good progress as well.