The Creative Process #52 - Desk on Fire

No philosophy this month - there's been no time! October has been a busy, eclectic month.

It started off with a family holiday down on the coast, which is both relaxing and exhausting with two kids in tow. There's a fine line between a lovely family game of minigolf, and trying to explain how to stand and use a putter.

I was acting head of my team for a week and a half, which was both easy and stressful. With no great power still comes a modicum of responsibility.

I'm a mathematician by trade. You might have seen maths suffer a bombardment of results from AI this month. In short, they got AI to strip-mine the frontier of open problems and the computer can solve a lot of them. Yay? This hit the maths community hard. I don't have any answers to any of that, but I do feel it shapes the mathematical tradition as being closer now to the artistic tradition than the empirical, scientific tradition. Which is a different form of creativity, but not really the focus of this newsletter.

Shenanigans last year shifted my yearly health checkups a month early, and into the middle of all this. Good news, I'm doing better than ever before, but there's always more to do.

I did my yearly fundraising activity for One Foot Forward, raising money for mental health. I managed to smash my usual goal of $1000. I was in the Top 500 of all Australian fundraisers this year. Part of this effort was substantially increasing my exercise, which ended up being brisk walks. Whilst being good for the heart, these were good for the head and also my projects. I formed a TTRPG campaign for my Friday-night games crew, taking the primordial sludge of ideas and turning it into something workable.

IF Comp remains a north star on my creative year, but I almost lost track of it. I managed to play and rate the minimum of five games to be counted as a judge. Lots of great games to play, and I felt like I hadn't done my share of contributing to the IF Community. I did publish the reviews of the games, as a small contribution.

I utterly missed my other yearly indulgence of the Roguelike Celebration. It always has great talks that inspire me to think of game ideas I still don't have the time to make.

Recently I had been feeling the ache of not having a good creative project that I was working on. The best thing, the advice goes, is to just choose something and give it a deadline. So I did.

I want to get better at making gamebooks and choice fiction, so I wanted a small scope project. As a little random present for my daughter, I wanted to make a gamebook about her dream of becoming the Prime Minister. I had the basic idea mapped out, and told her the deadline of 29th October, a Thursday. I usually put both kids to bed on those days, so instead of telling them meandering stories of my past to make them fall asleep, I would go through the gamebook with them choosing each decision.

To my dismay, I did not meet the deadline. When I wasn't dealing with higher priorities, I was dealing with much lower energy. I'm so nearly there, but need to just bring it home.

My daughter was disappointed, but not as disappointed as I was. I'm still on the hook for it, just gotta find time.

I think it'll be cool if I can make it up into both an app for her to play on her iPad, as well as a little printed book. I don't think people need more objects in their life – especially my kids – but I do think everyone needs more artifacts in their life. Objects with history that mean something to people at a time in their lives, rather than some plastic thing railgunned to your door by Amazon.

I was worried that October had passed me by without much creative work to speak of. I'm not content to just putter about. I need to start and finish projects. Otherwise, the thinking goes, I'm not actually being creative.

But perhaps that's not right either. It's easy for me to overlook what I have done, and yet focus on what I haven't done. You don't do creative work and have a life as a separate, parallel track. You are creative inside a life. Whether I liked it or not, this was a month of doing my creative best whilst also trying to do my living best.