For a long time, I've wrestled with
myself over a difficulty completing tasks. When the light bulb of an
idea pops up for me, it's not really a light bulb. More like a
torch. It illuminates my path, but the illumination is temporary.
The problem with a torch is that it burns out. And then I'm back in
the darkness with no more understanding of how to move forward with
the original idea. My progress stops.
I wish that were the only difficulty
involved, but those ideas aren't just a temporary illumination.
They're outright thought bubbles.
They entrap me. That one thought captures me. I am inside the
bubble.
If I
try to escape the bubble – to think about other ideas or try to
keep pressing on in another direction – the bubble will stretch,
but snap back to its original form, keeping me within it until I
pursue that thought. My brain won't move on from that one task,
until the bubble has gone its path, until the torch burns out.
It's a
simultaneous burning desire for creation and exploration and a race
against time. My balloon of hot air is in a trek to get around the
world in eighty days, or eighty hours, or eighty minutes... however
long I have before my bubble is floating on the winds of change
again, naught but a candle in the wind.
Because
of this I have many projects in the works that I've been working on
for years, in bursts – or until bursts, in bubble-speak.
Necromancy card game, Tensai pet battler, Astral Gate tabletop,
Astral Gate novels, Defend the Stream, this blog, my video
content...a massive number of projects that my brain simply won't
complete in one attempt...but it will not abandon them. They're all
revisited plenty.
Sometimes
I'm lucky and projects can be completed in a short enough time that
my results can be made visible – such as some of my stat projects
in League of Legends or my duelist card game modified from Suikoden
2's duel system (which I showed to a whopping one person).
But
for the others...it's a collective brainstorm – a supercell of
thought processes and whims -- that has been brewing for over a
decade at this point, waiting before unleashing its fury. I don't
know how to guide the storm, to keep a bubble from popping, or to
keep the torches alive. Sometimes it is pitch dark. I am likely to
be eaten by a grue.
