On Fading Torchlight, Thought Bubbles, and Brainstorms

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.