I had a bad second half in 2015. There was a lot of stress about money and life in general and a lot of follow-on stress from bad (and unfair, in my view) feedback at my workplace.
And I had overcommitted, creatively speaking. I promised myself I’d write a few things and make some other ones and learn (master!) a bunch of new skills and turn the whole thing into an independent second source of income.
And somehow I’d do all of that while maintaining a work-life balance and tending to my relationship and keeping in touch with family and friends and having a couple of social nights a week and going to concerts and galleries and plays.
It’s not really surprising, then, that all of my creative endeavours died on the vine. There were too many of them, and too many other things to juggle against them.
I promised myself at the opening of this year that I’d scale back and just look for the things that make me happy. One of the first things that has benefited from that shift is my relationship; I’m not caught up in a million things and I feel much more fit to just enjoy the company of LGW without worrying about the world outside.
The other thing that’s just starting to come back – slowly, so very slowly – is creative activity. I started with a bit of cooking. I made a low-fat alfredo from scratch a month or so ago, and it wasn’t great, but it was a good first stab. I’ve done three trays of granola, and I’m already trying things to keep it interesting (although, to be honest, I’ll probably always prefer the “lots of sugar and not much else” variant best).
The last two weeks, I’ve started to pursue the muse a bit more. I’ve been on a bunch of interesting pages for a long while. I’ve been browsing the archives of the New Comics Creators Facebook page this week, and there are tons of great small learnable bits in there. I’ve been reading Jim Zub’s blog a bit, especially the ones about writing and publishing. I’ve been paying a bit more attention to (one of) the Indie Game Developers Facebook group(s).
I also drew something!
Is it good? No! But it’s something I actually drew based on my own ideas for things I’d given up on for months! I’ll take that.