I often find that my motivation and inspiration come in cycles. Some months I am working through ideas and existing projects thinking how I am ever able to spend 7-8 hours a day working nonstop on a single big project with passion and energy. And then one month, all of a sudden, there isn’t anything I would rather do. I’ve always been captivated by the new and the interesting, particularly in the creative fields. If there is a service or item that I don’t see represented online that I feel as though I can provide, it becomes the forefront of my priority list. I want to provide it as soon as possible.
That’s not exactly what happened this month, but I’m still looking forward to giving it my all. I’m doing an art challenge as an exercise to get some more mileage out of Neal and Yaki. I’m going to be drawing them in 20 different art styles. It would have been simple to choose 20 different art styles that I like for this project, but I wanted to escape the land of familiarity a bit to make it a real challenge. I picked someone else’s format, and I’m not familiar with about half of the list. Should be interesting.
Alongside this challenge, I’m going to be working on episode 5 of Wakeup Call. It’ll be the last episode for this year since I’ll be busy with other things in December, but I plan to use the excess time to plan out my episode list for 2022. Ideally, I want to get 10 chapters written next year. It’ll be tough to pull off, but I think it’s just within the realm of possibility if I really push myself and keep it my main priority. Given my aforementioned love of the new and interesting, that last part may be the most difficult.
As promised, my site now has 101 Cosmic aliens, written up in my own format with my own terminology. We’re very nearly halfway there now. I pray I maintain the motivation to do another 100 next year. I definitely don’t want to leave the project unfinished. Similar to Wakeup Call, I’m planning to do 10 aliens a month for 10 months next year to get 100 more on the site. For the rest of this year, I’ll be looking into indexing and seeing if I can organize my aliens into some kind of easily searchable database. Something that mobile users can use to navigate it a little easier. My design and terminology are still a bit rough and need playtesting for me to finalize, but it feels good to just have a foundation to work with.
On the gaming side, not much to say. I’m done with Inscryption much faster than I thought I’d be. I’d recommend the experience without looking up anything about the game. It’s the sort of game that isolates you into a mysterious world and lets you piece together where you are. It’s much more meaningful as a personal experience than a community one, where you can imagine that it’s something only you are witnessing.
The only other project I’m working on is reviewing and analyzing stories on Tapas. I’ve got one more to do in the current set, and then I’ll do another four. We’ll see where it goes after that. If I’m lucky, I’ll manage to find someone over there willing to give me some feedback on my story. Can’t get enough of that. Happy Halloween. Make the most!
