Back when I was wee, there was a TV show called Quantum Leap. Quantum Leap was about a Scientist named Sam Beckett who got caught in a botched experiment and ended up “leaping” into people in the past (but within his lifetime) and changing and improving their lives. Putting aside the whole “higher power” thingy going on, it was a great idea.

I remember when a teenager discussing with my friend what you do if you leapt back in time to a younger you. It was a fun thought-exercise. And for some reason I started thinking yesterday… “what if I, the adult me, leapt back into being a teenager?”

The amazing thing I realised was that I’m a completely different person. Completely. My attitude, my opinions and my perspective are all different. Besides all the knowledge that I’ve accumulated (which would be enormous advantage… imagine knowing how big the web is going to go big…), the way I approach things and life has changed. Part of that is probably becoming a father, your priorities change but also part of it is just life experiences, getting married, buying a house, working in a professional environment and so on.

While I would never willing leap back to being a teenager, I realised that I’d wouldn’t want to change anything either, good or bad. It’s not about regret or not regretting. I love my wife, love my kids. Changing the past, even subtly, could change everything that I hold dear.

What a life-affirming conclusion!

I only offer one possible explanation (there may be others) but this one certainly applies to me. By trade, I’m a Software Engineer and, as my project leader said “you’re being paid to be pedantic.” This is quite true: I have to be pedantic, because that thing that fucks up shit at some point in the future (i.e. the devil) is in the details. So I dissect, criticize and over-analysis stuff. You wouldn’t want it any other way though (just think about the software that runs in your set-top-box or medical equipment even).  This need to critically analysis stuff spills into everything else I do though.

It’s not bad, it just means we see more “levels” to things. Take a flower, sure we can appreciate it’s beauty and why others find it beautiful, but we also appreciate it’s construction, the clever mechanisms of it’s survival and how it gets insects to carry it’s seeds and so on. Same with the movies we love, and because we love them, we take them apart, argue over what seem like trivia to others, recognise their flaws, etc. It doesn’t diminish our love for such things, but sure as heck pisses everyone else off. (Not that I have a problem appreciating something at a surface level. I love drawing and despite my amateur skills, I enjoy studying the surface and physical level nature of things when I draw).

My wife sometimes cuts me off when I correct our six year old daughter, because not only do I give the basic correction to her simply mistake, I try to address the underlying mistaken assumptions. I try to share with her my love of the details underneath.

It’s why, being a huge fan of Lord of the Rings (I’ve read all the books only three times so I’m not heavyweight) I didn’t like the movies but I accepted and enjoyed them for what they were.

Of course the side-effect is that with experience it makes you cynical. It’s why we hate marketing and “buzz” as it appears to be an attempt to gloss over and even give a different impression of (what we expect to be) the details. And to us, someone who is very enthusiastic about something can sometimes appear to be either a fool who hasn’t looked under the surface or a salesperson.

In conclusion, some of us geeks/nerds are pedants with good reason and hence we can appear to hate the things we love because we appear to be over-critical (but we are simply enjoying it in a different way).

There is an interesting discussion going on right now over on the igaming mailing list (and cross-posted to LiveJournal), but one I’ve consciously chosen not to comment on. The people involved have much bigger stakes in it than I ever have and I’ve had my share of being on the virtual battleground but I have little to add on this.

So I guess I’m doing it here. If you take the time, read the original post. It’s roughly about now in the year that some argument occurs (though the last few years have been quiet). The discussion is about how scenarios, or rather TableTop RPGs, are run at Irish Conventions. Apparently we do it differently to everyone else and one of the “old hands” in the scene has strongly suggested that cons change the way they do things.

Unlike most of the people involved in the discussion, I’ve only GMed at a few conventions, submitted only two (may be three, I can’t exactly remember) scenarios, attend conventions every few years and I’m not really part of the “scene” though I know a lot of the oldies and some of the younger ones by face or name. We’re a small enough country you know.

I’ve GMed at conventions but only in my younger teenage years (15+ years ago, maybe even more), when the offer of free entry and T-shirt were a big thing for me. I ran only systems I knew but I barely remember the experience. I do remember being called up a few days before one Gaelcon and being asked if I’d GM some game because I did it the year before, I could hardly refuse. I remember as youngster it was the systems I knew that I want to play.

As I entered collage, I wasn’t really involved at that level again. The only scenarios I submitted were because friends asked me to, no other reason. I put a lot of effort into them at time, getting them in on time, trying to layout them out to support GMs, etc. But I found as a newbie scenario writer, I was given the short stick for a lot of it. My second scenario was ran on the dreaded Sunday morning slots where one of the players arrived and promptly fell asleep, because, like everyone else, he had been out drinking at the pub quiz the night before.

The complaint in this discussion is that numbers are dwindling and the organisation behind scenario submissions and finding GMs is breaking down. Writers submit their scenarios late, GMs don’t get them until five minutes before the session starts, everything is a mess and with dwindling numbers, it’s just badness. The solution, proposed, is that the writer is the GM and there is only one table per scenario (ran by the writer). So no bad GMs to run that scenario, but then you have lack of tables, people don’t get to play the games they want, and so on.

I have to agree, at the few conventions I’ve been at, I’ve been lumbered with GMs who didn’t know the system but knew thew world (we still had a good game), with GMs who only got the scenario as we sat down (that game sucked) and games that didn’t run because there wasn’t enough players. Hell, in one case, I heard about game that was going to be scheduled and offered to be a GM, but that fell apart because of not enough players.

From my writer perspective though, it was always a one writer-table experience. Unless you’re one of the “superstars” of the scene or writing one of the stable games (like D&D or in the olden days Vampire), you only ever got one table. Most of the games I’d like to play are not the big name games (and this was before the big “indie revolution”), I play those with my regular troupe, it’s the unusual or less popular ones that I grab my interest. They regularly only have one or maybe two tables. To me it seems like we have the two systems already in place, but then I don’t have the vast amount of con-experience to validate that assessment.

So on side we have the big popular games or writers with several tables and GMs running the scenarios. This is the given impression of how cons are ran. And on the other side then, lesser popular or well known games and writers often only get one table (possible two).  So it already looks like, to me, we have a hybrid system of multiple GM to one scenario and single-table-writer-GM scenarios. The commonality is how the scenario is submitted to the con as a scenario writer must assume that other GMs may read their scenario and can’t just run with a few notes in their head.

So is the issue really with the scenario submission process? Should it be more flexible, lower the bar to get more in or raise the bar to get only the high level of quality? Or am I missing the fundamental difference in the two styles of organization?

It would seem to me that the clog in the pipe is the scenarios received by a con more than anything else. Cons need to have a better submission process that encourage new writers to contribute but keeps a high level of quality. Not easy I guess when everyone involved is volunteers. The more I think and write about it, the more it seems to me that conventions are like publishers in many ways. They need to be to maintain a high level of quality of submission. Yet unlike publishers there is very little feedback from the cons until the actual day of the convention (i.e. the public launch of the scenario in a live game), (in my experience but if yours differs, that great). If you don’t care about the quality than the model needs to change and give more flexibility to writer/GMs to just run stuff.

If we keep the old way, you need more writers to get involved. I think the first thing to do is reduce the foreseeable “barriers to entry” as much as possible, provide some sort of enticement to get new writers in and then provide good and decent feedback before the convention.

For example, one of the “barriers” people throw about is that people don’t know how to write scenarios and so there should be workshops and guides etc. These are all great but don’t necessarily encourage writers to submit their work to cons. Perhaps cons could start with a “Style Guide” that gives suggestions on format and layout, sections/chapters and notes on readability, much like you’d get from a publisher who may solicit freelance work. Of course they shouldn’t necessarily be about how to design the scenario though as there is “more than one way to skin a cat”, but guides and references are always useful, if well presented. You could use the wiki to “crowd-source” it even.

Also, why not promote the scenarios submitted last year? Make them available from the con website, with snippets of positive quotes from the players. I always find it odd that last year is forgotten, websites deleted and and the scenarios get banked and gather dust. I don’t see an issue with an old scenario being run again if there is demand for it. Also, by using last years scenarios as promotional material you’re also playing to the ego of the writers, encouraging them to come back and write more this year.

And you need to entice writers as early as possible. Awards don’t do it BTW. Not saying awards are bad, they serve their own function, but only one person can win an award, the rest are losers. You don’t want you’re new writers to be losers, you want them to write for the con next year. I know cons aren’t going to pay writers, and while it’s nice to provide them with snacks and give free entry, its not a particular enticement for someone like me. It’s nice, but really not enough. Instead it’s the little bit extra that con might do. As way of example, I write some free software. People  use it and come back to me for support. A small small minority of users will donate a few Euros my way to say thanks. That’s nice. I also provide a wish list of books and that is really really nice when I receive a surprise parcel with one of those books. It’s how I discovered Watchmen. Those little things, are what keep me developing the software and trying to help and support the users. GreyGhost who publish Fudge RPG, for example, will send you free stuff if you run a fudge game at a convention. So to get new writers and keep them, there has to be that little extra something to entice them and keep them. Perhaps a free signed RPG book, a piece of art from a local artist or even getting their scenario illustrated for example. I don’t know whats available to the budget or ingenuity of con RPG organisers, but it doesn’t have to be expensive. Con goers know what to expect from the con experience, but it’s that little bit extra that can make it memorable.

There are less physical ways too, such as proper feedback. If you have a hard deadline for scenarios and those that arrive on time should be reviewed and feedback provided back to the author. For a new writer, knowing that someone took the time to actually read the work in its entirety and make a point of providing useful feedback is great. In fact, feeding to the egos of the writers is cheap but just as effective as physical gifts. Send them a copy of the con pamphlet with their name highlight and their scenario listed.

In the end however, we’ve got to recognise that on all levels of these experiences are people who volunteer and provide their creativity and effort for very little return. So I can imagine it’s hard to change the way things are done or to take criticism from people like me who haven’t done their time. So I offer my thoughts as is.

I only a few minutes to blog today, on the last day of 2008. I may not even get to finish this post, depending on when my son wakes up from his nap. I don’t have a checklist or wishlist of things I had planned to do this year. Nor do I intend to do it for next year. Too many things have happened this year that it would be unfair to summaries as a bullet point in a meme. The scary thing is that it only seems like yesterday that it was the previous Christmas as I can vividly remember what the kids got then and now.

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas and that next year brings you good things.

I’ve read a number of books on how to write and on the creative process of writing and the one piece of advice I’ve kept with me is that you should cultivate the things that inspire you and avoid the things that demotivate you. The trick is identifying what inspires you and what has the opposite effect. For example, a badly written book can be a great inspiration because after reading it, you think “hey, I can write something ten times better then that.” But for me, I find myself becoming demotivated when I read reviews of roleplaying books and blogs of prominent roleplaying designers and writings. I feel I can’t reach their standards and so it discourages me from writing my own roleplaying game/book.

Last night I finished a large section of Lost Heroes RPG, but I started thinking: “whats the point? I can’t write as well as the guys behind XYZ or that blogger over at that online community”. I literally fell asleep beside the laptop then, my body and mind saying, enough is enough, stopping pushing yourself, you’ve got a cold, you’re tired, life sucks, kids are asleep, give up. But I had to rouse myself and get the kids bags ready for tomorrow. Oddly this activity is even more depressing, my mind wanders as I’m getting everything in order, as if my higher level functions are not really needed for the chore at hand so they are free to evaluate and drift among my memories and feelings and I find myself getting even more down about my writing.

I woke up this morning, physically worse than I went to bed. Nose is clogged up and running, my head is aching and I had to get up twice during the night to take care of the baby so I had a distrubed sleep. But at the back of my mind, I was working through some system-design aspects of Lost Heroes RPG, unrelated to the writing I finished last night. I was getting thoughts and ideas and spent much of my work morning, writing up notes, when I should have been coding.

I finished V for Vandetta last week for the first time. (Not as good as Watchman, but still excellent. I’m spooked by the futuristic vision of Britian that the English government are so deseperatly trying to make happen… like this “for your own protection”). There was an article at the back of the graphic novel by Alan Moore about his creative process for V for Vandetta and he described the experince of knowing that you have something but you need to get at it and work it to get there. Waking up with those thoughts about the system design of Lost Heroes RPG was exactly that, my subconsiousness saying, “hey, you got something here so get off your arse and finished it.” It’s not mind-blowing and my subconsiousness failed to convince that I have something amazing, but at least I’m going to keep working on it.

It seems to be a slow process and the current volume seems gigantic compared to previous revisions. Maybe I should start putting pieces of it up as I go though I had hoped to get someone to read over it before I put it online. The website is certainly sitting there, waiting to be setup.

In one of my recent posts, I was talking about a Fudge RPG project I’ve been silently working on and said:

Some thoughts about it though have pushed me to consider releasing it as an indie or even free project.

I foresaw two major problems to producing a decent quality RPG:

1. Lack of decent tool for layout (I don’t have thousands to spend on some Adobe product)
2. Artwork

First I find Scribus; an open-source Desktop Publishing Tool. Quite complicated and a bit of learning curve, but free. Along with OpenOffice and the Gimp, all the software is there.

For the second, while I can draw, I can’t draw to a professional or high quality level. But then I came across a blog post on design and found numerous photo and illustration sites, where you can buy artwork for use in your projects: sotck.xchng, istockphoto and veer.com (and there is always flickr). Just a quick browse I found pieces I could use. They aren’t on point but would do. If I add my own skill I’m sure I could generate some pieces based on what I found.

So yea it’s actually doable, I mused. (There is actually another issue but I’ll talk about those at the end.)

Then I catch this post from Fred Hicks in my newsreader about actually not publishing and doing your RPG for free. Did Fred Hicks read my mind? Probably not I thought but his advice hit the point. I had considered putting aside a small budget for the project, just enough that I don’t care about making any back. I also read the posts/blogs he linked to in that post. Both were completely relevant to my train of thinking. For me, getting something published was more about a personal milestone or goal than gaining audience or making money (both would be nice but not crucial).

I’m still not convinced but it’s not that important. I still have to do the new version of LH first before I actually need to decide. The content comes first before all that fancy stuff.

I’m certainly not averse to doing it for free. Just take a look at TDOMF my plugin for WordPress. I’m making a small amount of money on it, not enough to write home about, but it’s a nice feedback. I get bug reports and feature requests every week and I try to respond to all. But that leads me to my last issue that turn me off giving an RPG away for free. With TDOMF, I’m releasing into an existing community who will use it. I have, therefore, an extended “play-testing” user-base that will tell me concisely what’s wrong with it how it works. They are also willing to download upgrades and keep up to date. Releasing a free RPG, there is no community there to release to. It’s a discussion that’s floated around the Irish gaming community for a while. Releasing into a vacuum is the same as copying a file to /dev/null. It goes nowhere and is pointless. Of course, maybe I’m just ignorant of a community out there that would be interested (please inform me!). I’m also acutely aware of the “pluggers”, people who register and logon to forums expecting people to be interested in your project but have no “credibility”. This is something I don’t want to do. I did it for the Irish Gaming Wiki and got slammed down many times. I don’t want to spend time promoting myself and playing the “status game” either. I mentioned in my previous post my “narrow creative bandwidth” and part of that would have to be spent on doing that and everything else would suffer. I’m also aware that the success of free media (RPG being a specific type of media) is dependant on luck and popularity.

Maybe I’ve gotta wait till the Internet starts shouting at me, before I really listen…

My thoughts have been skirting around the idea (note: I’m just rambling here...) that that some of my hobby projects like “COG”, “LH” and TDOMF would benefit hugely from opening them up to input from others. I say “skirting around the idea” because I am not completely comfortable with it. I guess, in a sense, I’m not a particularly open person either (which probably explains a lot about the content of this blog!).

I remember a sad incident from my childhood – while I was in primary school, I wrote a “ghost story”. I took several middle pages from a copy book and taped them together to form a little book. On the last page I had done up this elaborate skeleton drawing and the story was pretty much written around the drawing. Now you can imagine the effort a six year old puts into something like this. I had it my school bag, proud as punch. But after the lunch break, I found that some of the other boys had taken it out, drawn all over it and destroying it in the most mocking way they could. They were waiting for me to find it at which point they started to tease me about it, making fun of my writing.

It’s amazing that I can still conjure that memory when I think about the idea of allowing others in. These days I’m a professional software engineer, working on a good team. I have no problem collaborating and sharing ideas about the project. But when I talk about my personal hobby projects, like TDOMF or LH, I don’t talk. They are mine and I don’t share. I don’t think it’s just a childhood memory that stops me. I think it’s a number of personal reasons. First is self-confidence, opening up a piece of work for others to collaborate in, requires that others want to collaborate with you (anyone remember the GCG website?). The second is, I haven’t met or found anyone online or otherwise I would want to share my projects with. And lastly, they are hobby projects. I’m doing them for myself, at my own pace and for the simple pleasure of working on something. Bringing others into it, means delgating, sharing responsibilities, planning… bleurg!

But also, part of the issue for me, is the mental or artistic ownership of the project. I have a “vision” of what I want and I work towards that. The vision may change or move around but I’m always fairly clear on what I want (which may end up being different to what others want). The best way to express that vision to others (so they know what I want) is to bring it about myself, trying to explain it will lead to miscomunication. It’s certainly the case for TDOMF (which is easier to talk about as it’s software). I want to have certainly features implemented and certain polish to it before I give it a version 1.0. Once it hits there, I may consider looking for help with it. The same goes for LH, my Fudge roleplaying project. I have a vision of what I want and until I get close enough to it, I’m not particularly enamoured of inviting others to help me. Take my Reboot RPG, hopefully it’ll appear in a little while as a PDF. I don’t think I’d mind if others expanded or radically changed it after that.

Yet, COG is another Fudge roleplaying project of mine and the vision I had for that is sort of distributed or modular in a way. I have several ideas and components and I want to make a coherent game out of it. I don’t think I’d have too much of a problem exposing it to others and even trying to do something with it (if people liked what they saw). Maybe that’s the trick to it, to share a distributed vision with a group of people who you respect and work towards it. The only obstacle is, I haven’t met a whole lot of people that I respect in a sense that I would work well with them (or vice versa). (I now think of the small disaster Specky went through).

My own friends who I roleplay with have all done their own pet RPG projects. For one, Dark Obsidian, I submitted some fiction to but I didn’t collaborate with the author on it. My friends all have different tastes, particularly in roleplaying. That’s why we play well together but probably unlikely to work well together because we wouldn’t get over some of the fundamentals of game design.

My other hobbies, drawing and writing really are very much single-person activities except when you want to show them off. Maybe that’s it, I’m closet perfectionist – I don’t want to share my projects until they are perfect (close to my initial vision)!

This is a warning, not a saying:

“To know your destiny is to destroy yourself. It is better to live in ignorance and love, for the world is fated to be destroyed by destiny.”

I was at the gym and I started musing on a story in my head. The gym is one place I do a lot of thinking and imagining while I work out. I played the whole story out, right up to the end. It was a fully concieved story, several main characters, background, mythos and a plot. Then those words appeared. I could see them as the last lines to the novel. I don’t know exactly what prompted it as I normally envision stories in my mind’s eye like movies, not text in a novel. The story I was imagining was certainly about destiny, how once you accept it, it consumes you totally but if you try and fight it or ignore it it will also destroy you. Destiny and fate being something much larger than the small lives of men, their hopes and fears.

I tried to analysed my thought processes that lead to it and I know, in part, the text is actually a warning against religious zealousness, though the story had little of that.

Saw this post from cartographer, where she talks about spoilers and how she is getting more interested in good writing than:

trawl through hours of quite-good just for the big reveal at the end

(I know it’s nearly month ago, but I’m only catching up on some posts now).

Of course, she’s talking about Harry Potter, a series I’ve yet to go near. I thought I was just being peculiar in my book-buying habits but there is part of me that, in general, distrusts certain types of series. I’m not just talking about novels, but roleplaying books, TV shows and movies.

I’ve always been more engaged by a short concise format for a series then a never-ending or over-long one: a definitive beginning and a definitive end with in a short enough time frame, such as the recent The Lost Room (TV).

I tried to grasp what it was that makes me distrusts such series by performing this thought exercise and formulating it into a sort of rule or law:

The longer a series continues, the probability of disappointment reaches zero.

This is true. The longer something goes on, the greater the chance that I’ll find something I don’t like about it. Nothing’s perfect. But this isn’t what I’m after. A series can dip and come back stronger. No there is something else. So I started thinking about the various series I’ve loved and hated: The Matrix movies, all six Star Wars movies, Lost (TV), X-Files (TV), World of Darkness (RPGs), Discworld (Novels), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV) etc. All these series I eventually turned my back on them or they left a bitter taste in my mouth. They all had a certain strong addictive quality, a fanboy-ism and hype that seemed to throw me eventually off them… many were based on “the big mystery”, like Lost and X-Files. Others had a evolving and alluring mythos, such as World of Darkness and Star Wars. It might have been the tired formula and decreasing impact of the “hit” that turned me. They are like a drug where each “hit” has less and less high which has the knock-on effect of increasing the demand/addiction for more, which further gives the appearance of the series getting worse.

As a series, with a high addictive quota, continues, the apparent quality of the series will decrease.

Where “addictive quota” is generally anything fanboy-inducing, be it a rich setting, a big unanswered mystery/conspiracy, a never-reaching but alluring climax, etc. essentially a element that keeps you coming back for more, whats going to happen next, kind of thing. But this isn’t necessarily correct either. A series can maintain “apparent quality” even with a big mystery. For example the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Star Trek Next Gen. I nearly considered Farscape in that list but that got canned so perhaps the quality didn’t decrease to a level that turned me off.

Of course, what I mean by ”apparent quality” is subjective viewer experience of the series. The quality of the series could be consistent through, but from a user experince of it and the decreasing power of the hit, the subjective quality decreases. However in my experience, the quality objectively seems to suffer a bit.

Anyway lets try to rewrite the rule:

As a series, with a high addictive quota, continues with no fundamental change in premise, the apparent quality of the series will decrease.

H.P. Lovecraft didn’t write a series with the same set of characters. Each short story stood on it’s own, yet each shared a similar formula. In a similar vein, Star Trek Next Gen comprised of lots of short stories (of course nostalgia could be playing it’s part here and making me look back with rose-tinted glasses). Stargate have regularly changed the major antagonist and so by fundamentally changed their premise. However, in the case of Stargate for me, I never got into it so I would have never noticed the quality dipping.

So, the trick, it would seem, is to have a big enough dramatic change or end of story before the “apparent quality” of the series decreases. In the case of Lost it might mean actually revealing something concrete. For World of Darkness… they simply waited too long, for me as a viewer of the series, before changing their formula and ending their big-mystery-story. There is a danger that it’s only the addictive quality that has you watching and if you stop watching, the addiction fades away and the subjective lack of quality is all that is left.

Sure some people have a greater tolerance before the quality decreases which means they are more willing to wait till that big change or the end arrives. Most normal people’s tolerance is not high. My wife got bored of Lost within the first episode of the second series. It took me at least 4 episodes or so. Even when I tuned in to the finale of series two, I found, nothing seemed to have changed! I’ve heard people saying the latest season or finale is brilliant and well worth it, but my subjective view of the quality of show is so low now I can barely work up the interest to switch it on. And of course, in the case of TV, people often start watching later in the series and so their tolerance takes them further than someone who started from the beginning. I think also, as a child and teenager, my tolerance was much much higher or perhaps the impact of each hit was greater so it took longer before I noticed the series going bad.

If I had the time I’d draw a graph, where you have a viewer’s subjective quality and their level of ‘hit’ and as the level of hit dips and goes below quality, quality decreases. Once that happens, if you stop the addiction, a viewer lose interest.

All these does explain why I have developed a general distrust of majorly hyped series such as Harry Potter and why I avoid them, I think. I could be simply spouting nonsense too!

So what does this mean for a ”good” series?

Well simply, a series must change. It can’t depend on the big mystery or that one bad guy to keep it going so long. It has to regularly dramatically change. Well you can, if you get the right audience I think, but you have to be careful then.  If you fail to provide a big enough hit later, some of the audience may find themselves wondering what they thought was great about the series in the first place.

So I wonder… would the Prisoner have been a cult hit if it hadn’t been canned?

(Small side note, I don’t think this affects actual roleplaying chronicles or games. When you play an RPG, I think, the hit is so different, self-generated if you will and so it can maintain the same level as long as the players don’t get too jaded.)

I’ve been finding it incredibly difficult to find time to do things-I-want-to-do, the things-I-need-to-do and things-I-have-to-do. Many of the things-I-should-do, don’t get done… because I simply forget. This isn’t old age setting in however.

I work and I’m parent. That pretty much sums me up today. Add on top of that that we’ve moved into a new house in the last two to three months.

What this means is that, we’re managing. At home we’re slowly getting rid of the moving boxes. By and by we’ve hired two skips so far, once for the new bathroom and then a bigger one for the new kitchen. But, it looks like we’ll have to hire another one to get rid of all the empty cardboard boxes (and other junk we’ve accumulated in the move)! One room is just boxes at the moment; our other spare room is just a dump for the old carpet. Even our living room is a mess of books in bags waiting to be put on shelves that will appear, soon, on a wall, somewhere in the house.

This all meant that I have no where to code, draw or meditate. What’s worse, I didn’t feel inclined to do any. I could always just clear stuff off the table and start drawing or sit down for a few hours in the living room with my laptop and headphones or even just close the door in the bedroom and take 30 minutes… however it dawned on me that the lack of a workspace was an obstacle to actually pursuing my hobbies outside the priorities of my life. It isn’t the only obstacle however.

Of course, being an engineer, once you understand a problem you can often solve it. So why haven’t I starting coding TDO Mini Forms v0.3 yet or got dug into maps for Reboot (see here and here)?

A workspace is a meant to be physical thing, a space separate from every day life. Somewhere private. But essentially it is just a tool. Required but you don’t necessarily need a private room (unless there are practical considerations such as space to store equipment etc.).

I could easily grab my laptop and start writing (or coding) anywhere! No it is also a mental thing. A workspace allows you separate your life and what you’re about to work on. It simply helps set you up for work. When I was training Shotokan, you would enter class, bow, take your place and start training. You would leave work behind. The workplace simply aids in giving you head-space.

And that is what I am really missing. Head-space. My free-time gets filled up with all things that-must-be-done-now. When I try and make space for me, I just zone out. Tired. Sophie, my wife, gets pretty tired these days, which is understandable, so I end up taking on a little more. My head-space is actually just vegging out in front of the TV, playing my Nintendo DS or Unreal Tournament 2004 on the PC. None require any real particpation on my part. Sure I could write in this period, but it isn’t just a case of my body being unwilling, it is also my mind. I need to feel I can and able to do it, not be dragged down by lethargy.

Which also means it’s a little hard to really chill-out because part of me goes… “you know, you should really finish of that piece, get it done” (where piece is a flat-pack piece of furniture or a piece of code for WordPress plugin).

I could meditate, but I’d probably just fall asleep!

Anyway, all these to conclude that an abstract or true workspace is also one of time and mood, not just some physical space.