ON LEARNING HOW TO FOCUS

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Are you feeling that dull, is-this-really-my-life, painful feeling in the middle of your chest? The one that seems to want to well up into real tears but never does? The one that is calling you to action but you’re not really sure what the action is?

You have? Thank goodness. I was beginning to feel like I’m alone in this.

I’ve an inkling what the action I’m being called for might be. It has something to do with art making, with telling stories, with weaving worlds. And a lot of that has been happening. But maybe the call of action is a call to focus.

Focus on one story, on one world, on one project.

In the long term, that will be Uniting a Kingdom. The story has got a really awesome ending. I just have no idea how we get from where it is now to there.

In the short term it is an entry for New Signatures. I can’t seem to work out how the entry scheme works, so I’ve decided that the deadline is 19 June. There is some feedback I’d like from some of my peers before then, so I aim to finish first iteration end of May. Lots of work, but I’m really excited about it.

This is an aspect I need to work on, though, and due to the proliferation of terms like “renaissance soul” there are others who do, too. We have so many ideas and only so many hours in the day to implement them. And as we are working on one idea three hundred more gets generated. I’ve heard of this mythical “writer’s block” where the writer in question doesn’t have a starting point. The opposite situation is more of a problem for many of us: there are so many starting points and it’s so exciting to get started on something that we hop from one thing to the next without finishing anything ever. And I’ve reached a point in my life now where I’m not satisfied with that any more. I want to finish things. I want to be able to show what I spend my time on.

So in the interest of focusI might be twiddling with the site design a bit. I’m thinking of dropping the Wednesday to Friday slots altogether (it will still be available, I’m no Everett Brogue after all). It’s been fun to work on but focus is required at this point. Obviously I need my Tuesday soapbox and the whole point of this whole site is the Monday “updates” (yeah, I can hear you snickering, saying “what updates I can’t even remember what this whole webcomic is about” well you know what, you try working 7-5 every day, having hobbies like figure drawing and yoga and a happy marriage andproducing comic pages every week) anyway where was I? Focus: obviously something I struggle with. There’s just too many things out there and in my head here. But the point I am at now in my creativity journey is to learn to focus on one thing at a time. One project, taken to completion.

I’ll let you know how that feels.

P.S. There’s a huge desktop downloadable of the above image available here.

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