Sunday 1 January 2012

It's a New Year...



My New Year's Resolution is to contain and stifle the great dragon which has been smothering my creativity: Procrastinatrax pejorative. A lot of the time, I'd be working on something, and just never post it: "it just needs more polishing, more work, more tinkering and tweaking." But no amount of tinkering or tweaking ever fully satisfied me. It's a wonder I post anything at all.

I recently put up a post on the Aquiromians. Originally it was much longer, before I decided to split it into parts. I started working on it in April. April 2010. I had a big post on my thoughts on the upcoming Hobbit film's dwarves. I still have tons of reviews of comics, books and the like that I just wasn't happy posting. Well, no more.

And, of course, there's the Encyclopedia. I've amassed tons and tons of notes over the years, but I keep second-guessing myself, so much of the EH as it is now is written from scratch. The temptation was to just take posts I'd made on the REH Forums, The Cimmerian, Hyborian Age Gazetteers, even Conan: Total War previews, and make them fit. That was the original plan. But every so often, I came across some little detail that I had reconsidered. It might've been a pastiche element that slipped through the cracks (Shamar being a pre-Cataclysmic city was one), or a new take (my view of Corinthia had changed dramatically), or even just some weird thing that didn't work out. So I eventually stopped, and decided to just go back to the stories.

But that's been problematic too. The way my mind works, I take time to remember. I can't just draw it forth like CTRL-F on a file: I have to delve through filing cabinets. So this has slowed things down too. But, again, I'm reconsidering my approach.

Hopefully I'll have at least one post a week up, either Encyclopaedia related, or one of those reviews I haven't finished. In any case, Happy Hogmanay, one and all!

2 comments:

  1. Happy New year, Al!

    I seem to have that same dragon hounding me. Often I have blamed my lack of productivity on what I perceive to be an insufficient workspace, but that's a pathetic excuse. Unforgivably, I know that even while I make that excuse.

    Whenever I think of Howard in his little space doing so much I mentally slap myself.

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  2. Welp, now you know why I have no posting schedule besides "maybe every Friday maybe". Procrastinatrax pejorative doesn't seem so much a problem for you as its evil and easily-mistaken counterpart of the genus Onemoreeditus--Perfectionatrix Maybeanotherdraftorus. I've had a good spell of sitting in front of the laptop and getting nothing done fictionwise, which seems the true stomping-ground of Procrastinatrax Pejorative.

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