Archive for the ‘Life as a Creative’ Category

Back in 2009 and early 2010, I worked 60+ hour weeks. Between my day job, Dresden, IPR, etc., life was full. Too full. “Mental breakdowns happening like clockwork due to the constant pressure”-full. Add my rather rigorous convention schedule to that, and it was a recipe for unhappiness.

The problem is that I tricked myself into this toxic situation because I would see the number of hours I *could* work in a day and the number of things I needed to do both to keep a roof over my head and to achieve the dreams I had, and said “yes, I will work all those hours. how bad can that be?”

Ambition is a demon on your back that makes you feel guilty when you have to tell someone “I would love to work on your project…but I can’t.” It makes you feel guilty when you decide to watch TV for a couple hours instead of working. (It also robs the feeling of awesome from the achievements in your life, but that’s a topic for another time.) Ambition is the thing that told me I should work all those hours.

The other side of the coin is that we aren’t robots.[1] We can’t be on 24/7, even if there’s time in the day for us to do so. Because time is only one part of the equation. It took me until a few months back to realize more of the equation[2]:

Time + Mental Bandwidth = Productivity

Mental bandwidth[3], unlike, time, is not a constant. It’s your ability to focus on an idea, your energy to do something brain-based, like deal with customers, write, edit, produce audio, manage projects, whatever. Of course, mental bandwidth is also consumed by dealing with home maintenance, travel, relationship issues, business meetings, taxes, all that crap. And mental bandwidth isn’t something entirely under your control — both in that the world will throw you crap you have to deal with and that it’s linked as much to your physical condition as anything else.

To plan my life solely around the time I have is an amateur move. I also have to plan around my mental bandwidth. But since I don’t know what that’ll be tomorrow or next week or whatnot, that’s hard to plan for. So I’m starting to take an approach of figuring out how much I could work in a given stretch of time, and committing to only working 70% of that. If a day gives me ten hours of work time, I know I have to work seven. (That doesn’t count breaks and the like. No one pays me for those anymore. But I’m strangely comfortable with that.) That said, I’m planning more weekly than purely daily.

Right after GenCon, I tried to dive back into work at 100%, and crashed a bit. I didn’t really have that mental bandwidth back. Lesson learned and all, but it’s hammered home that I need to be more aware of my mental bandwidth both in the moment and how I can predict it in the near future. To that end, I’m (slowly) reading Getting Things Done (mentioned previously) and am trying to take better care of myself physically & mentally.

This is not an easy thing to do. I can’t tell which activity of all those I need to do in a day will cost more bandwidth at that moment. Sometimes, dealing with customer service is easy, and costs less than writing. Sometimes, the opposite. Shoot, sometimes writing makes me feel like I have more mental energy than before I sat down. It’s all strange and relative and a bit chaotic — enough to make planning difficult. Especially because they all need to be done. I can’t just say “meh, I won’t do X today,” at least not without drastic consequences.

Like many of my “Thoughts on” posts, I am not stating a solution to something. Just putting thoughts to virtual paper on this lovely Seattle day.[4]

- Ryan

[1] Close friends will know the tone of voice I’m using here. And that I’m wincing as I type it.

[2] Math & CompSci nerds will cringe at how basic that equation is. But you get what I mean, which is the point.

[3] A friend of mine calls this Emotional Bandwidth. I used to think of that as something different, but today I’m less sure. I prefer “Mental Bandwidth” as a label, though.

[4] I’m writing this while chilling outside. It’s drizzly. I’m enjoying my pipe & KMFDM. This is heavenly.

(I posted on Twitter yesterday that this would be called “Overthinking is Masturbation”, and it is, but I had further thoughts this morning. Heh.)

One of my many flaws is that I procrastinate in the form of “thinking about what I need to do.” I like to take long walks and muse about shit: story ideas, game mechanics, blog posts, personal stuff, whatever it is that’s on my mind. And there’s a degree to which this is helpful.

That degree is the excuse I use to keep doing it far, far beyond usefulness. Because (and here’s where we get into the original title) thinking, as an act, is pleasurable. Being clever or intelligent or whatever it is we’re doing when we’re thinking to ourselves about something fires off neurons in our–well, at least my–head that reward me for this activity. I find it calming, relaxing to just think about something. For hours. For fucking days.

Only it’s not useful to “just think” that long. After a bit, because nothing is recorded or submitted to others for feedback or anything that would take me beyond “just thinking,” I come around to the same thoughts over and over. Sometimes I realize it and explore new tangents. Sometimes I don’t until much later. Either way, now I’m wasting my time and preventing myself from moving onto the next action I need to do.

Sometimes these thoughts are about worrying about said action. So I analyze over and over what I feel I should do to mitigate a problem. Sometimes these thoughts are about a hard action, like a tough bit of writing or designing or editing that I need to do. So I think about it over and over. There are different reasons I’ll spend time just thinking, and they’re almost all excuses.

(The ones that aren’t excuses, unfortunately, justify this activity for the ones that are.)

I’m started to read, slowly, Getting Things Done. One of the things mentioned early on is to write down on paper things in your mind, so that you can free your mind up from fixating on them. It hit home yesterday, and a little more this morning (when I changed the title of this post) how the ways I’ve already been doing that have helped me, and how I need to do a better job at it still.

Since I got my iPhone a few years back, I have absolutely fallen in love with quickly typing notes and emailing them to myself. Or occasionally doing a voice memo. I told people within two months of having my phone that it changed my life. I would have a quick idea, type a note, email it to myself, and did that so often that I have a tag in GMail called “Notes to Self” that I routinely go back and search through.

Suddenly I could remember small ideas that would hit me minutes after going to bed. And by typing them out, I was suddenly able to sleep better. My mind wasn’t chewing on this idea over and over — it was allowed to set it aside.

Productivity ensued.

Now, I realize I need to get better at this, not just for the “I’m walking and oh that’s a good mechanic idea I should write it down” moments, but for everything. I can “just think” about a short story for a day, at most, but the next day I need to write things down. The act of writing makes an idea concrete, something I can better explore because I have made it tangible, and something I can then put down without fearing losing the idea — the very reason my mind keeps obsessing about overthinking.

That frees up my mind, my mental bandwidth, for other things it needs to work on. And for working on whatever that thing is more efficiently.

I mentioned why I considered “Overthinking is Masturbation” above, with the brain reward cycle element, but here’s why it’s toxic: once you’re done with the initial thinking you need to do, you’re wasting time. Your thoughts will become better once you write them down. And better still once they come into contact with someone else. The move from pure thought to action is profound, sometimes intimidating, but necessary. And the longer we delay that move, well, none of us are getting any younger.

There are so many excuses we do to keep us from acting. I’ll address some of my own past ones now:

• I only have part of an idea. Congrats, that means you have an idea. You’ll have more if you make your brain explore it by writing it down.
• I don’t know where to start. Actually, you do, it’s just not where you want to start. That’s okay. Start in the middle, or wherever words flow best. You needn’t be linear.
• My idea sucks. Then stop thinking about it? Can’t? Probably means that it’s actually your confidence that sucks. And that’s something that takes practice. So, practice by writing this idea down.
• I’m not ready to write it down. You never are really ready to do anything until some time after you’ve done it. Don’t wait to be ready. Make yourself ready by doing it.
• I’m tired now. I’ll do it tomorrow. Really? You can’t just make a few notes right now, before going to bed? You can’t suck it up for ten minutes?
• I don’t think I can hack it. That’s honest. And you might not be able to right now. But if you never act, you’ll never be able to. Yoda was full of shit: there is a “try.”
• I’m afraid of what I’ll write down. Yep. But that fear doesn’t go away if you ignore the action. It just eats at you. So, suck it up and write. And move on. It’s easier to do so if you act than if you don’t.

When we overthink, when we allow our minds to keep us from moving forward, we’re losing precious hours and days that we could spend creating. We’re losing precious time we could spend learning how to be more confident in our efforts, in how to recover from the mistakes we will invariably make, in all those things that it takes to be a creator.

I’m not telling you not to think. But instead of procrastinating, allow yourself to enter an upward spiral of thinking-acting-thinking-acting. You’re allowed to go back to thinking after you’ve acted. I promise you that. And I promise you that in each iteration of that spiral, your thoughts will be even more awesome and more rewarding.

- Ryan

There’s something I tell people often when they start to get tripped up in a thought — be it playing a game, or trying to articulate a design, whatever:

Say it badly now. Then we’ll work on saying it well.

This comes from my own experiences where trying to state an idea well right away caused me to hesitate, which made me feel like I was a fucking idiot, which in turn killed my confidence in myself and my ideas. I like to tell people that I could have been the person I am today years fucking earlier if I had learned that one lesson sooner.

(Of course, it took those years to learn the lesson concretely/emotionally/to-heart/however you like saying that, rather than just intellectually. So, even that’s bullshit.)

Then I started using this technique a lot as a GM to get players stumbling over an idea to slow down and feel comfortable about saying anything. Works fucking wonders. Only later did I realize the uses outside of the gaming table, and about using it for myself.

We all fear looking like an idiot, especially on the Internet with cockbites around every corner waiting to tear you down, or we’re looking to gain the respect of people we respect, stuff like that. I totally understand the impulse to craft a message well before saying it. Hell, it’s not like I don’t still try myself — we all do. We all should when we can. This rule applies to when we find we can’t.

As social creatures, we are brilliant when we’re feeding off of each other — many minds are better than one and all that jazz. If you have an idea you’re having trouble articulating or making work, get outside of your head. By saying whatever you can to someone else, they can to help you better figure it out. Last night, I was working on trying to explain what I mean by “emotional resonance” to one of my good friends, Justin Smith, and I started with “so, I’m going to talk some dumb shit here, bear with me.” He helped me understand what I was actually talking about, and now I get the concept itself better than I did by thinking about it silently.

Look at my last blog post, Reward Mechanics & Paying Attention. I poorly articulated some shit there that it took others to help me better understand. If I was afraid of looking like a moron on the Internet, I wouldn’t have posted that. I knew I was off on something, but couldn’t entirely figure out what. Now I know (or, at least know better than before).

So if you’re flustered or confused or just can’t quite articulate this thing in your head, stop trying to do it well. Do it poorly. (If you need a safety net, do it poorly with friends, and state up-front that you’re going to do so. Also, if people give you shit for it, I recommend the retort “Fuck off, cockbite.” They’re being the asshole, not you.)

Related: Be unafraid of being wrong, and of admitting that you’re wrong. I have formed and furthered relationships with people that have started by me being wrong in a conversation (not intentionally, of course). No one needs to be right all the damned time. Which is convenient, since no one is.

- Ryan

I really should get back into the habit of blogging, so I will by writing about something I have been telling some people lately.

When it comes to working with people, I have learned a really crucial rule: It isn’t your job to give someone a reason to tell you ‘no.’

This is really, really important. I used to do that total bitch move of, when people asked me to work on something with them, saying “Are you sure?” Whiny, insecure validation bullshit. The simple truth is that I should trust people to be sure of that when they’re asking me to work with them. Or when emailing someone about a job, I would put in my own caveats and make myself sound weaker, sound insecure. I’m giving the person I want to convince to hire me reasons to tell me “no.”

I learned to stop doing that.[1] I will accept “no” as a response, and if there’s an issue that I think I would be irresponsible in withholding (like, say, my availability), I will put that upfront. But I no longer act like someone who needs validation in order to “feel right” about getting a job.

As a result, I have received more work. You can to. Just stop being an insecure tool. Hell, you don’t even have to stop, just *pretend* that you aren’t. Fake it ’til you make it, baby. Just don’t make it easy for a client to want to tell you no.

Related, it’s okay to be confident. You might be worried about sounding arrogant or cocksure or whatever, and thus be afraid of that being off-putting. Stop that.

If you’re worth working with, I want to know that. And I want you to know that. I have little patience (some, but not as much as in the past) for people who need hand-holding. Have confidence in yourself and your decisions. Show me that you do. You’re only being truly arrogant if you’re throwing it in my face and refusing criticism in return.

I used to equate showing confidence with showing arrogance — which is to say, I was a fucking moron. When I decided to show more confidence, suddenly I got more work and more people interested in said work. The trick is still simple: as long as you’re not throwing how “right” you are in others’ faces and as long as you’re willing to take criticism, you’re not being a cockbite.[2] (If you’re afraid you’ll become a cockbite, surround yourself with awesome people who will tell you you’re being one and be willing to listen. This is why I am proud to be in the Evil Hat family — we do this.)

Just try it. Don’t hide behind weakness. I understand the impulse to do so — if you do, then you’re in control of your own failure and lack of progress, and there’s something to be said for being in control of *anything* in your life. All I can tell you is that three years after starting this new life, I find putting myself out there and struggling with my own success far, far more fucking satisfying than being in control of my own failure.

- Ryan

[1] This is one of those times where my advice with being a freelancer overlaps with dating advice. Mildly.

[2] Clearly this is my favorite word to use on my blog.

Some days, I am reminded of the words of Saint Eastwood, in his guise as the Avatar Callahan:

A man’s got to know his limitations.

Other days, I am reminded of a saying that Paul Tevis told me years ago:

When you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them.

At a glance, these might seem to be contradictory statements, but the more I think about them, the more I Get It. Together, those two statements are about keeping yourself — no, scratch that, keeping me — away from two extremes. By knowing my limitations, I remind myself not to take on 12 hours of work every goddamned day. Especially on days like today, when I woke up feeling groggy and haven’t completely sorted myself out. It’s when I don’t know (and by extension don’t respect) my limitations that I fall down, being useless to myself and to those I’m working for.

And by remembering not to argue for my limitations, I don’t embrace my failings. I don’t just sit back and beat myself up over those limitations that I feel hold me back. I look at my limitations, and see how I can adapt to cope with them, to fix them, or to learn how to accept those I cannot right now change. This is pretty key, because I have that fucked-up work ethic beat into me where I think “Hey, I’m not going to bed until around midnight. That means I have 14 hours to work today, right?!?” This mentality is as much a limitation as everything that seems to keep me from achieving it, if not more so.

(I’m also one of those people who sees “needing sleep,” “needing socializing time” and other “being a human” sorts of things as frustrating limitations. Maybe one of these days I’ll entirely accept those limitations, but I am still young and foolish.)

Not much more to post about here. I was inspired to write this because I’ve seen friends and colleagues either not know their limitations or argue for them. Figured it was time I paid those lessons forward.

- Ryan

I’ve been thinking a bit about this, as I’ve been nose-to-the-grindstone on editing the third edition of Primetime Adventures. There’s a part of me that wants to encapsulate in a relatively small amount of text what I do as an editor. Talking about grammar and organization and stuff is all well and good, but I think those are means, not at end. To that, I have the following two duties I hold myself to as an editor:

• My job as an editor is to make your text match your intent
• My job as an editor is to call bullshit on your intent (or what I perceive your intent to be) when warranted

Grammar, spelling, all that copy editing stuff is there to make the text communicate well. Organization is there to make the act of processing and understanding the text to flow as smoothly as possible (among other uses). But none of that matters if you’re communicating something other that your intent. And your intent doesn’t matter if it’s off, or if I misunderstand your intent because of your text.

I think about that from a whole-book level, from a chapter level, a spread or page level, section level, paragraph & sentence level. I think that makes me a slower editor than I could be, and I know I don’t have that luxury on a larger book to be that critical and detailed, but right now that’s the editor I like being. Revealing a writer’s intent is rewarding.

(This probably bleeds into game development, which is why Paul credited me as both editor & developer on A Penny For My Thoughts.)

Anyway, back to work. I just wanted to share some (likely disorganized) thoughts. Feel free to call bullshit…on my text or intent.

- Ryan

I have this mantra: “Work with everyone.” It’s a business & creative endeavor philosophy I started subscribing to around a year ago. I’m still pretty new this this hobby/industry/creative community/whatever you want to call it, but there’s something I noticed that’s worth calling out:

Nearly every person I respect in this space works
or has worked with a lot of different people.

As I’ve started working with different people, I’ve taken lessons from my interactions with all of them. Editing & developing Paul Tevis’ game A Penny For My Thoughts, working with Fred Hicks & Ben Baugh[1] on Don’t Lose Your Mind, working with the massive Evil Hat Crew on The Dresden Files RPG, working with Brennan Taylor in my role as Indie Press Revolution‘s General Manager, all these things keep me on my toes and make me a better, sharper, more proficient professional. (Apologies to those I’m leaving out, as I have taken lessons from all of you.)

If I were to stick exclusively with the same crowd, while we would probably build a fantastic rapport and solid shorthand, I feel like I’d also limit my exposure to new ideas and ways of doing things. And in my former/day-job profession as a software engineer, I totally see that happening all that time.

So, I don’t want to be that guy. I want to try working with everyone, to learn all that I can and to (hopefully) share knowledge in turn. Furthermore–and this is key–I don’t want to give people reason to treat me like someone they don’t want to work with. While I won’t succeed 100%, I think that’s the key to whatever success I have ahead of me. At some point, I want to work with you. And I want you to want to work with me. This means I need to make and keep up a reputation for being reliable, useful, and being thought of more highly than “a total cockbite[2].”

At the moment, the “reliable” one is hurting, because I’ve over-subscribed myself. But, I’m unburying myself and am not immediately taking on new work (though I am always talking to people about “The Future”). That means I have learned one of the early lessons that many freelancers learn the hard way, of over-booking themselves out of fear that saying “no” means never getting another opportunity. (I suspect “the myth of opportunity” is a future blog post.)

I think I’m pretty useful to people. At least, Fred keeps hiring me to do stuff with Evil Hat, so there’s got to be something going for me there. But, again, that usefulness only comes from experience, and a variety of experience is better than being cloistered.

The “not being a total cockbite” is the big one. There are people that I am leery of working with, in spite of my mantra, because they have that sort of reputation. That reputation flags in two ways: One, am I actually going to be able to finish a product or project with this person, or is this just a waste of my time? Two, is this person’s reputation going to drag me down along with him or her? I don’t want to be professionally hurt by being a Cockbite-by-Association. So if I have that sort of reaction to people I might otherwise work with, I have to recognize that people could have that reaction of me. Thus, I take steps to keep myself from being that guy, even if it means I’m a little more boring on Twitter and the like than I otherwise would be.

Thus, “Work with everyone” (or the full version, “Work with everyone who is willing to work with me, but don’t be stupid about it and go into each new working relationship with eyes open”) is shorthand for my entire philosophy on professional conduct. As a freelancer, I’m young. It’s easy to cut off opportunities when you don’t yet have an established reputation. “Work with everyone” helps me take action to avoid that. I won’t be entirely successful, as I’m sure I’ll piss someone off or flag as undesirable to some folks, but I’ll be more successful than if I didn’t try, if I didn’t have a code of conduct that drives my interactions.

Of course, this is just about business. When the day is done, I have a pretty select group of people (although always slowly growing) with whom I want to go to the bar and grab a drink. “Work With Everyone” doesn’t mean “Be Everyone’s Best Friend.” Man alive, I certainly don’t have the energy for that.

- Ryan

[1] Oh, crap. I still owe that man his ENnie.

[2] I do love the word “cockbite.” It may not be a professional word, but by damn it does the job. And it’s fun to say. Try it.

So, a few days ago my friend Justin Smith posted up a list of my old gaming stuff for sale. In that post, he mentioned that I’ve moved to Oakland, CA, and am now “living the dream.”

I suppose that bears some conversation.

Last January, I decided that I wanted to leave Sacramento, my home for 17 years. Every time I visited the Bay Area, I fell in love with it over and over again. I didn’t know what I was going to do once I moved, but I essentially gave myself twelve months to get my life together enough to figure that out. Over the course of those twelve months, several new projects and opportunities came knocking — notably doing project development for The Dresden Files RPG and becoming the general manager of Indie Press Revolution.

After GenCon, I had enough work and contacts to make a stab at being a serious part-time freelance writer & editor. (Enough to where I was working around 60-70 hour weeks trying — and failing — to get everything done, counting my then full-time day job.) I reaffirmed my commitment to move at the end of the year and focus on my budding new career — something my friends and I jokingly called “living the dream.”

Okay, maybe not so jokingly. Here I am, a man who has turned down a life of security for the unpredictably of a freelancer — the feast and famine involved, hoping people will pay me for work rendered, and having to manage my own time/schedule/productivity/etc. I’m now spending several hours a day making shit up (as well as help others make up good shit and display it well), hoping people will keep being interested in it.

And you know what? I’m happy. It’s not easy, and I never imagined it would be. Frankly, I’m flighty and still over-committed, two things I’m going to have to square quickly if I’m going to keep this up. But it’s a new set of challenges in a number of different arenas, and I’m a man who thrives on that. (Some friends know me to say “Something cannot both be easy and worthwhile,” which in hindsight is probably a rather strong indicator of my worldview.)

It helps that I still have my old job in Sacramento as a part-time thing, which means I have steady income and insurance. That takes some of the edge off of the risk. Certainly, it’s not as “sexy” as the whole struggling artist thing, but I’m a 31 year old gamer nerd. Sexy is something I don’t have to worry about.[1]

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’ll talk about more later, like how I hired the aforementioned friend Justin to be my business manager and some of my plans and pitfalls for dealing with this new life as a freelancer. At least, that along with me going back to blogging about design, production & media thoughts.

- Ryan

[1] Some of you will take this as a self-denegrating comment. Others a fantastically boastful one. The “great” thing about this medium is that you can’t hear my inflection to know what I mean by it. [2]

[2] Ohh, Rob Donoghue-style footnotes! I’m keeping it classy!