Struggling With Creativity

This is from my weekly email series, The Weekly Mixtape. It’s more stream of consciousness than a creative fight, but I would still appreciate it if you subscribe to newsletter. Plus you don’t have to wait for these posts until I remember to add them to the site.

It’s apparently that time of year, a new tradition that hopefully will go on for years to come: it’s time for Mythic Quest to stop with the jokes and make us feel bad.

Last year, we were introduced to A Dark Quiet Death, an episode about two creative game developers selling out their dream to make money. Then we saw the personal fallout from that decision.

This year, we were introduced to Backstory! It wasn’t quite a good as last year’s episode, I could relate more.

For those who haven’t watched the series, CW Longbottom is the writer for the game within the show (the titular Mythic Quest). He’s an older man who has a penchant for saying things he shouldn’t. The winning author has recently fallen on hard times, with his books going from Nebula award winners to crashing and burning in recent years.

Now we get to see the younger version of him…and it’s one that so many creatives will relate to.

He struggles. He has a short story he’s trying to publish, and it’s just not very good yet. And despite his changes he makes to improve his work, he keeps getting knocked down again and again and again.

For my own backstory, I had a phase where I was trying desperately to publish my own novel. It certainly wasn’t something I always wanted to do,  but something I stumbled into later in life and discovered that I actually liked writing.

Over a period of several years, I wrote quite a few books. Seven or so full length novels. I even got mild agent interest on one of them. But other than a short story that I self-published to sales numbers in the single digits (The Blardeens), nothing really came of the effort.

Which brings me back to CW Longbottom and watching him fail again and again. I’ve been in that position. I could relate to CW as he put his heart out there only to have it smashed down.

Without going into spoilers, CW obviously found success for a time. Going back to last year’s A Dark Quiet Death, the creatives found even bigger success, but that had it’s own issues. In both cases, we see their work becoming more important than the world around them.

Maybe it’s just a compromise I’ve made with myself, but ultimately, I’ve realized that while I would love to make a non-tax book that people will actually read, that’s less important than making sure those around me are doing as well as they can.

Making art is important. Making art while ignoring the people you care about is a dangerous path.

The Links

• If you haven’t already, check out the guest post on my site about Payroll Penalties. It’s important for every employer out there (including if you just employ yourself)

Service Dog Update
Ah man, we had a pretty big scare this week.

Our neighbors have two dogs, one of them a big mastiff mix. They’ve lived there since before the pandemic started, and we’ve had absolutely no problems with their dogs…until about a month ago.

Suddenly, their big dog took a huge interest in Wilson. We’re talking smashing into the fence and knocking down pickets. We’re talking shoving his big snout through the new opening and barking like crazy at our 1 year old poodle. We’re talking attempting to jump from their deck to OVER the fence and almost making it.

Wilson, for his part, thought it was a big game. He’d run back and forth in front of the fence hoping they could really play.

This week, he got his wish.

My daughter was jumping on the trampoline with her friend, with Wilson running around happily, when the neighbor mastiff charged out like a bull, smashing through three pickets and charging into our yard.

Fortunately, Wilson immediately panicked and ran into the still open back door and up the stairs where I was working. The neighbor dog didn’t follow.

Wilson was freaked out for about a day…then he went back to jumping happily in front of the back fence.

Hopefully this is just a little blip in the long scheme of things. But it definitely a moment of heart attack as soon as the whole picture came into focus.