My largest creative problem I fear is my utter inability to focus on one damn thing. My attention span is narrow. I can blame it on whatever I like. Perhaps my upbringing in front of the boob tube has something to do with it. Maybe it’s my neurochemistry. Maybe it’s the fact that I live in a goddamned amazing world filled with neat, shiny stuff. Maybe the internet has too many rabbit holes (damn you, Wikipedia).

But at the end of the day, the result is the same: staying focused is really hard for me sometimes.

I often generate multiple creative imperatives simultaneously from the base of my lizard brain, and I have multiple ways to express them. I am trained not just in the ways of writing creatively (though as I’ve aged, I feel this has become my focal point for my creative energies), but I also have college-level training with visual arts, and musical experience as well. I feel tugs of each frequently – with my musical training being one aspect sorely missing given I live in a tightly packed apartment complex and haven’t played a brass instrument in years. Sometimes these pulls come in too fast to even shift gears. I’ve frequently felt the tug to do a webcomic but always feel pulled in too many directions to do it. With all the distractions, I’m not even sure I could keep that a tight schedule. It’s a miracle I remember to go to work some days.

I’m hoping that this blog can help me reign in some of the aspects of creativity into focused into certain directions, partly using the blog’s audience, so that I might draw down focused fire on any one project at a given time.

In the name of focus, I have several projects in mind that I’m listing here for posterity. Maybe if I throw darts at them long enough, I can find one to attack, then complete.

So, here they are:

– Novel draft completed in 2010 (Modern Fantasy, Requires proofreading, continuity edit, and polish)

– Novel draft raft Completed in 2011  (Dystopian Sci-fi, Requires proofreading, continuity edit, and polish)

– Incomplete draft started in 2012  (Speculative Fiction and Espionage, First draft completion needed)

– Five Short story first drafts written in 2011 (Multiple Genres, Requires proofreading, continuity edit, and polish)

– Unrealized project (Occult Thriller, Requires more full development of setting, characters, and underlying mythos)

– Unrealized project (Young Adult Fantasy, full development of setting, characters, and underlying mythology required)

That’s the to do list before any of the other ideas I have in my head can bang their way out.

Time to go to work.