And I got scared. Overwhelmed. My next thought: “You know, I’ve abandoned this project before. Like, five times. I can abandon it again.”

But then (and thankfully there is a “but” here) as I was walking home later that day, I was visited by the first of three epiphanies. (Hmm, this is starting to sound a little like Dickens’ Christmas Carol.)

Epiphany #1: Writing Beyond will be hard. Very. Hard.
Corollary #1: It’s still worth it.

As usually happens in these cases, supporting evidence quickly rallied to my side.

Exhibit A: After dinner, I was reading Seth Godin’s book Small Is the New Big and came across an essay on hard work. “It’s hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that’s remarkable,” he said, and it grabbed me by the collar and shook me, because that’s exactly what I’m trying to do with Beyond.

Exhibit B: My friend Janssen told me about an article on the perils of praising your children — if you tell a child they’re smart, it actually inspires them (despires them?) to underachieve, whereas if you tell them they’re a hard worker, they do better. That’s the story of my life, folks. People told me I was smart, and as a result, whenever I ran into something that I couldn’t coast through easily, I gave up almost immediately. I put too much trust in innate talent (which may or may not have been there at all) and almost completely ignored effort. This is a recipe for failure. Edison was right: it’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

We now turn to the epiphany of Creativity Present. As a brief bit of backstory, I’m about 15,000 words into the first draft of Tanglewood, my young adult fantasy novel. Last week I decided to put it on hold so I could focus on writing short stories, because they’re shorter and thus easier (in my mind, anyway). Then on Wednesday I was walking home and had yet another epiphanic visit:

Epiphany #2: Writing Tanglewood will be hard.
Corollary #2: It’s still worth it.

I’m sensing a theme here. I decided that yes, writing a novel is something I really want to do, and jumping ship now isn’t going to help my goal. So I’m going to write short stories after I finish the book.

The third epiphany, tall and cloaked, came yesterday — also while I was walking home. (Seriously, my best thinking time is while walking home from work. And in the shower.) As you may have noticed, I’m an artist (with a very, very lowercase ‘a’). I like making art. But I’m not very good at drawing, particularly at drawing anything that remotely resembles a human. And I’ve been stuck at the same level for a very long time.

Epiphany #3: Learning to draw will be hard.
Corollary #3: It’s still worth it.

In retrospect this all sounds completely obvious, but dang, I’ve wasted a lot of time avoiding hard work — and I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I’ve been evading the hard stuff by doing easier things, or by telling myself that I wasn’t cut out for art or that I shouldn’t spend my time programming when I really should be spending my time doing x, y, or z.

Bzzt.

Lesson Learned #1: Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it.
Lesson Learned #2: Worthwhile things take effort. Always.
Lesson Learned #3: Recognizing that it’ll be hard somehow makes it easier.
Lesson Learned #4: Doing things that stretch my skills is exhilarating.

So I’m going to forge onward with Beyond, keep writing Tanglewood, and practice drawing humans until they look real and not like hobgoblins with elephantitis.

And yes, I know I’m sort of bending the actual meaning of the word “corollary.” :)

This time around the realization came via Cal Newport’s article on fixed-schedule productivity. Read it. Great stuff. I’m also digging the Zen Habits blog.

A while ago I realized that my life’s work is in books, and more recently I found that that’s in writing them and designing them. That’s what I’m made for. But is that what I spend most of my free time doing?

No. And that’s the problem.

From now on I’m not letting myself work on any side projects unless they have to do with books. I’m axing Donne (the to do list web app I had just started building), Beyond (my genealogy web app), the chord chart I was designing, and all other non-book projects. Instead, I’ll make do with existing tools.

For example, I was going to typeset a nice PDF of our Mormon Artist volunteer handbook, but I can just put the information up on the website. Much faster. Similarly, I was going to extend my Glider wiki for multiple users so we could use it for the magazine style guide, but I realized I could just use Google Sites and have it up immediately. Check.

Also, to keep myself from getting distracted too often, I’m going to do my best to limit my time on email, Twitter, and Google Reader. We’ll see how it goes.

My new plan is to have no more than one writing project and two book design projects going at any given time. Here’s what I’m working on:

Current writing project: Tanglewood. It’s coming along really well, too — I’ve woken up fifteen minutes early each morning to write and have managed to hit my 500-word quota every single day so far.

Current book design project #1: the D&C reader’s edition. I’m still reparagraphing it and have been dragging my heels, but I’m going to focus now and make it happen.

Current book design project #2: a short illustrated edition of Christina Rossetti’s poem “The Rainbow” (which is actually part of a longer poem). More on this soon.

Will I still be thinking and writing about web stuff? Sure. That’s my job, after all. But in my free time I’m focusing strictly on books. That’s the only way to get really, really good at making them.

2009 in review

2009 was a good year. A very good year. ;)

I went to London in February (Adventures in London, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, and Days 6–11), which was awesome. I also went to a bunch of writers’ conferences (CONduit, LDStorymakers, WIFYR, Forum on Children’s Literature (Day One, Day Two). I missed LTUE because I was in London, unfortunately, but I’m making sure I go this year. I joined a writers group with some of the people I met at WIFYR and started writing a YA novel, Tanglewood.

I began work on a genealogy web app, Beyond; designed a project tracker; started work on a D&C reader’s edition; made a 3D illustration called Jetpack Johnny; released The Standard Works and Glider; designed a Latin declensions chart; and published Words of the Prophets: Selected Sermons from the Book of Mormon.

After trying to do everything, I decided to focus on just writing and design. It’s already proving to have been a very good decision.

I also bought a car and, most importantly, got married to Meridith.

Some statistics

Blog posts in 2009: 113
Tweets in 2009: 7,220
Number of books I own: Around 1,300 (I have 1,080 cataloged in LibraryThing, but there are a handful I haven’t cataloged and I still haven’t added Meridith’s books yet)

Resolutions for 2009 and how I fared

First off, let me link to two earlier resolution review posts, one in February and one in July.

1. Go to London. Nailed it. :)

2. Listen to only classical music in January. As mentioned in the two review posts, I made it halfway through and decided it was an arbitrary resolution. But I still like classical music.

3. Read 60 books. I ended up only making it to 37. By the end of July I’d read 31, and then there’s a four-month gap to the end of November, after which I read six more books. (Why the gap? See #13. I’m grinning. ;))

4. Write half an hour a day. Nope. I did change halfway through the year to a word count goal instead, but I, um, got distracted and slacked off. :)

5. Write five short plays and get at least two of them produced. I had two short plays produced: “Perfect Circle” (which I renamed “Broken Chord”) at the student slam in January and “Crime & Punishment & Teletubbies” as part of Bad Play Project in April. I also wrote a full-length play, Childlight, as part of BYU’s WDA class, and we had a staged reading of it in October.

6. Write 50 short stories. This is embarrassing. I did write the beginning of one, but that’s it. Apparently writing short stories is a habit I haven’t quite gotten into yet.

7. Write one novel. I didn’t do NaNoWriMo, but I’ve been working on Tanglewood over the past year. I’ve started over eight or nine times, with the most recent reboot being yesterday (cough), but I’m not letting myself start over again until I finish a full draft. (That said, with each successive draft it’s become a better book, so I guess it’s worth it.) See Tanglewood: a teaser for what the first chapter looked like back in May. It’s changed a lot since then.

8. Write and illustrate a children’s book. Nada.

9. Get into the habit of submitting work for publication. Nada.

10. Keep Mormon Artist afloat. In 2009, we published five regular issues and one special contest issue. Had 23,707 visits to the website from 17,393 unique visitors, with 52,041 pageviews. The Facebook group now has 1,700 members (not quite the 3,000 I’d hoped for), and there are 230 subscribers to the news blog. I got interviewed about the magazine for the Daily Herald, Iconia, and A Motley Vision. The magazine also got mentioned in passing by the New York Times and TIME Magazine.

11. Complete 20 digital paintings. I only did five, and all were for Meridith.

12. Stay at Inbox Zero. It didn’t last long, but I’ve generally kept my inbox to 10 or 15 emails at a time, so I’ll count it as a somewhat of a success.

13. Get married. Woot! As most of you know, I met Meridith in July and we got married in November. This was the one resolution I definitely didn’t expect to make, but it’s the one I’m most proud of. ;)

14. Read no more than five books at a time. I’ve mostly done this, and it’s been a huge help in getting me to finish books.

15. Cut side projects and focus on writing. I haven’t been as successful at this as I’d hoped to be, but I did reinforce my decision to focus on writing, which is something.

Resolutions for 2010, in which much awesomeness will occur

Writing

1. Write at least 500 words every day (excluding Sundays). It’s time for me to take my writing to a more professional level, which means producing consistently. ‘Nuff said.

2. Finish Tanglewood. By which I mean not only finishing a draft but also revising it. If I can keep writing 500 words a day, I should be able to finish the first draft within about five months, which leaves seven for revisions. Easy.

3. Write five short stories. We’ll make it more attainable this year. :) (And I want my focus to stay on Tanglewood.)

4. Write two short plays. Ditto — enough to be doable but not so much that I don’t finish my novel.

5. Attend writers’ conferences. This includes LTUE, WIFYR, CONduit, and LDStorymakers, along with any others I can afford and schedule in. I love love love writing conferences.

6. Read 60 books. I’m managing around five books a month nowadays, so this should be easy.

7. Post to my blog at least three times a week. I also want to figure out how to make my blog better.

Design

8. Read five books on design. This can be graphic design, book design, web design, industrial design, whatever. I’m thinking I’ll start with Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, which I started once but only got a few chapters in.

9. Typeset five books. With the D&C reader’s edition already underway, this shouldn’t be too hard.

10. Design a typeface. I’ve always wanted to do this. (We’ll say I only have to design the regular face, not italic or bold or small caps.)

11. Design four language charts. By which I mean things like the Latin declensions chart, which was really fun for me.

12. Design two movie credit demos or two other motion graphics projects. I’ve wanted to get into motion graphics for a while, and since it’s basically graphic design in motion, it thankfully fits in with my writing/design focus.

Other

13. Spend at least some time studying a language. I used to study lots of languages, but it’s been a few years since I’ve done anything, and I miss it. I’m thinking either Old English, Welsh, or Old Norse.

14. Baby Crowder. Just kidding. :P

A few final words

These aren’t my only resolutions; I have several of the “be a better person” variety as well, but they’re more private, so I’m not posting them here.

Exhibit A: If I read a book on writing, read a novel, or watch a well-written movie or TV show, I want to write.

Exhibit B: If I respond to a single email about my magazine or flip through a back issue, I want to work on the magazine.

Exhibit C: If I watch a well-made animated film or clip, I want to make an animated film.

Exhibit D: If I read about good business principles that resonate with me, I want to start a side business.

Concrete case in point: Yesterday morning I got an email about my magazine. (One of our volunteers suggested a possible interviewee.) I replied. Suddenly I was interested in working on the magazine again, and I ended up spending a couple hours coding this administrative web app I’ve been working on (er, more honestly, the web app I’ve been procrastinating for weeks).

Second concrete case in point: I picked up this 20 Master Plots book my old roommate Joe gave me and flipped through a few pages, and suddenly I found myself craving to work on my novel Tanglewood. (Tangent: can you put a verb after “crave” or does it only work with nouns? Hmm.) (Okay, I’m back. Doesn’t look like you’re allowed to use it with an infinitive after all, but heck, I like the way it sounds, so I’m going to keep it.)

And the list goes on. It’s almost uncanny how reliable this system is — works pretty much every time without fail. And I think that’s the source of my wanting to do everything. Influences push and pull on me, and when they’re intriguing, I’m hooked. (At least for ten or fifteen minutes, I should add. If I don’t act upon that newfound interest, it usually wanes quickly. And this keeps me sane.)

Is it good? Yes and no.

The good: These triggers (motivators, catalyzers, whatever you want to call them) work really well, which means I can harness them to direct my creative energy. When I know I need to work on the magazine, all I have to do is make myself reply to one email and from then on it’s easy. I haven’t yet figured out how to harness them, but I’m working on it. Triggers are also good because they generate passion, which gets things done and makes life fulfilling and all that jazz.

The bad: I flit back and forth between projects, losing interest in the last one as soon as a new trigger pulls me in another direction. But I’m not sure this is actually bad; it keeps things varied enough to be interesting, and it doesn’t seem to have stopped me from getting stuff done. It just makes my experience broader instead of deeper, basically.

Triggers are especially handy in jumping the gap from zero to one:

Jumping the gap between 0 and 1 is tougher than 1 to 2, or 1 to 100. At that point, you’re building on something already there. It’s that initial jump where the urge to give into procrastination is strongest, where excuses can derail you easiest. We’re all creatives of one discipline or another, so creation (or rather, subcreation) is something we each deal with on a near daily basis. And, for the most part, it’s ex nihilo. A blank page or canvas is terrifying in its possibility and your inadequacy to fill it.

In other words, in getting from nothing to something. The something may be small, but it’s usually enough to get some momentum to move forward.

My current goal: figure out how to control these triggers so I can spend more time working on higher priority projects instead of sprawling myself all across the board.

So, I have lots of interests, and for the longest time I’ve been trying to figure out what I should focus on — what my life’s work would be. I’ve been crawling closer, but it wasn’t until recently that I narrowed it down to something doable.

In reading Jim Collins’ article Best New Year’s Resolution? A ‘Stop Doing’ List, this paragraph dinged my mind and set it abuzz:

Suppose you woke up tomorrow and received two phone calls. The first phone call tells you that you have inherited $20 million, no strings attached. The second tells you that you have an incurable and terminal disease, and you have no more than 10 years to live. What would you do differently, and, in particular, what would you stop doing?

Right after that, he lists three questions with some follow-up kick:

1. What are you deeply passionate about?
2. What are you are genetically encoded for? What activities do you feel just “made to do”?
3. What makes economic sense? What can you make a living at?

And that was the beginning of the epiphany. I started going through the things I do, examining each in turn.

Writing? I’m passionate about it, I seem to be made for it, and if I work hard enough at it, yes, I could make a living at it. Plus, I’ve been doing it all my life. I’m a man of books. I love reading. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a little boy. I love sculpting words into sentences. Writing just fits me.

Design? I’m also passionate about it, I seem to be made for it, and I’m already making a living at it, both full-time (web design) and occasionally on the side (book design and graphic design). I love iterating through drafts until I get to a design that clicks and shines with beauty. Design is what I’ve spent most of my free time doing for the past five years, actually.

Art? I’m passionate about it, yes, but I don’t think I’m made for it. If I were, I’d have been drawing my heart out all these years, burning to make art. I get flickers of interest every once in a while, but it’s not consistent enough to make a career at it. (And I almost typed that as “flickrs”. Dang, Web 2.0, you’re getting to me.)

Music? I’m also passionate about it, but again, I’m not made for it. I play the piano from time to time for fun, and I’ve composed a number of pieces, but the even then, the last time I composed anything was around ten years ago. I’m not drawn to it enough to do it seriously.

Coding? I’m not as passionate about it, and I’m only partly made for it. I realized a while ago that most of the coding I’ll be doing in my life will be to make tools to assist the other parts of my life’s work. I don’t love it enough to make it the alpha dog.

There were other things I’d contemplated doing, but these were the main ones that had repeatedly risen to the surface.

And there it was: writing and design. It makes sense. It’s what I love. It’s what I spend my free time doing. It’s me. (And I realized that I’ve been calling myself “a writer and a designer” for the past few years. Apparently I’m nearsighted in more than one way. ;))

So, I’m going to stop worrying about getting great at art or music or coding. I’ll still do them, sure, but just for fun and relaxation. That’s the difference. Dabbling is now enough. This way I can focus on becoming a great writer and a great designer, without other things distracting me and pulling me away from my goal.

I’ve already felt like a burden has lifted, like I’m finally free to do what I was born to do, unfettered and focused. And it’s awesome.

It’s a project calendar for keeping track of (a) which projects I’m working on and (b) when I’ve worked on them. That way I can easily see where my time is spent and possibly where I need to adjust things. (“Hmm, looks like I’m neglecting my writing. Whoops. Time to fix that.”)

I started out using the back of my Field Notes notebook, since it has a handy grid, but I ran into a problem: when I finish the notebook, I no longer have my project calendar with me.

Enter Google Spreadsheets:

The grey boxes mean that the project has ended. Each month is its own sheet, which keeps things tidy. (Projects that end don’t need to be on the next month’s sheet.)

And the best part? It’s super easy to maintain. I can just copy and paste the black boxes, and when I start a new month, it only takes a few seconds to clear out the boxes and change the days of the week.

Speaking of tracking things, I forgot to blog about my writing log (which I used to use back when I was writing more frequently):

I need to go in and start using that again. (Since, ahem, I’ve been a slacker.) I’m also planning to make a grid-based log for scripture reading and family history and other church-related things I want to do more diligently.

Update: You can now download a Google Docs template of the project tracker.

Another update: There’s now a project page for this.

What: Childlight When: Wednesday, Oct 21, 5:00pm Where: Pardoe Theater (in the HFAC) How much: Free

The play is a fantasy, set partly in our world but mostly in another. There’s magic and humor and that’s about all I’m going to say. :)

A short history of the play: it began a couple semesters ago as a one-act play for one of the BYU playwriting classes. I revised it a couple times in that class, then extended it into a full-length for the next semester. It got accepted into the WDA program at the beginning of this semester and I’ve been rewriting it ever since. (I think we’re on draft 11 or 12 by now, all told.) The play has had six or seven names at this point, including Return, Checkmate, Gridlock, and Man of Cloth. (I’m still planning to use “Man of Cloth” for something someday.) (And no, I don’t mind if you steal it. :))

Anyway, I’m mostly just glad to be done with it, since for the last three weeks I’ve gotten up every Monday at an unholy hour (either midnight or 2:00) and written all night/morning. I miss my sleep. ;)

Anyway, wedding plans are going as well as can be expected. We’ve almost got the announcements done and ready to go to the printer (yes, we’re designing them ourselves, of course :)), and we signed on a nice apartment last week. Or maybe it was two weeks ago. Time is seriously one big blur these days — it’s hard to believe that we’ve been engaged for almost a month. Crazy. And lovely. Meridith is da bomb.

In other news, I’m working on a full-length play for the BYU WDA class (the play is a fantasy, currently called Gridlock but soon to be renamed), slowly working on my Tanglewood novel, and aiming to get two issues of Mormon Artist out this month (the special issue and Issue 7).

Speaking of Mormon Artist, we got a brief mention in TIME Magazine two days ago in an article on MagCloud. That was cool. :)

And wrapping up this random post, I got my Google Wave invite last night and have been playing around with it, because of course I’m a gadget geek and this is the kind of thing we thrive on. Conclusion? It’s too early to draw a conclusion, especially since only five of my contacts are on Wave right now. But it seems cool and has a lot of potential. I’m not sure if it’ll replace email or IM for me yet, but we’ll see.

Ha.

My turning point came when I started writing and workshopping plays. Suddenly this illusion I’d concocted — that my first drafts were pristine towers of unalterable perfection — burned away and I could see through the glass clearly: my first drafts were actually just big hunks of clay waiting to be molded and massaged into later perfection. They were the first step, not the last.

Lately I’ve noticed that this process of revision isn’t just for writing. Time after time in my design work, I’ve seen the magic of a fourth or fifth iteration turn a blah design into something awesome. Brett Helquist was talking at a symposium a month ago and showed some of the drafts for his illustrations for the Lemony Snicket covers, and bam, it hit me that visual artists revise just as much as writers. Ditto for composers and dancers and everyone else.

Sure, there are people who can turn out genius work on the first try, but they’re exceptions. The rest of us have to tackle the work over and over again, trying to see its true form and get rid of everything else, willing to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch if necessary.

I’m not dissing first drafts, by the way. There’s a passion and an excitement in seeing the first embryonic stages of a work come to life — making something new, something the world has never seen before. That’s heady stuff. You just have to mix passion and polish, that’s all.

As for me, I’m excited to take this process of revision and apply it to my music. Back in 2000 and 2001 I wrote several piano pieces, but they’re all (noticeably cough) first drafts. I could tell that they weren’t all that great, either. But now, knowing how to revise, I can start getting better. (That’s the other thing: revision makes you a better artist. It really does.)

Not that I have a one-track mind or anything ;), but revision is essential in relationships, too. Things don’t automatically work out perfectly unless you’re in a romantic comedy; in real life, you have to fix things as you go along, retooling the relationship as both of you grow and learn (both about each other and about yourselves). You can’t just turn on autopilot and expect everything to work out all hunky-dory.

You know what? I just realized that revision isn’t just for art or for relationships — it’s a way of life. Period. The whole thing. Think about it.

Well, sort of. Saying no to freelance projects has been a really good thing and has given me a lot more time for writing. And for dating. (I’ve been doing a lot more dating than writing lately. I have no problem with this. ;))

At the same time, I still love making art and books, and posting about Words of the Prophets a few days ago got me itching to start on another similar book project (a reader’s edition of the D&C). After thinking it over a bit, I’ve decided that writing will still come first, but that I don’t have to limit myself only to writing. Focus is important, but it’s not the only thing of importance.

So, I’ll still do other stuff. I have to. It’s who I am. The difference from where I was before, however, is that I’m only going to do my own projects, which means I can backburner them whenever my writing needs more attention. Deadlines will be very flexible.

I’m excited. Let the bookmaking recommence. And I should have more info on the D&C project pretty soon.

With all of this I’ve realized that I love graphic design way more than web design. It’s the part I love most about my current job, actually, but unfortunately it’s only around 5–10% of what I do. I’m thinking that in a year or two I’ll switch to a graphic design job, something where I can work on print projects. Mmm. I love print.