I struggle with motivation and time management issues, as well as following through on projects that I get started on and then just end up leaving on the back burner. They’re my biggest personal roadblock, I think. I’m also pretty sure that I’m not supposed to focus on them, per se, but I’m intrigued by it more because I see it all as a vague, collective, dramatic arch nemesis than I do an actual obstruction to personal development.

Maybe I’m not taking the issue seriously enough. I had a recently-misplaced binder full of over a decade’s worth of half finished songs attesting to my proclivity towards starting things and not finishing them.

Sometimes, I really do give a task my best effort, but I still come up just shy of completing it in a manner I would consider to be successful. That almost happened yesterday. In my last update, I was discussing the challenges I faced with trying to make a simple lyric video; just black slides with white words transitioning to the pace of background music. Shouldn’t be that hard. It wasn’t until almost 3 am before I finally had a product I could upload to youtube. Here it is if anyone’s interested, by the way:

No fancy embedded video player or other sophisticated multimedia content to view here. You’ll have to check it out for yourself.

I’ve been writing my own songs for over half the time that I’ve been alive for now, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that that talent now best epitomizes my vice when it comes to motivation and willingness to follow through. At this point in my life, I know that the song in the video linked above could, and in fact should, sound many times better than it actually does, and I don’t just mean in the production value (though perhaps I should have procured the resources to boost that aspect of recording and producing a long time ago as well). I know my voice, and I know when I half ass things. This was one of those times.

To further add to the example, the visual aspect of the lyric video is also crap, and I know it, but I’d never made one before and I kept running into unexpected snags at every turn. I’m trying to level with myself as to whether that’s just me making excuses, or if that was legitimately the truth of the matter. I’m biased in favour of the latter. In any case, the point was that, after two days of toying around with different approaches on and off, I almost didn’t complete the project, and had I not, in all likelihood, I would have lost interest by now. It would have become just one more effort never getting finished, published and shared on a long list of many.

I figured enough was enough. Just do it. If it’s hard, complicated, troublesome, then figure it out. There’s FAQs and troubleshooting guides and help forums everywhere these days. There’s no reason why I should accept failure at this point.

So, with any luck, and now after having learned a thing or two to help expedite future endeavors, the world may yet see more musical output from yours truly. Might not sound like much to get excited about now, but if the trend continues, it’ll amount to something worth while someday. [edit: I want that hope back]

I missed submitting something yesterday, here or elsewhere (yes, I have fingers in other pies). The main goal for yesterday was to submit a lyric video. I’ve never done a lyric video before. Seemed simple enough, though, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I recorded a song in one take, just voice and guitar, and saved it as an mp3 file. Then I tried to use no less than three free video editing software applications available in Ubuntu’s repositories to create a simple uploadable-to-youtube mp4 or avi file. None of them seemed to be able to generate and edit slides, so I started making my own jpeg images using Gimp, hoping that the transition and timing process involved in editing imported graphical content was fairly straight forward. It wasn’t.

I feared I would have to resort to Powerpoint. Truthfully, now that I’m looking back on everything, I don’t know why I didn’t just start there. Not having it, I almost went through the hassle of installing Wine so that I can use a pirated version of Windows Powerpoint. Thankfully, before it was too late, I came to realize that the Libre Office Suite that comes with Ubuntu already has a PP knock off [edit: LibreOffice deserves waaaaay more credit than that] called Presentation/Impress (name depending, for some probably simple but as of yet unknown reason I’m too lazy too look into).

Not that the project is quite finished yet, but in a few short minutes, I was able to successfully accomplish infinitely more than I was able to in the previous 5 hours of attempted work. I had to leave to attend a social function (RPG game night, highlight of the week if you must know) before I got to the time editing portion, and I didn’t get home till late, so no dice for finishing up yesterday. As for today, I’ve been lazy and largely unproductive for the most part up until pretty much just now.

Anyways, with any luck, I’ll have a new video posted to my youtube account within the hour. Two if I hit an unexpected snag. If so, I’ll append a link below. If not, I’ll probably talk about why not in a subsequent post. Cross that bridge when I come to it I guess.

I’ve been struggling to get into a routine. I haven’t needed to set an alarm for when to be up in the morning for almost a full year now, so, naturally, I don’t usually end up waking up until it’s nearly noon. Likewise, I don’t usually get to sleep until after midnight, so it balances out a little, but still. Couple that with the fact that every time my girlfriend, who has nearly polar opposite sleeping habits from mine (in the sense that I at least have some), comes to visit me from out of town (which is just about every weekend), any sleeping and waking routine I do begin to establish throughout the week is instantly abandoned. I very much enjoy having her over each and every time, but the short era that existed between us meeting and me figuring out that I didn’t have to wait for her to wake up before I could as well was a puzzling time for me (in case it isn’t obvious, I’m still figuring out how this whole relationship thing works).

Ideally, what I’d like is to be up when people normally get up. During the week, I wake up briefly to the sound of my roommates getting ready to head to work, but it isn’t until another REM cycle or two come and go before I’m finally good to get up myself. Setting an alarm almost never works unless I need to be up for something related to “responsibilities” or some such thing, ’cause if I wake up for even a moment before it goes off, I will do so utterly convinced that the wise decision to make at that time is to switch my alarm off before it goes off. Every. Goddamn. Time.

And then, by the time I am up, showered and fed, it’s basically noon, and well, I probably haven’t checked facebook yet. Shouldn’t take long. Naturally, it’s takes up the majority of all my free time for the day. I almost never have fewer than 7 or 8 tabs open at any given time, and if I do, I quickly replenish my browser with as many new ones as the more interesting posts on my facebook newsfeed so generously provide. I read constantly. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but if my ambition is to become a writer, I need to allocate at least some of the time spent reading towards writing instead. Therein lies my greatest dilemma as of late, hence this blog. No more excuses. Between here, Wattpad and my own documents, there’s no excuse for not getting at least a little bit of writing accomplished each and every day, starting yesterday.

This is just scaffolding.

The prototype was designed and released almost a decade ago, without much deliberation. I was in my late teens. At that time, the work was entitled Ecco of Legends. The first draft sputtered it’s way off of dad’s old dotmatrix printer, consuming some twenty-odd pages all reamed together, briefly circulated around the family for positive-by-default review before being pulled apart, hole-punched and stowed away in an old high school binder for all but the briefest moments ever since.

Deliberation has been something of a roadblock ever since. The first draft had the benefit of passion without fear. Now, I keep second guessing myself. Too much of a perfectionist. It hasn’t been all bad, though. Sure, The Story’s been put on the back burner way more often than not since its inception, but it’s seldom been stagnant. It’s been evolving, almost constantly.

At this stage, I don’t expect anyone who might chance upon this blog to care, and that’s fine, but a day might soon come where knowing a bit about The Story’s background might be of some interest. The predominant details of The Story’s evolution involve the name and thematic changes that have transpired over the years. As mentioned, it was originally called Ecco of Legends. Why “Ecco”? Honestly, I have no idea. I know that, at that time, I knew that “ecco” meant “here is” in Italian. I also knew of the Sega game called Ecco. I could never get far into it, but I liked it. The idea of sending out a sonar call, holding it long enough for it to bounce back all the way from the edge of the screen to Ecco’s sensory of their environment, resulting in a map for the player. I can appreciate that it was probably influential.

Originally, the first draft was presented in first person perspective. Worse, the main character was named after myself. Soon thereafter, I changed the main protagonist’s name to “Ecco”, but already after The Story had been named. Not entirely sure why I went that route. Still makes no sense to me to say “[Person’s name] of Legends“, none whatsoever. Regardless, the name for the protagonist stuck, even if The Story abandoned it’s original title.

Since then, it’s been redesigned from a vaguely third person/sometimes omni perspective point of view, allowing for a healthier degree of separation between myself and the character(s). Thematically, The Story’s origins were founded on a juvenile outlook on charismatic Christian theology from within the belief system itself. That has long since been shed. In fact, there is now a high degree of moral ambiguity intended to be expressed by the time the final draft is ready to go to print (still a fairly long ways off) [edit: later feelings have me wanting to go a wholly wholesome route, just not seeing the clearest way to do so]. As for working titles, the first change was from Ecco of Legends to The Eden Project, then to Star of Eden, then finally now to the present title, Elyen. I’m very fond of the present title, so I don’t expect any future changes to occur.

The original game plan was a simple “good vs evil” template involving angels and demons, with humans in the middle in a fictional, quasi-high tech, quasi-medieval world that was somehow tied to and vaguely co-influenced by the real world. Now, it’s more about imaginative adventure, psychological poking and prodding, philosophical thought-provocation, and general dilemma-driven conflict.

In summary, The Story, aka Elyen has been a very long time in the making. As mentioned, this blog is just an attempt to establish some scaffolding to perhaps help the process along by giving me a side related creative outlet to express and shape new ideas and old into satisfying and exciting forms which I hope will serve to strengthen and expedite the writing process for Elyen.