I got a viral infection and thought having to rest would be awful, but it lead to me having a breakthrough that lead me to rethink my approach.

So for the past week I’ve been stuck in bed, exhausted and stuffed up due to a viral infection. Read: no antibiotics would help and I just had let my white blood cells do their best. It has not been fun and I’m still a little cranky I ruined my streak of good health. Although I am of course, very thankful I managed to stay healthy all year up til recently despite not having the healthiest habits lol. It was very frustrating the first few days as I tried to power through or “take it easy”, by which I meant giving 100% at my day job and devving and doing things around the house which didn’t go well to say the least. Eventually, even my stubborn self had to admit I was beaten and actually rest properly: napping, making sure I was getting enough fluids, the works. While I was doing so, I put some things together about my work and creative practice.

New Month, New Challenge, New Fatigue

Firstly, upon reflection: I have been pushing myself into some monthly challenge or creative sprint pretty much every month since April: Ludum Dare, Art Fight, Summer VN Jam, trying to get out a version of an upcoming game to coincide with the end of the Spooktober Jam, Scream Jam, and that’s not even everything. I didn’t finish most these projects but I shrugged it all off as I often had social things pop up as well. While that did happen, the emerging pattern may have been fatigue setting in. The doctor I saw made a comment about the body getting sick as a warning to those who had been burning the candle at both ends, which I definitely had been. Trying to excel at work and in personal dev and other hobbies and social activities and familial obligations… It was more of a juggling act than I’d prepared myself for. I thought I’d just figure it out, and in some ways that attitude succeeded, I never realized how important purposeful rest was. I figured I didn’t have to do anything special since art and creating it can recharge you, neglecting that art also takes energy. Everything has a cost and reward, but failing to calculate that ahead of time is risky and you get either a bigger reward than expected in the best case, or often, a bigger cost that might not be recouperated by the reward.

Lower Standards Pave the Way

When you plan things, you can adjust the cost and/or increase the potential reward. The cost of some tasks can be massively reduced by addressing the inevitable messiness of building things. You can of course, solve this by using a framework such as Agile and minimizing that messiness but sometimes the simpler, and better, answer is to lower the expectation. I ended up doing this, although not by choice, with Dungeon Generator or as I’ve nicknamed it: DunGen. There’s a highly visible bug in it where sometimes off to the side there will be a seemingly random path that leads to nowhere. It does not connect any rooms to anything and is a bit of an eyesore. Of course, you only get so long to work on a jam game and I felt better about putting it into the world flawed than keeping it under wraps to be release at some point. This was one bit that helped lead to realization that my standards were too high. As in even people I hold in very high esteem and want to emulate in my creative practice weren’t meeting those standards. After a conversation with one of those people who pointed this out, I took a look at my goals and realized I was doing better than I thought. Most of the things on my vision board I had already accomplished. I’d had similar, but not quite as good results when looking at my 2025 Stuff I’d Like to Make Bingo (still have to put markers on the ones I’ve done, but I’ve covered much the board). While I hadn’t done everything, I was generally killing it! Despite that, I had been stressing about failure to the point that it ended up hampering me. So now I’ve taken a week long break, what will I do? I think I’ll keep things light for the rest of the month. I’ve got a vacation coming up and some fun Halloween plans that I definitely want to enjoy fully, plus I’d rather not have to call out sick for a while haha. I won’t be doing nothing for the rest of the month, although that will be incorporated at points (I have learned something from this after all). I want to actually prepare for some drafting in November.

November Challenge, but Not A November Sprint

For a long time this was when I’d attempt Nanowrimo but the organization, dead as it now is, and its actions kinda soured me to that specific challenge. So this November I’ll be trying The Trials of Verse and Vignette, The Order of the Written Word’s version of Nano Rebels. It’s meant for people working on multiple things during the month, which may raise alarm bells considering I just finishing talking about pushing myself too hard, but I am a little extra rebellious here. My multiple things will not all be full finished works. These past few months have left me with things in various states of limbo. I want to wrangle those a bit. I know for sure I want to get to redrafting my Summer VN Jam idea. I teased this a bit on the site and am confident in the idea. However, I wrote the 1st draft with 0 planning, as in it was completed before I even had any semblance of a coherent character sheet for any of the characters in it. It wasn’t bad, honestly, I got positive reception when sharing the script and it had some moments I thought were done really well. However, I’d like to do the horror a little differently and write some the horror with less of a light hand. The whole thing including dev notes that won’t be seen by the player was just under 3,000 words and the cap this next draft is at about 8,000 words, making it the only one I will even attempt to get a full draft for during November. For other things I want to get some writing done on, I want to work on the remake/full version of A Wine Colored Crime, finally actually start a draft of my college dressup mystery game, and finally work on an indulgent RPG project. I’d like to emphasize I don’t aim to finish any of these in a month. I’m not even sure if I’d be able to finish a draft for any of these in a single month, since I can write slowly and even the smallest of these projects would each be tens of thousands of words. Instead I want to get some words down for clarity’s sake. Where are these stories going? What will they need from me? How long will their drafts take? The Trials of Verse and Vignette (TToV&V) for me will be about clarity overall. Increasing clarity and doubling down on themes in the short horror game and figuring out what I want from the other projects. TToV&V just helps me have to break those down into concrete little milestones so a detailed outline would count towards my goal, as would completing character sheets, character interviews (as I write mine as though they were in-universe short stories), or writing samples (to test writing styles, tenses, POV characters, etc.).

October Set Up

That leaves the rest of October for me to do something I don’t do to the extent I should: planning. Making mood boards, collecting inspiration, collating ideas from my scattered notes, investigating software, rereading old drafts and marking them up, and so on at a slow pace. My own Preptober customized for my odd little way of working. I’m quite excited for it honestly, especially as I’ll have to face my old work head on and see it for what is was, not what I had dreamed up in my head or what I was sure people were judging me for not creating.(Newsflash: They definitely weren’t) It’ll be the first time I’m allowing myself to see it without those sky high standards and I can’t wait to actually see where I was.

So, to sum up: sometimes getting sick is a good thing and rest can do the brain good. I’m going to try to go at a slower pace and not be so hard on myself about imperfections, as a human, I will never create a perfect work, nor will anyone else for that matter. November I’m going to try to have more fun creating, less mad scientist frantic energy, more whimsy. If you’re trying a writing or creative challenge in November, remember to plan for break days, both mandatory and frivolous. I hope we both knock it out of the park!