I think the CTP tileset saga is about to get derailed by one of the writers. He’s not interested really in a team product - he wants to run the show and only have his character do things and be the star, which isn’t how it’s set up at all. And now he’s gone off half-cocked (AGAIN! for the 4th or 5th time actually….) with a bunch of stuff that’s not going to fit.
*sigh* He needs to be swatted - HARD. That’s not my job, thankfully - or not, maybe….
There’s a major difference these days in what I’m actively writing (fantasy set in tilesets for the game NWN - for a group producing the tilesets outside the game dev group) and my own “stuff”. Of course, my stuff has no deadlines, and the tileset fiction does. The tileset fiction is just a fun diversion really - not that my own novels-in-progress are any more “professional”. But the tileset story has one really great thing going for it: it actually feeds my imagination, sending it off onto other tracks - like back into one of my own WIPs.
Which is a very very good thing - since I have been sitting all winter writing mostly nothing because I couldn’t get “jump-started”. Even the online workshop I did in February didn’t help much, because the woman who “moderated” was so unenthusiastic about fantasy (even though of the 12 of us, 9 are writing fantasy!)
I’ll of course have my laptop along when we go off for a few weeks later this month, and I’ll be sure to put several in-process works on it. No point in letting the engine die for lack of fuel!
That’s a bit of an obfuscation, truthfully. There IS no “imagination engine” or “imagination machine”. But machines have motive power, and so does the imagination: it’s just a matter of discovering what “engine” runs yours.
My “imagination engine” is fueled by “what ifs” mostly. A single thought - even a partial “phrase” of a thought - will set me off on the “what if THAT happened instead” path. I even do this in dreams: don’t like the way this one’s headed? Fine, what if we go this direction instead? I’ve been known to direct dreams for long periods of time - and while I recall them imperfectly, some of the parts eventually make their ways into my writings.
The oddest things can start a train of thought - a face that seems familiar though you can’t give the person wearing it a name; the horses got out and were NOT hit by a car; a cloud-shape that seems to hang in the atmosphere forever; a strange light where there shouldn’t be one on the mountain. On and on - imagining is play much of the time, with only a nod to “using its output”.
Once you find out what sort of fuel yours uses, it’s a matter of practicing “starting the engine”. Let ‘er roll!
