Life Gets in the Way: Staying on Track

Seven of Wands, Tarot

Life gets in the way sometimes.

I have a trait. Sometimes, I build up momentum on a thing and I ride it like crazy with little regard to details and consequences.

It’s a strength, and a weakness.

For example, several years ago, I had an idea while driving for a webcomic, so I wrote it up and put it on the dub-dub-dub as alienses.com because it amused me. Turns out, it amused a number of other people and attained a respectable place on the webcomics charts for a while.

Alienses

Sounds like a strength, right?

But man, so many typos and mistakes. So much momentum, so little regard to details. These days I’m far better about proofreading and attention to quality, so that much has improved at least.

But it’s also a fragile thing, this momentum. A bump in life disrupts the momentum and then I have so much trouble getting back to it. For Alienses, it was my dad’s passing and the circumstances surrounding it, so that’s a bit extreme, but for other projects, it could be just simple day-to-day life.

The most recent example is Dungeons & Dave, the website I threw together once I started writing D&D products. I was posting pretty regularly and starting to get somewhere with it and then I just got busy at work and then got sick for a couple of weeks, and then… Momentum: destroyed.

After that, another death, a friend and neighbor this time, kind of completed the crash.

Life gets in the way. It always does, and always will.

These should be Seven of Wands moments, not The Tower.

The Tower, Tarot
Downfall, Endings
Seven of Wands, Tarot
Defiance, Conviction

 

 

 

 

 

It’s time to gird the loins and get back to it.

(Was anybody else ever confused by the phrase “gird your loins”?)

((I know I put the question mark outside the quotation marks. I actively disagree with the rule about putting it inside and in my personal writing I will continue to protest it.))

(((I wonder if these would be better as P.S. and P.P.S and P.P.P.S’s instead of parantheseseseses… wutevs)))

(((( This post is going under the category of “Advice” because I don’t have one for random ramblings. Here’s the advice – Don’t get crazy with parantheseseses. No good will come of it.))))))

2 thoughts on “Life Gets in the Way: Staying on Track”

  1. Agreed, momentum is difficult to maintain on a project with so many of life’s interruptions. The biggest issue for me is restarting a project and getting it moving again. Life will interrupt momentum like a traffic light, but when it turns green again, I’ve lost interest in going that direction. Sometimes something more interesting has come along to use up the available time. I wish I didn’t have so many unfinished projects. At least I’m better than some who start so many project and never finish any of them. I probably finish more than half eventually.

    1. Yeah, restarting is crazy hard for me. It isn’t just a matter of regaining momentum, there’s also an odd emotional component to it: I feel silly re-starting a project after being away from it so long.

      The inner-critic voice says “Oh. Are you still doing that?” with a sneer and a sideways glance.

      Anyway, the good news is that a lot of people don’t even start projects in their heads and don’t even have the possibility of not finishing them, so good on us who at least get that far. 🙂

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.