2009 Directions

Last year, for the first time I decided to challenge myself by publicly posting goals/ambitions for the year. As 2009 slides in to a steady state of churn and grit, it's worth reviewing what happened and how far I got.

I wanted to spend more time making music and collaborating with other musicians. ✓ Check. By the end of the year, I must've recorded more than 20-30 tracks, and above and beyond the hip hop, spent many hours jamming weird blues and folk style improv with my Wellington friends.

I wanted to complete a novel. I had two different working ideas, and made some progress, but ultimately never got beyond the 10,000 word mark on either. My NaNoWriMo attempt was an abject failure.

The game is still nascent. I did write some pretty cool scenes and experimented with some interesting potential programming technology to make things work, but ultimately, the game concept I have is just too large for a single person to build effectively. I won't give it up, but for the time being, I need to set up a better creative foundation and working situation before I can move forward on this.

So... One out of three. Not particularly impressive, but there are reasons, if not excuses. What can I learn from this? Did I overestimate what I could accomplish whilst working full-time as a web developer? Did I simply procrastinate too much? Was I not motivated enough? My dilemma of the now is whether this indicates that I need to change this method of goal setting. Perhaps it's better to break off small little pieces at a time, and focus on the micro day to day, week to week goals?

Of course, this doesn't allow me to escape the hard reality that I have large ambitions, and the small incremental goals are just steps towards a destination. Maybe it helps not to obsess on the destination while taking each step, but without a destination, I'll be forever hacking up experiments, demos, and starting projects that will never be finished. I used to internalize this as "the curse of open source" but it applies equally to writing, music, and everything else.

Right now, I'm in a unique position creatively. My full time job evaporated at the end of December and after jigging up enough contracting work to get me through January-February, I'm now working on various projects to fill this space. It seems like a golden opportunity to actually focus on doing the things I want to do creatively and artistically. Unsurprisingly, even now (the second working week of January) I'm already running at full capacity.

So let's draw a line in the sand. Since I achieved my goal of recording more music in 2008, let's upgrade that to record an album. Yeah, I'm fucking serious on this one.

As for the novel, and the game - they didn't get completed so they stay on the list. I can kinda lump these together because the game exists in my head as a complete plot, and could be written as a novel if I was willing to forego various branching forks in the narrative.

So this is what 2009 has in store for maetl:

  • An album
  • A novel
  • A game
  • Lots of websites (as usual)

We'll come back to this list in 2010, and see how well I did.