Abridged

When I was really sick a couple weeks ago, I finally watched Dragon Ball Z Abridged.

Not even sure why I did it. I can't remember how I landed on it. And you know what? It was really good.

I don't have a lot of experience with these abridged series. I've only seen clips here and there, and usually what I've seen is a bunch of chaos, memes, and non-sequiturs. And yes, while there was some of that, what surprised me was how the series really kept to the core story, only making modifications when it would speed things along , or to make a critical point about the original series. (I mean let's face it, DBZ takes forever. Even DBZ knows that DBZ takes forever, which is why they made Kai.)

What surprised me more than anything was the emotional weight it had. They understood the important beats of the storyline and made me manage to feel things about what was going on, even though it was a parody, even though I already knew what was going to to happen in the story. It had its own internal consistency, it's own modified world building, it's own characterizations. Maybe they weren't fully three-dimensional characters, but they were at least 2.5.

In some ways I almost feel like it was ahead of its time. Some of the same fourth wall bending humor and the characters not taking themselves very seriously reminds me of the current MCU style.

In any case, it was a pleasant surprise.

At the same time I was finishing up Dragon Ball Z Abridged, I also started subscribing to a service called Blinkist. Blinkist is a service that takes nonfiction books and podcasts and condense them down to their core ideas. It's like reading those non-fiction books, but they cut out all of the inspirational fluff and meandering stories. Which honestly, I don't really mind that part of it sometimes, but the frustrating thing I find about books like that is that I can never find points when I need to go back to them. I'm sure it's intentionally designed that way, to make sure you read the whole book, but Blinkist keeps everything organized.

I've even gone through some Blinks (that's what they call them) of books that I have already read and found them to be pretty accurate and useful. It's nice, because I'm always trying to get new ideas, new perspectives, new techniques on how to improve myself as a person and as a creative individual. But I definitely don't have time to read all of those books, and I definitely don't have a budget to purchase them all in audio form.

I'm not sure what lesson there is to gain out of any of us. It is interesting though that I seem to be surrounded in cutting ideas down to their bare essentials.

Idle

I started getting sick about a week ago. It wasn’t COVID and it certainly wasn’t a surprise; my wife had fighting off the same cold for about three weeks. Despite my teacher-boosted immunity system, three weeks of exposure was too much.

I was sick enough that I took the day off on Monday, but my calendar was too packed to take any more time off. Sometimes it’s just more of a pain to reschedule and get everything done.

So to make sure the cold didn’t turn into a worse infection, I’ve spent as much time as possible not moving. Tuesday, I got home, made dinner, didn’t eat it, then laid still for 11 hours.

So all my time I usual,y would’ve spent working on projects or walking the dog was pretty much spent laying around and watching YouTube and anime. It was very relaxing, but it also shows me just how much time I spend working on everything when I’m not at work. Sometimes I’m reluctant to call my creative work a “career”, but I certainly put the same hours in.

My brain is starting to work at nearly full speed again, so I’m excited to get back to it. But it was nice to get a little perspective.

Synesthesia

So I know I've mentioned Andy J. Pizza and his podcast (Creative Pep Talk) before. Lately, his episodes have been INCREDIBLE (about why you shouldn't give in to the temptation of creating for the algorhithm) but I've been thinking about something else he's talked about.

Well, not even talked about. Alluded to.

Synesthesia.

If you're not familiar, synesthesia is when you receive sensory information with one sense but experience it in another. You've maybe heard of in different contexts, but it's things like "hearing colors" and "tasting sounds."

And though Mr. Pizza hasn't outright claimed it yet in any of his podcasts, he has alluded to several times that many creators experience some level of synesthesia, and that tapping into that synesthesia can be a way utilizing your unique tastes.

I've often felt that way about music. I see things in my head with music, entire stories that unfold, which is why I think music has been such an important aspect of my life (and why it's an important part of my writing process and my podcast creation process.)

I mean, a lot of my early life I listened to film scores, so that kind of makes sense. That is music created specifically to go with visuals, so obviously it's going to have a story-like structure to it. But as I've gotten older and expanded my music consumption (and music mastery) I started to notice that it was a consistent thing. All music generates stories in my head. All of it.

And yes, there are some colors going on in there as well (G suspended 11 is always a aquamarine green in my head, and D minor dorian is a dark blue (but is that because the D minor dorian is featured so heavily in Miles Davis' KIND OF BLUE?)), but the story thing is something I find interesting.

I also have very specific feelings about what colors are associated with the months of the year.

But I also wonder if synesthesia is also just the brain making associations. For example, in my head, April is always yellow. But is that because April O'Neal from the Ninja Turtles wore a yellow jumpsuit?

Another example is that I am currently sick with a chest cold, and all I can think about is Germany - in particular this black tea a nice German family gave me one evening when I was on tour. I got super sick when I was in Germany - the same kind of congested chest cold I have now. I've had dreams of the streets of Ibbenburen. I "smell Europe" - and no I don't know how else to explain it except that I think I smell something that reminds me of Europe but it's not a specific smell.

Do creative people have a higher tendency to have these synesthetic bleed overs when they create memories? Or are these just how memories are stored in my brain because I have a higher level of synesthesia?

Anyway, the brain is weird.

Clumsy

Everything I write right now feels really clumsy.

It’s an effort to get the words down and I’m mashing the backspace key like I need it to live.

Maybe I’m rusty, or maybe I’m about to grow. When I was a musician, I remember this feeling. My fingers moved when they felt like it. Chord progressions were suddenly an alien language.

It was like a physical manifestation of impostor syndrome.

But then a week or two later, everything would be BETTER than it was before. It was like my brain was just adjusting to improvement.

Really hope it’s the same thing here.

The conversations the ants in my house are having, probably.

“It’s over, your majesty. The last of the scouts have not returned, and the final crack now stinks of the Ortho Rot.”

“I see…I suppose it was inevitable, after Queen Antaria’s hubris. Can you believe her rhetoric? ‘We shall live in the cupboards, amongst the stores of sugar.’ “

“Pure folly, your majesty.”

“Small strike forces at low value targets, that is how we’ve always survived, and how we will always survive. Remember the incursion on the dog food? They simply vacuumed up the patrol, not a single drop of the Rot sprayed that day.”

“Indeed, your majesty is quite wise.”

“What of the expedition we sent to the backyard? The Crucible of Charred Meat?”

“Burned, your majesty.”

“The humans sprayed the Rot on their own device?”

“No, your majesty. Burned, literally. They lit the crucible. Nothing is left but molten panic pheromones.”

“They truly are monsters…well, back to eating leaves and such, I suppose.”

“Yes, your majesty.”

Villain puns with increasingly more powerful villains.

How can you "pick up" if there's nothing to pick up?

Villain steals burrito.

-

How can you "pick up" if there's nothing to pick with?

Villain destroys pickaxe.

-

How can you "pick up" if there's no one to pick up?

Villain kidnaps children.

-

How can you "pick up" if there is no up?

Villain destroys gravity.

Rebellion

About 5 years ago I ran into a concept called “The Four Tendencies” by writer Gretchen Rubin. The idea was that each person can generally fall into a category of how we respond to external and internal directives. Her observations were that some people, for example, were really good at following directions when somebody else gave it to them, but really bad at it if they gave it to themselves. If you can figure out which of those tendencies you were, you could try to hack your own personality into being more productive, or happier, or well balanced or whatever.

I should note that this is not based in any sort of real psychological research. She's not a doctor or a therapist or anything like that.

Anyway, when I took the tendency test and read the articles associated with it, I came up as “The Rebel.” The idea of the rebel is that they have difficulty listening to the commands of anything outside themselves, and anything inside themselves. Basically, the moment somebody tells me something to do, I don't want to do it. At least, not in the exact way that I was told how to do it. According to Rubin, there's an independent streak in the rebel, so even if they're completely willing to do the task they are given, either by others or by themselves, there's always going to be a tendency to do one part of it just slightly different, or slightly their own way.

I was very fascinated by this angle for a while, but then I saw a real psychiatrist and started thinking about other things.

Still, I wonder if there's something to it. I've been trying to get back to writing my Persona 4/ 5 fanfiction story, and I just couldn't. I was in a part in the overall arc that I didn't really have a strong idea for when I first came up with the thing. It's a big gap in the story, and this happens sometimes to me while I'm writing novels too. When that happens, I just have to buckle down and outline a bunch of stuff until I figure out how to glue the previous sections in the next section that I already know how to do.

So I spent about an hour and a half one morning going through all the lead up, figuring out where I wanted to go next, and then outlining it. That was exactly what I needed to get back on track, and I've been regularly posting on that story again.

And then this morning, I wrote a portion of the story that was not something I outlined, or something that I had planned for. I was struck with the idea at a whim, and just started typing it out.

I'm happy with what I wrote, and I totally posted it, but I still found myself going “Why am I like this?” Why did I spend all that time carefully outlining every single step, only to throw it completely off by the third time I sat down to write?

Now, as I'm walking the dog, I started thinking about that Four Tendancy thing again, and wonder if there is a part of me that has to rebel against what I'm told, even if I'm the one that told myself. It's an extremely annoying habit , and one of the reasons, most outlining systems don't work for me. The minute I've decided how a story supposed to go, I feel compelled to not do it in that way. Sometimes that's a good thing, resulting in a really interesting, creative twists from what I was going to do. Or sometimes it just results in me not doing anything on that project at all.

There's always been a piece of me that loves the improvisational. I mean I was a jazz major after all, and the podcast is basically a large exercise and improvisation. I used to be a 100% "pantser” as a writer, but then I got frustrated with how long it took me to get anything done. I've tried to become more and more outline base, more on schedule, on track, productive.

But maybe I'm just delaying the inevitable. If I'm just going to buck every outline I make, is there a point in doing it? I don't know.

The Creative Pep Talk podcast the other day was talking about Taika Watiti’s tendency to write something, then leave it behind for a few years, then go back and tackle it again. I used to write like that. My rule was right, a novel, write another one, then go back and edit the first one. Heck, Heart and Soul Fist was the result of me going back and finding a story I had written 7 years prior.

So is that the true methodology of who I am as a creative person? Output output output whatever comes to mind, toss it in the metaphorical drawer, and then bring it back to life later?

Is it better to embrace your natural tendency, or train and mold yourself into something different?

More

There's a piece of advice that I heard a long time ago, maybe about 4 or 5 years ago now, that said "push publish more often." The idea being that the more things you submit out into the world, the more chance that you'll find the audience that you're looking for.

That didn't make sense to me at first. After all, as a consumer of stories and media, I often make a wholesale judgment of a creator based upon the first work I consume. So it would seem to me that you would need to make sure that everything you put out into the world was the best possible version you could make it. That's a perspective held by a lot of people who don't make stuff, and a perspective held by the big gatekeeper players, who have appointed themselves tastemakers.

But then I started thinking of it from a more practical perspective. Let's say I sold t-shirts. If I only had one color T-shirt in one size, my capacity to sell t-shirts is limited to people who like that color. And are that size. If I was trying to open a t-shirt shop and said that I was trying to get be perfect t-shirt, the one that would define me as a t-shirt maker, people would think I was stupid.

I've tried my best to improve upon that over the last few years and publishing more things. I think I would have kept secret before. I release short stories I write on the Patreon. But I certainly haven't done the best I possibly could with this.

It's not just being judged under my ability as a creator and writer. I think it's also a fear of being judged on my taste. Our taste is what defines what we determine as good are, and it's by meeting. Our own taste that week decide to put something out into the world. These days I'm not worried about whether I've still fully portrayed the thing I was trying to portray. I worry that people will think that my taste is garbage, and that I'm trying to add garbage to the world.

I think I need to get over that. One of the best things about the podcast is that we only get one try at it. Sure, I can edit it a bit, but there's only so much I could really do if I wanted to drastically change how something came out. Out. And since the podcast is so far, the most widespread success that I've encountered, I should use that as feedback that people enjoy the same things I enjoy. Which of course also makes sense, because if people didn't enjoy the same things that I enjoyed, those things wouldn't exist to begin with.

I feel like I'm writing in circles now. It all boils down too something I retweeted the other day: there are only two writing problems. Not knowing what to say. And knowing what to say, but being afraid to say it.

I think it's time to publish more often.

PS: please excuse any strange word choices or transpose words. I dictated this while walking the dog.