Creative overload and staying the course.

I reckon myself to be a pretty creative person. I write software for a living and contrary to what some non-programmer types might think, it's really a very creative occupation. But I don't always get enough from it to soak up my creative juices - I'm always coming up with ideas for things I'd like to do. Things I'd like to create.

In the last year alone I've been getting into Norse mythology, writing Interactive Fiction games using Inform (versions 6 and, only very recently, 7), designing pen-and-paper RPG rules, writing poetry, drawing figures from life (and other doodling), learning the Perl programming language, and tossing around ideas for an MMORPG with a totally new bent.

Needless to say, there's plenty on the plate and I simply don't have time to indulge in them all. Because of that I tend to pick at things. Nothing ever gets completed and in fact nothing tends to get very far past the start...

I'd dearly like to address this and get some creations created, done, finished, released out into the world. I figure that I'll never be the best games programmer around - there are too many really clever people doing that - so instead I want to bring to my life the stuff I can do well. And that's come up with creative ideas. Lots of them don't lead anywhere, but that could well be that I'm prone to losing patience and going off at a tangent. When I've gone off on a few tangents I inevitably lose faith in the germ of the idea I originally had, and I give up. It's frustrating and I have to nip it in the bud!

So much for the diagnosis - now for the _cure_. I'm going to pick two things to work at and I'm going to keep going with them. The first is to learn Perl well by having a concrete piece of software to develop. The second is to create an IF game about a group of ancient Norsemen settling a new land.