Snowflake #5

[mistressofmuses]

Lazy day, which was mostly nice, but I meant to do more, ha.

Slept, read, went grocery shopping... decided to completely redo my plans for the silly horse sim game I play... napped.

So since I don't have anything super exciting to post about...



Challenge #5: Something you wish you had the time/energy/talent to do.

For something in the time/talent category: I really wish I'd honed my visual art skills more, so that I could either make animatics or just sequential comics... specifically so that I could make videos or lyric comics for specific songs that I just... visualize the perfect music video to. A lot of those would be fan-vids (my sibling and I make a lot of fanmixes), while a few would be original stuff, but some just seem so perfect in my head. ;-; Instead, I just daydream about them.

[Particular favorites in no particular order:
"Glass Heart Hymn" by Paper Route paired with the Captive Prince trilogy
"My Dark Disquiet" by Poets of the Fall paired with the Captive Prince trilogy or Good Omens
"Yellow Flicker Beat" by Lorde paired with the Newsflesh trilogy
"The Escapist" by Nightwish paired with Bioshock: Infinite
"Hand of Sorrow" by Within Temptation AND/OR "Blame" by Bastille paired with the Shades of Magic trilogy
"The Calling" by The Amazing Devil paired with The Southern Reach trilogy
"The Road" by Hurts paired with Sparrow Hill Road
"Neon Wound" by The Silversun Pickups paired with the Broken Earth trilogy
"Take Me To Church" by Hozier paired with the original story I'm too scared to attempt yet - I know it's a cliche song to pick, fight me
AND SO MANY MORE]

More in the time/energy category:
There's a particular fic that I've been working on on and off for almost 15 years (the oldest word doc on my computer for it says 2008, but that's labeled "version 2," so I think the idea was even older.) In its various incarnations, it's probably had between 100k and 150k written on it.
Usually I refer to it as the "fairytale worldhopping monstrosity" if I ever mention it. (Kingdom Hearts, worldhopping between non-Disney fairytales, SoRiKai endgame)

After attempts that didn't really go anywhere in 2008 and again (twice) in 2009, I really tried to get it written in 2015-2016, and got a bit of momentum on another go in 2018 after ditching some parts of the outline I hadn't been enthusiastic about, but haven't done anything with it since.

I recognize that this project is a big source of "idea debt" for me, in terms of how much creative thought I've dumped into it, when it may realistically never happen. Yet I just can't quite give up on it!

It's the kind of thing that will appeal pretty much to an audience of me, and I've second-guessed a lot of big components of the plot, especially as I've drifted away from canon. But I still want to just write it, even if I'm the only one who wishes it existed!

Comments

[olivermoss]

15 years is a long time! I hope you find a way to tackle it. At least you know what you want :)

[mistressofmuses]

Thank you! I hope I can, too. It really is a ~personal project~ to an even greater degree than fic usually is for me, but I'd love to just have it done. One of those "I want to read this, so I guess I better write it for myself first" things, haha.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it's hard when you've got all that good work put into a thing and can't share it yet. I hope you find a way to break it down into a something manageable. Sadly, I have no experience getting massive projects like that done, but I have seen a lot of artists I've followed for a long time get back to backburner projects once they, well, have leveled up their skills a bit. Seeing how common it was for artists I followed for a long time to have their 'new' work be something I knew they had first talked about a decade or more ago made me a lot less self conscious about my paranormal investigations series ambitions.

[mistressofmuses]

It's good to have the reminder that there are other people out there who have returned to things after a decade or so! That's encouraging, haha.
That makes me feel less self-conscious about the idea of working on something that I've been thinking of for so long too.
(And thinking about it that way, definitely no shame in waiting until you feel like your skills match your ambition for a project!)

[windowsmillennialed]

I feel obligated to point out that oh heyall no, visual arts are by no means talent excluding or including for that matter and that like damned near everything else, I'm quite certain you could cultivate such skills. The time is going to pass anyways, so why not give it a go?

[mistressofmuses]

This is true! It's certainly never too late to try and work at something! I think my biggest lamentation is time - I already feel like I don't have enough time for the things I want to do (writing, reading, more physical activity, etc.) and I'm afraid that trying to take on another thing would be too much to juggle. But it's a fair point - the time passes anyway, so even just trying to pick it up occasionally would produce better results than never doing so at all!

[tjs_whatnot]

It's the kind of thing that will appeal pretty much to an audience of me,

Ahhhh! These are the best and the hardest stories to tell! I wish you luck on all your writing and vidding endeavors!

❤❤

[mistressofmuses]

Thank you! I appreciate it! (Those stories are hard to tell sometimes, but can be very fun as well.)