Recommencing

Having "paused," the problem becomes, how do we start up again?  No doubt, like many of us, you've felt that sensation of looking at something you did months ago, only to hate it now.  "This is garbage," or "What the hell was I thinking" are common responses.  The result being that we can't bear to take up the effort again, so that we trash it and, in the end, wind up where we were when we started.

This dissatisfaction with work is a part of the creative process, and unquestionably the least pleasant part.  We see the imperfections in our work more clearly that we do in the work of others, because we have invested ourselves and because we've spent hours painstakingly reviewing every aspect and link.  The process of making anything involves choices ... and with every choice made, we destroy avenues and opportunities not taken.  What we are left with is something we're tired with, something that isn't as good as we hoped it would be and something we've begun to hate with the heat of a thousand suns.

It is this familiarity that breeds contempt for our own work.  It is familiarity that makes us hate editing or having to go back and fix something we thought was fine.  What we have to remember -- and this comes with difficulty -- is that others are not nearly as familiar with our flaws as we are.  Others don't know what it was "supposed" to look like; they only know what it is.  Others don't know the choices that were made, now regretted by the creator.  Others can see the value of our work much more clearly than we can.

It is common for actors and directors to admit that they can't watch themselves on the screen or attend their own movie.  Authors very often can't bear to read their own books.  I consider now and then that my book, How to Run, deserves a rewrite -- but all I feel is acute pain when I consider the task, like a stabbing blade in my liver.  If I read any single page, all I see are its ugly imperfections.

From this, it should be evident that there's a danger in putting a project down and pausing it, as I argued with the last post in this series.  Maintaining the process of working from beginning to end is a method of maintaining the delusion that the work is going brilliantly -- by not awarding ourselves any distance on it.  Of course, it doesn't matter whether we finish the work or not.  The result will be a first draft and first drafts always suck.  Sooner or later, no matter what, we're must someday look at that work in the cold bright light of reality and see it for what it is: crap.

Here is where we separate the meat from the bones.  I know deep down that there is nothing in my book that I can't fix -- it is only a matter of doing it.  The doing is a determination of not minding that it hurts.  The doing is committing to the end product, and not to the superfluous regrets and unfortunate lack of self-perceived talents we have.  The trick is to set aside things we would have liked to have done, or things we chose not to do, or things we tried and weren't able to do.  In the long run, with the final product, the things we see as "garbage" in our own work aren't nearly as important as we pretend.  Every work has shortcomings.  Every program will fail to accomplish something.  That.  Doesn't.  Matter.

We must learn that lesson or we're doomed.

As an example, I'll pull out a back-and-forth between Sterling and I from late October, regarding trade tables.  [Yes, Sterling, you knew that sooner or later I would have to pick this discourse out of my teeth; today's the day].

Sterling asserted,

"For example, your trade system, which I think is one of the solutions you cited is not the best solution. Mine is better. Mine can't rely on the number of references in an encyclopedia to determine the amount of a resources in a hex, because my world doesn't have an encyclopedia. But moreover, the number of times a word in mentioned in a description of a place is not a reliable way of determining how much of the stuff is in there. You need an arbitrary way to determine how much stuff is in a hex and that one works, but is it the best way? (I may be misstating how your system works, but I hope the point is not lost in spite of my errors.) My system accounts for resources, labor, and technology in determining what and how much an area produces and consumes (all values I must set arbitrarily as well). My system is not tied to a hexagonal grid. My system does not as easily produce a list of prices as yours, but it clearly illustrates imbalances between settlements and allocates my populations to various activities very well. I don't believe your system does that. Those allocations create more verisimilitudal value for my world than a bill of trade goods prices. And I can extend my system to produce price lists when I need them. So my system is better. By my measure. This isn’t an emotional choice; it’s a solution driven by different goals which reflect the difference between what my game needs and what your game needs."

Marvelous.  For those people who think I can't stand to be kicked in the teeth, I give you Exhibit No. 1, the above.  Coldly, plainly stated, with each statement possessing the force and pace of a hammer hitting an anvil.  Rarely am I eviscerated with such meter.

I do not care that mine is not the best solution.  I did not base my economy on the admittedly arbitrary method of counting references in an encyclopedia because it would be a reliable measure of that which is implied but not stated here.  I assume Sterling means "unreliable" with regards to the real world of the mid-17th century.  That is true.  There is no attempt at accuracy between my trading system and that of the real world.  That was by choice.  My numbers are, however, known and fixed precisely for my fictional game world, so where it comes to calculating any part of my system, my numbers are completely reliable (particularly since, when I wish, I can tweak the numbers to fit my perception of what my world needs to be, rather than concerning myself with reliable numbers that would indicate accuracy -- a value that has no meaning in my fictional setting).  In creating my trade table, I didn't need to account for resources, labour or technology, so my system was not built to account for those things.  I could have easily built my system so that it ignored a hexagonal grid; lines on a map would have been sufficient.  The grid is not there to limit the design; it is there to streamline the design.  I had no reason to feel that greater precision would produce more meaningful results that my players would recognize.  My system was designed to easily produce a price list.  I can produce a price list for any market incorporated into the system in about 45 seconds, a time period that mattered where it came to players deciding to head off to a market during game play on a whim.  I have no use for knowing the imbalances between settlements.  I don't need to allocate my population to various activities.  I'm not running a system that is designed to produce results like Europa Universalis.  It is designed to enable the players to use a system specifically adapted to the needs a player has.  And nothing more.  It is irrelevant to me if another system is better.  It is only relevant to me that a player understands it, can predict it and finds elements in it that enhance the player's experience.

Choices were made.  I made different choices than Sterling has made.  The one thing that Sterling says his system doesn't do is the one reason I built my system for.  This does not mean that Sterling made the "wrong" choices.  Sterling made choices that created a trade system for his needs.  He did not make a trade system that would have fulfilled my needs.

That said, my trade system is a disaster area.  For two weeks, I have been painstakingly reviewing every calculation, something I did not do in 2016 when I last updated the system.  And omg, the errors.  The errors.  The stupid, myopic, blundering, sometimes incomprehensible errors.  I owe an apology to every person who asked for and received a copy of this terrible, bug-filled document, and particularly those who contributed $10 to my patreon for the privilege of seeing it.  Jeez.  I am embarrassed.  At one point, without reason, I simply copied the price of a pound of wheat grain in one part of the document as the price of an ounce in another part.  As a result, I have charged my players 16 times the real cost of bread out of sheer incompetence ... something I've apparently done for, I'd guess, more than seven years.

I can only take comfort in that, of the scores of people who have copies of the document, none have ever said to me, "Why does cell B1073 give the price of barely per ounce at 2.14 c.p., when cell B4186 gives that as the same price for a pound of barley?"  Not that this excuses me.  But it does comfort me.

I am fixing it.  And scores of other errors, many of them just as embarrassing.  And trying not to mind that they are embarrassing, so long as they get fixed.

Returning to any task once it has been paused is a Herculean task of getting over oneself.  When we pull out those old tables, or look at that compiled description that kicks us in the gut, we must take stock of the situation clearly.  We are at a fork in the road.  One signpost points to an easier road that says, "Burn It, Start Again."  Yes, oh yes, that is the easy road.  That road is well lit, has sunshine falling down upon it and is filled with notions like "The new concept will be amazing" or "Don't worry, it will resolve itself."  When we're freed from looking at our mistakes, we can imagine all sorts of perfections in our future.

The other sign, broken, weather-beaten, hard to read, says, "Keep Going."  It implies that if you don't keep going; if you always follow the bad road; nothing will ever get done.  And that's true ... but I still haven't explained how you're going to do that.

My daughter is a hat maker, though she hasn't been able to declare that as the source of her income yet.  Because space is at a premium in her condo, her materials and tools are crammed into a clothes closet that is about eight feet by four.  Whenever she works, she has to haul her materials out, lay them in place and settle into work -- but of course, there's always something that she's forgotten or can't find, meaning that she will spend an hour or two dredging through the closet before she's able to seriously get down to work.  This is annoying as all hell.  I'm sure many readers here can identify similar issues they have with their own projects.  It is aggravating to remember some paragraph in some publication that would perfectly suit this specific project at hand ... only to forget exactly where that paragraph is and find oneself searching, plagued, through twenty or thirty books.

My daughter's problem would be solved with a worktable, had she the space to put one.  She hopes that sometime in the next year, they will be able to sell their condo and purchase a house with more bedrooms and a basement, both for her newborn son and for herself.  With a worktable, not only is everything organized, but present work can be set down and left exactly where it is, so that when we settle into work again, it is easy to find our place.  Then we can resume without all the hassle of figuring out where we were or where things are.  Things are where we left them.

Recommencing involves the adoption of a mindset that can be daunting, at first.  When I recommence a map, most of the methods are straight-forward; there are only a few places where the process gets quite complicated, and I try my best not to set down the task of mapmaking just prior to one of those points.  That way, when I pick up the work again, the first day or two is spent doing something easy and uncomplicated.

On the other hand, with something like the aforementioned trading tables, there are no simple points.  The excel file that exists is an interwoven hodgepodge of endlessly linked cells which were too numerous to label in a side document.  This means when I take up the task again, I must spend at least a week following my logic around in various circles until I adapt, once again, to the mindset I last had when I last took the plunge.  There is, first, the getting over the mistakes I've made; then there is getting over the emotional bitterness that I haven't the skill-level to do a better job of things.  Then there is the methodical task of following threads, such as C275 linking to E3487, which is adjusted by F2234 on another worksheet, whose data derives from B345 on yet another worksheet ... all this being an adaptive process that forces my brain to work differently.  The way my brain worked when I first made this nightmare.

I could just decide to force the system to fit the way my brain works now, but there is a problem there.  The system as a whole is monumental in size.  Reformatting it would require five or six months of constant and diligent work ... and it would require doing all of it in one sitting.  The first version, created in 2005, took me about a month.  The second version, in 2009, took two.  The third version, in 2013, did not attempt to reformat the second version, partly because I was working full time at a job, while in 2009 I had lost my journalist job with the rest of the world and was living on E.I. (I had the time).  The 2013 version was a tweak.  The 2016 version was as well.  I have the time right now, mid-covid, to take the months needed to rebuild the system from scratch, but with 2013 and 2016, it has become HUGE.  And frankly, I can't imagine how I would make it better than it is.  At best, I could organize it differently.  Not better.  I don't see that as a value-added proposition.

Whereas I can change my thinking pattern to what it was in 2016 in just a few days, though it is skull-sweat.  I'm adaptable and once, I was very familiar with all of this and I can be familiar again.  Oh, sure, I hate the freaking thing; but as I've said several times now, that can't matter.  I want to make corrections, improve the math and add new things to the price list.  That's what matters.  Not how I feel about it.

Those are the things the players will notice.

My worktable is the desktop of my computer.  Everything is carefully assigned to a cubbyhole, and carefully titled, so that if I cannot remember what a thing is called, I can at least identify where it ought to be.  This means that, like a worktable, every month or so I spend an hour or two "cleaning up."  Deleting files, moving new files off my desktop into the right folder, pulling a bunch of old content I don't expect to use again into a dead-letter folder and putting that in the right place, and so on.  I move about a hundred files a month this way: renaming, deleting, correlating, cutting and pasting ... whatever it takes to keep the desktop clean without my losing a sense of how it is structured.  That way, when I want to find the pricing table and open it up, I know where it is and when I last touched it, often at a glance.

I haven't used paper and binders in 15 years now.  It is more valuable to take a picture of a page with my phone, transfer it to my desktop and give it a name and a tag, than it is to keep the piece of paper.  Then, if I want to find it, rewrite it or delete it, I'm not hunting through the shelves in my room for a piece of paper I haven't seen in two years.  It is right there, tagged "guild" or whatever, when I want it.

Get a worktable.  Organize it.  And put the things you've paused on it.  Then, learn how to make yourself recommence your work, without the compulsion to take the easy road to getting nothing done.