#Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't put all my rp commitments and stuff on hold

[whereverthemusetakesme]

I really want to make some original story content, but it just seems like so much work...

Does that make me sound lazy? I don’t even know.

I’ve just... always liked the idea of making my own stories and stuff. Ever since I was really young, I’ve had a head full of unwritten fanfic for whatever I was interested in at the time - way before I knew what fanfic even was! - and I guess it was in my last year of primary school that kind of splintered off into wanting to make my own fiction property. That led to an on-again-off-again story that, other than drawing a lot of spontaneous characters for it and occasionally using them in English creative-writing assignments, didn’t amount to much outside my head as fanworks kind of eclipsed them all, until I seriously started to consider writing something of my own while I was at uni.

Even so, though...

I dunno. I have ideas, but... it’s taken me upwards of seven years, on and off, to hammer my main one of those into something I’m actually working on with the intent to ultimately post it anywhere. Even then, I’ve still got a lot of scripting and a lot of drawing work ahead of me, and while on the one hand that’s exciting?

It’s just taking me so long that, I dunno. I suppose any big project takes time, but I’m as slow at it as I am at rping... which is something I know you’ve all experienced from me xD;

I suppose it comes down to me being too much of a perfectionist, in truth? I greatly dislike the idea of putting out anything that isn’t absolutely my best work, so if I don’t feel like I’m in a mood to put out my best work I just... avoid doing any of it. Not exactly my greatest habit.

I mean, for example... the story I mentioned before? Would you believe that I tried to start writing it as a prose story no less than six times? Only to take so long at it that I would eventually reach the point where, a handful of chapters in, I’d scrap the whole thing, just because it was no longer up to my slowly-but-steadily-improving standards, and start it from the beginning again?

I know... I know the common advice that first drafts are always garbage so that doesn’t even matter. Like I said... overly perfectionistic.

It’s like... I’ve put so much work into this story already, and I haven’t even got past the third page of actually drawing it (and the script is still half-finished too but SHHH, I’m working on that simultaneously, to give me the added motivation to actually finish it this time!). I can’t even imagine how much more effort it’s going to take to turn it into a fully finalised, fully polished thing in the end.

And then on the side I have SEVERAL OTHER STORIES I want to work on in various formats, including a far-too-ambitious ANIMATED SERIES that I would be working on all myself and I just...

Where am I even GOING with this all?

I just want to make up stories and share them. I don’t have any other ‘grand design’ with this, I just want to make things up for other people (and myself) to enjoy. I suppose any such project takes time, but it seems other creators can just churn works out in a matter of weeks or months, while I’m over here in my little corner like...

“Hey, you remember that one project I started in literally 2012? Yeah, still on that thing...“

Granted, the story has become a whole different beast than it was back then. And I remember hearing that even Disney, of all companies, had some of their movies that took them literal years to hammer out the concept for, so maybe I shouldn’t be too put off. But if this, my first attempt at a big project, has taken me so long to get anywhere...

I don’t know, I’m rambling. I suppose this is why most published comics and movies and whatever have whole teams of people working on them, rather than just one guy trying to manage everything himself. Or maybe I just need to pull myself together, stop wasting time by procrastinating, and just get on with the thing whether I ‘feel like it’ or not. I dunno.

What I do know is that seeing so many finished products around sure makes the process look a whole lot easier than it actually is when you’re right in the middle of it xD;;