Creativity is a two-edged sword

Don't worry...I'll discuss the girl later......



I'm currently going through a bout of creativity. Probably one of the reasons I started this blog. I've got a dozen ideas in my head that I think are cool. Many I have no means of expressing, for the others there's writing. I've got book ideas, RPG ideas both old and new, a friend of mine and I are thinking of teaming up with a local comic book artist and taking a run at the comic book industry (which would be my second attempt), I've got ideas for three different campaigns in three different role-playing games, plus new ideas for the one I'm running, and toying with penning down some of my horror sci-fi screenplay ideas (I'd like to do a respectable rendition of some of HP Lovecraft's works, among others).
That's all well and good except for one problem: These ideas always come to me between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Creativity and insomnia have always gone hand in hand with me. I'm not really sure why. I suspect it's like that with a lot of people.
By nature, it seems our minds tend to work, and think, differently at night. In the dark, the impossible becomes a little more possible. At night, imagination gains a slight advantage on reason.
Why is that? Could it be that in the day time the sun and the blue sky seals us and our thoughts...our perceptions...inside the atmosphere of the earth? Our minds, perhaps, feel contained, locked away from the rest of a universe filled with infinite possibilities.
But at night the blue curtain peels back and the universe is opened before us. The moon and stars serve to remind us that we are tiny, and that we live in a dimension of infinite possibility.
The world, also, gets quiet. If you live in the city, like I do, traffic dies down after a certain time and once I tuck rae into bed and she drifts off, there is nothing to derail my train of thought.
I can sit here, recline, and unfetter my imagination.
If that's true, though, then I'd have this problem/boon all the time, and I don't.
It comes in bursts and spurts. Sometimes sustained, other times brief.
I can always conjure up a bit of creative writing on demand. You kind of have to in my career. But there are times when I know what I'm writing will be rather special.
This time however, I'm having trouble figuring out where to focus that energy. I really don't need to start anything new.
I've got a completed novel I'm trying to sell, I've got three or four ideas I'm thinking of taking to the Palladium Open House to pitch at Kevin Siembieda and the gang there, two of them are halfway completed already, and I just had a great idea that would change the direction of the book series that I want to, some day, define me as a writer.
I don't talk about this book series much, it's sort of my opus. I put it together piece by piece, and I'm afraid in a way, that I'll jinx it....but what the heck.
I want to do three trilogies, set in the same fantasy world, where the reader will have trouble distinguishing science and magic and where some things which start out as one end up being the other. And yes, I'm being intentionally vague. However, one thing I've always wondered when reading Forgotten Realms books, Dragonlance books, The Lord of the Rings and the like, is this: What happens when a fantasy world "grows up"?
What if the elves and magic never left. They stayed right through the renaissance age, through the industrial revolution of a world and right into it's equivalent of the modern day.
What happens to the dungeons and the dragons after the advent of gunpowder. Would that old temple of elemental evil be a tourist spot, or, thousands of years later, would gun-toting adventurers follow their sword-bearing ancestors into dank forgotten necropolises where the dead still walk?
The first trilogy of this series would be fairly traditional, but at a cusp of technology and philosophy. The second trilogy would be within a renaissance period that's turning rapidly into an industrial revolution. The final trilogy would take place as this fantasy world and it's occupants have moved out of the castles and into the high-rises. Where mages work at designing spells that keep your car running smoothly and rangers are crack paramilitary units as likely to parachute behind enemy lines as they are to slip stealthly through a quiet forest.
I want to be published first before I do that. Published in the novel industry anyway. I've already been published a couple thousand times after 14 years of mostly daily news reporting. But it's not the same.
Anyway, I wonder how long this creative spurt will last, and what the results will be. Sometimes it dies out and, if the project isn't pressing, I'll hang it up til the next one. But with the Open House coming up I want to get some stuff out and done that I've had sitting around.
It's also inspiring that a few people have asked me about them.
I get little PMs and e-mails saying "hey, you still working on Coalition of Magic?" or "Do you have the map to Nightside and some more info?"
Sometimes that's the mental push I need. It makes my subconscious chime in and say "Hey, get off your fat, lazy ass, turn off the computer game, and finish some projects."
It really helps when people do that.
That's enough for tonight. One of the ideas I want to pursue one day is a screenplay adaptation of the poem "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
If you haven't read it I suggest it strongly.
Oh, and here's something just to screw with your head. That girl at the top of this post that you've been drooling over....it's Soleil Moon Frye.
Punky Brewster.