Connecting The Dots - Dispatch 24
April 1, 2023
In my last seasonal theme declaration, I talked about the infrastructure for projects that I had spent so much time building, and that it was high time to begin making use of it. Well, since then, I have!
That dispatch came out on December 5th last year, and since then I have created five video projects, and five dispatches, on a myriad of subjects ranging from conquering the world to calendar systems. I made a card game, started an online store, joined my school's theatre program, and - I haven't even had a chance yet to talk about this yet - I created and submitted a portfolio of art pieces and got accepted into AP Art for next year! In other words, it has kind of all been happening of late.
But right now, dear reader, as I string these words together, I feel a touch of creative dissatisfaction, and it is this dissatisfaction which shall be the foundation for my upcoming theme. Hark!
It is important to state, as much for myself as for you reading, that my dissatisfaction does not stem from a sense that I'm not doing enough; I think any creative or ambitious person would say that the feeling of not doing enough is constant and inescapable. But when I look back on all that I've managed to get done since that dispatch in December, as I just have, even my own never-satisfied creative brain says, "yeah, I guess that's pretty damn good". Rather, my current state is a symptom of a deeper problem with my projects, and the infrastructure that I've been using to execute them. This is a problem of connection.
Imagine each of the different projects I described at the start as an independent node. Some of them are connected, like my theatre experience is connected to my YouTube channel via the video I made about it, and this dispatch is connected to my website. With my current system of semi-weekly dispatches and every-once-in-a-while videos, this is what that looks like for the last four months of projects:
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I don't know about you, but to me this chart looks like a crab, with the shell being tenuously composed of connections from my YouTube channel and website to the mailing list that I've got. The legs are each individual projects, videos, or dispatches, spindling out from those two hubs.
The trouble is that those two hubs aren't very well connected. I put in a little effort every week or so to write one of these dispatches, for what? So that they can sit on my website? I originally imagined this series to be a sort of brain dumping ground, with the incentive for posting semi-frequently being the encouragement of other projects, but now they just sort of take time away from things I'd rather be working on. The same is true for my YouTube videos, which, over the last year and a half or so have dropped quite a bit in production quality. During the pandemic, when I had a lot more time, I would spend five weeks making one of my animated history videos, researching, scripting, recording, animating, and editing each one carefully. But now, my videos have in a sense been filling the same purpose as my Dispatches - I come up with a scrap of an idea, and, in sometimes a little as a day or two I put something together and post it.
Here's the chart that I'd like to work towards:
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Basically, I need to connect more of these dots. Over the next couple months, I'm hoping to experiment with creating video projects that are based off of other things, like dispatches, research projects, short stories, art - things that I'm already making anyway, rather than having those projects be completely or mostly separate from everything else I'm doing. As far as this dispatch series goes, I'd like to put a little more effort into each post, and, rather than having it be a sort of "bare minimum" of projecting, write each one with the intention of eventually doing something more with it.
I'm really looking forward to seeing how this goes, and I've got a ton of exciting projects in the works! If you aren't already, I highly recommend that you sign up for my mailing list; it is, above social media followers or YouTube subscribers, the best indicator for me as to how many people actually read/watch/share the things I do here. Thanks in advance!
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- ALGC
