Body: PASS (walking, diet)
Mind: WIN! (writing mood board)
Spirit: WIN! (writing mood board x 1000, ASMR meditation)
Social: WIN! (visiting with friends, corresponding with family)
For the Unity game that Landru (a different Andrew with a Star Trek-derived nickname) and Jason and I are developing, I was tasked with creating a "mood board", which is a collection of images and music and notes in order to find the mood and themes for the game.
Since this game is set in the same world as my novel, the mood board is also useful for my writing projects. And at the risk of tooting my own horn, the board is amazingly cool. I spent two hours yesterday just scrolling through it, drinking in the images and music and text, enjoying the world that I have created.
I think I finally realized, when viewing this board, that I have created something cool. I've been pretty frustrated, as you know, with the lack of progress in the storytelling (though my latest outline is looking more promising). But what I saw in the mood board was that all the work I've been putting in for over a decade is paying off. The world is rich with potential conflict. It is believable within its own rules. It is fertile soil for growing stories in, even if I haven't found the right one quite yet.
In my own mind, I had been laboring under the delusion that my fiction would only have value once it finally became a story, and all the other work was just foundation to build the story on. But now I see that all that background work is valuable in its own right. Even if I never write a story myself, but hire other authors, I have still done something that is hard and requires talent and has value that audiences will enjoy. And I'm still pretty confident that I can find and create the story so long as I keep working on it.
Okay, that's enough self-praise for now. But I probably under-praise myself in general so the odd glut of it is probably okay.
Anyway, I mentioned ASMR meditation so I should talk about that briefly. It's basically a technique of using auditory "triggers" to invoke a pleasant tingling in the head and spine. Common triggers are whispering, tapping, crinkling, etc. It works best with headphones so you can hear the sounds in simulated 3D. The variety of ASMR triggers is so huge I can't begin to describe them all, so here is a strange but surprisingly effective example: it's a dude putting comic books into plastic bags. The crinkly sound of the plastic and the shuffling sounds of the paper are really pleasant.
The neat thing about these videos is that I'm learning to appreciate sound in the real world in a new way. Even just typing on the keyboard right now, I can really listen to and enjoy the sound of the keyboard. I think that when we lived without artificial sounds, before radios and TVs and video games, we (obviously) listened to the real world a whole lot more, whereas now it's easy to go from artificial noise to artificial noise while barely noticing sound in our natural environment. It turns out the world is full of rich, interesting sound, and it's neat to be able to tune into it again.
No comments:
Post a Comment