Striking a Creative Balance

In my day job, I’m a software engineer. There’s a lot of creating choices that get wrapped up in that work, but rarely do they come with actual creative liberty. At the end of the day, you’re using your creative talents for another’s designs. That can work out for some, but they often have other external pursuits that fill their time; for me, that’s ended up being writing, particularly romance.

Sidebar: Interesting aside, the RWA filed for bankruptcy. Maybe alienating the vast majority of your most-loved authors & their readership was a bad idea?

Now that I’m revising, I’ve got a chance to look at what this process has grown into, and while there’s aspects of my day job―I use revision control (git), my workflow has some really eerie resemblences to an actual pipeline… it’s entirely self-driven, and that’s part of what is making it good for me.

All of this comes together with a moemnt where I had to assert, no, I’m the one calling the shots on what gets written here. While usually, I love riffing on ideas, when it comes to a story I want to tell, it needs to be of my style and design. My partner made a mention that maybe I could try a different path/genre―I realized I owed them an explanation of why I was so assertive of creative liberty with this work, and other times.

We often riff on ideas togehter, but this is different. Jokes are workshopped at high speed, then abandoned. Histories and questions of the sciences are given the modified Aristotelian treatment. We’ve got a tendency to argue points back and forth, It’s wonderful, and we tend to have a very high rate of info sharing, but here it backfires.

The problem is, ultimately, I want to exert my control over the direction of this one work, the creative projects I’ve spawned, because it is the only creative work I have that is solely mine; the direction is under my total control, and that’s amazing. When I’ve got that singular direction and control, I’ve got a unique ownership of it, and I just miss that in my work product. It’s hard, too, when the synthesis of ideas that happens in those riff sessions is so crucial; that makes the boundary-setting difficult. We’ve got a tendency to block off ideas mid-development, but riffing lets us sidestep that. Cutting it off feels wrong somehow, but I need sometimes to set down when I’ve arrived at a decision, and don’t want to reevaluate it without first making the work.

Sidebar: Supposedly there’s troves of porn made of Disney characters, drawn by the artists. Effectively they did these as character studies, but made them probably to ensure they’d never be useful―or as a middle finger to the own-time policies Disney was using.

The more I think about contract bounds, the more it bothers me how long companies were able to stifle independent creativity of their employees; when you own the output of an individual, even their independent creative time, there’s something truly mind-numbing that happens. Washington has some fairly strong own-time protections,[^1] but it stil involves some care as the implementor. I bring this up because frankly, provisions of that nature are inherently anti-competitive and really demolish morale in the long term.

Sidenote: This just spawned a whole other conversation about reasonable work environment “intensity” limits, and what we should consider for them. Next blog post!

In the end, I can’t say much more than I believe everyone should have time for creative pursuits (the “8 for us” of “8 for rest, 8 for work, 8 for us”) but more than just having the time, having the energy in that time to take muse of it. There’s been jokes about “OSHA safe meeting exposure limits” for years, but maybe there’s some real merits to that.

P.S. As I finish this post, it’s Juneuary here. We’re getting bursts of rain, sun, rain … all with a delightful chill temperature. Zero out of five, completley unimpressed with this weather.

P.P.S. One last note: this ink (Colorverse Hayabusa[^2]) is really sparkly and I’m taking some absolute glee in using it for serious blogging.

[^1] RCW 49.44.140 covers ownership of intellectual property and unenforceable provisions in contracts.

[^2] Colorverse Hayabusa Glistening is absolutely gorgeous on Levenger’s paper.