Tonight I was supposed to be contending with a nearly impossible-to-conquer creative to-do list, spanning past, present, and future tasks that I had felt desperately needed to all get accomplished this weekend.
Instead, about halfway through I called it a night and fired up the Wii to spend a few hours playing Final Fantasy: The After Years, and in retrospect, I think I’m more or less ok with that particular decision.
I tend to be a work-a-holic when it comes to my creative ventures, mainly because I’m still striving to make them a full-time effort. I take on too much and I underestimate how long things will take, so as a result I’m constantly stressed about not being farther along with projects and whatnot. And oddly enough, the ultimate counter-productive result is that eventually I’ll end up getting so stressed that I just need to drop everything and take a freaking break, which is what I finally ended up doing tonight.
Aside from about an hour of playing Mario Kart with Sara, Lori, and James the other week, I honestly can’t remember the last time that I just sat down and played video games without feeling guilty about it. I do play D&D every other week for most of the evening, but I had to cut back to that amount from more because I felt like I needed to spend the time elsewhere. The question is, what’s the balance between recreation and actually spending enough time writing to make real progress???
It’s a fine line because I know that if I get too lax I’ll never get anything done – especially when I get sucked into an RPG like Final Fantasy! – but at the same time, all work and no play eventually bleeds out the creative juices to where I can’t get anything done anyways. So do I err to the side of fun, or to the side of actually getting things done?
*rhyme!*