#13: Who overclocked this damn thing?
“Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.”
Project update
Lovely friends and family, I managed a meagre 4,200 words in the last week because of one thing: I discovered that Screen Australia has a new grant, and it is an absolutely shining gem for me. In addition to being a medium-sized grant (up to $30k), Screen Australia’s Emerging Gamemakers Fund can be used to fund work specifically for videogames (ooh, that’s me!) which, get this:
Are aiming to build a prototype (ooh, that’s me too).
Built by small independents (ooh, that’s me three).
Represent or are developed by, or are from, teams with diverse and underrepresented backgrounds and experiences (!)
Are for underserved audiences (!!)
The fund is aimed at emerging creators & diverse voices (!!!)
So, I discovered this grant about 3 days ago and it is why I have been in overdrive since then. I had an annual plan to bring together my 2 main grant applications for 2025 between April and the end of May, to submit right at the start of June. The current round for this new Screen Australia grant closes in 3 weeks. As it turns out, I’m now absolutely flying to assemble everything that I possibly can for the 11th of April., now only 2.5 weeks away. I spent about 8 hours on Sunday researching the contractual and legal angles for voice acting, which will be absolutely critical to my game, and was pretty disappointed to find out that the industry is a lot harder to understand than I imagined it would be. That is for good reason - regulatory rules alone about distribution by broadcast, non-broadcast, social media, etc, are complicated, to say nothing of the distinction between licencing and buying intellectual property outright, rates per word versus rates by time, the list goes on.
All of this is to say that I am absolutely hammering to turn my plan into an agreement 3 months earlier than anticipated, so I’m really, really thankful that I’ve done as much planning as I have. I’ve now reached out to 5 fantastic people about potentially working together on music composition, sound design and recording, I’ve got requests to provide voices for the game, I’m making a list of lawyers who specialise in games, I’ve reached out to a 3D artist and have put a call out to all of the artists at the AIE for expressions of interest, I’m compiling a list of all the assets that I’ll need and whether they should be bought, built, hired, etc… It’s a long list, and if any of you who I’ve reached out to are reading, hello you absolute delights, I love you all!
I am not yet wholly out of my comfort zone (thank you, work, for helping me harness my resilience), but I am very much feeling the pressure of my own expectations. I am reminding myself in every spare moment that everything I am doing is exactly what my values, morals and personal compass tell me I should be doing, and it’s a lot of work, but it is also a pleasure and a privilege to have something like this to throw my energy and passion at.
Personal reflections - Imposter Syndrome & Creativity
Pushing past 30,000 words of dialogue on Saturday, I stopped to reflect. This story is split into 3 acts which represent very different but interwoven periods of my life, as retold through an adult lens where I’ve added emphasis, perspective, and nuance. My own writing entertains me enormously, and I find it very interesting. Now, before you take that as being conceited and egotistical, let me explain why it’s quite the opposite. I’ll get there in a moment, promise!
As I hit that milestone, I started to wonder whether anyone else will find this story interesting, these ideas interesting. The start of the story contains a lot of curious and intriguing conceptual ideas which are deliberately meant to fire up the cognitive parts of your brain, to fascinate you into wanting to keep on discovering the story, but in so doing, learn about the way that you, yourself, think about a variety of topics like life, death, truth, fairness, and purpose. These are ideas that draw me in and grip me, but on the weekend I started wondering whether these are the sorts of questions that other people find stimulating as well… or whether they will just find it boring. I’ve got that on my mind a lot at the moment, and while it isn’t slowing me down, distracting me, or causing me to re-construct my ideas, it is playing on my mind.
So, how about all that hubris from before, eh? Thinking that your own work is good enough that it even entertains yourself is a pretty big claim, so let me talk you through it.
I don’t really believe that this enterprise I’m undertaking is built on my cleverness, intellect, humour, or any other attribute of the kind you might expect after someone has just told you that their own work entertains them and is very interesting. How can that not be conceit and ego? The answer is that I don’t really believe that I’m doing anything at all here, really, and at the same time doing something very important. I am most certainly creating something, that is, I will end up with a body of work where no such work existed prior, and yet I can’t ultimately take credit for any of this story. Its twists and turns, its plots and meanings, all this work… it is not a function of intellect, or even of planning. I could not predict the way a conversation between characters will unfold any more than I can look at the back of my head. True, I know in advance what the outcome will be, but in truth, I didn’t “decide” that either - it emerged from what made sense to me in the context of the story. You might think that I created that, too, but I don’t believe that I did.
It takes only a single moment in time to stop and observe that you are not the author of your thoughts. You are the witness to processes of cognition which, most of the time, you are only dimly aware. You do not control your body in any real particulars, you do not control your blood, your breath, your blinking, though I dare say that now I have mentioned them, you’re under the illusion that you do. Don’t worry, it won’t last very long, and you’re unlikely to be able to sustain the feeling of control for very long, even if you wanted to. Even there, you can observe that your ability to maintain your interest in doing so is not up to you, either - you do not choose to become bored or fascinated, they are just states that arise.
You can’t choose what to think, or when, and you can no more hold onto a thought than you can hold onto sand in the wind. You cannot clear your mind, or fill it, it simply empties or fills per its own inscrutable machinations, and you cannot will it to be otherwise - although, depending on who you are, you might be able to trick yourself into thinking that you can do so precisely because of having the type of mind that you have, while acknowledging that that is a type of mind which you had no part in choosing, because it grew into existence before “you” existed. We don’t run our minds, we are a function of it, at best. I’m not blind to the implications of this of course, my own capacity to seek, contemplate, and think about precisely this idea is governed by factors that I had no hand in: my upbringing before I came to feel like I was a conscious being and the events that occurred within that time, and my genes.
So, what of all of this? What was the point? Well, as it turns out, it was all an exercise in me explaining why I feel no shame or bother or hubris at thinking that my writing is good, entertaining, thought-provoking and stimulating, exactly because I don’t perceive it as mine. These thoughts that I am documenting, these experiences, expressions, metaphors, analogies, facts, I see my role in all of this just the same as some mad hermit in the desert, trying to catch the draining sand imbetween her hands. The enterprise is doomed should you view it at the macro scale, but why would you? There are more thoughts than can ever be observed or documented, just as there is more sand than can ever be held, but the undertaking of catching just enough of it to create a good story? There’s a worthy goal.
You can’t beat your mind at its own game, and you can’t take ownership of your thoughts any more than you can take ownership of a beautiful bird which alights on your shoulder before fluttering away. It was never yours, you just had the pleasure of its acquaintance for a moment, and if it delights you, then let it, and if it doesn’t, let it go. When it delights you, share your delight with others.
Games I played
Alas and alack, this new grant stood between me and my noble promise to myself to play two games last week. I failed, friends, but it was for a good cause. Next week. What else could possibly happen?
