I've had an idea for A Creative Project. I get these every so often. Sometimes I follow through on them, sometimes I start them and don't finish them, sometimes I don't even start them. This one is actually one I've been mulling over in my brain for quite a long time, and I think I'm just going to go ahead and do it.
Rather frustratingly for you, I'm not going to give you any details on it just yet because it's something I want to keep secret until I'm ready to launch it. It's the kind of thing that's going to take quite a while to put together, you see, and I want to launch it when it's in a "complete" state rather than doing things piecemeal. It is, however, something that I hope folks will find worthwhile and valuable, and it will allow me to realise something that I have wanted to achieve for quite some time, but have never really quite figured out the best way to go about.
I'll be honest: the reason why my brain is always mulling over Creative Projects is because as I get older, I feel increasingly… I don't know, "concerned" about What I Will Leave Behind. I'm not planning on dying any time soon, I hasten to add, but when I look back over my time on this Earth, I want to feel like I achieved something that mattered. My wife and I have not had kids and are not going to have kids (through mutually agreed choice) and as such any "legacy" I leave behind will have to depend on what I was able to achieve in the time allotted to me.
Now, I'm sure one could say that I have already "left something behind" — several things, in fact. There's this blog, there's MoeGamer, there's the stuff I wrote for various websites (although most of those are now defunct and thus only accessible via the Internet Archive and/or websites that have ingested all the material from a now-dead other site), there's the contributions I've made to magazines over the years, there's my YouTube channel, there's all the Evercade manuals I've had a hand in writing, there's the blogs and videos I've made for Evercade.
And yet, I dunno, I sort of feel dissatisfied. I feel like relatively few people know who I am. When people look back on sites like USgamer and GamePro, I'm never mentioned. Whenever I've launched new Creative Projects, they don't get any buzz from peers I may have worked with or adjacent to. Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no desire to be "famous" (or "infamous", for that matter) — but sometimes it does just feel like it would be nice to have a little bit of recognition (or, hell, just acknowledgement) for the hard work I've done over the years.
As always, if you're reading this, the above is not directed at you. If you're reading this, you probably Give A Shit about me, and that is nice, so thank you. I'm just talking more broadly. I'm not getting any younger, and it seems that getting vaguely maudlin over whether or not you have "achieved" anything in your lifespan is a natural thing to do when one is not getting any younger.
There's a line from the Final Fantasy IX manual that always sticks with me at times like this. For the longest time I was convinced it was attributed to Zidane, but it's actually attached to Freya's character profile in the original manual. The line is "To be forgotten is worse than death."
I probably don't need to explain myself there, do I…?
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They—I'm not sure who, just, you know, "them"—say that you should never write about writer's block. Which is why I'm not writing about writers block; I'm writing about how I avoid it. An important thing to consider if you're going to be writing something every day, I'm sure you'll agree.