is creative energy truly fungible? asking for a me

[merelydovely]

A bunch of folks on twitter have been making noise about attempting a return to Dreamwidth, and I went "oh hey, I made one of those...I should go poke it."

This is admittedly mostly a form of procrastinating because I'm supposed to be doing three different exchanges right now. I will take this moment to figure out what the timeline is for each of them.

• Merthur Glomp Fest: Drafts are due March 15th (eek!) and posting starts April 1. I have 3,014 words and a five-chapter outline.
• MDZS WIP Wednesday Server Wangxian Exchange: Mod check-in is March 13th. (I am a mod; the mods are all writing for each other.) Soft deadline March 21, posting by March 26. I've got 3,549 words and a scene list.
• Wei Wuxian's Tongzhi Server Exchange*: Check-in March 23, final check-in April 20, posting April 27. I have the basic sketch of an idea.

The WIP Wednesday posting date is actually coming up earlier than I thought—I might need to revise my outline down to include significantly less backstory/worldbuilding if I want to get both fics written at essentially the same time. Either way, the Wei Wuxian's Tongzhi Server Exchange is gonna have to wait.

I've been really excited about the volume of artistic output I've been managing lately, mainly because I was able to get a new monitor stand that frees up a lot of desk space, leading to a new convenient and permanent home for my Wacom tablet:

(I am inserting this image via a discord link—could someone who's more Dreamwidth savvy than me let me know how Dreamwidth image hosting works, if at all?)

So I've been doing what feels like TONS of art lately. I'll have to make another post about all that soon so I can fulfill the promise on my sticky post! But now it's time to shift all that creative energy into fic, because deadlines are looming. Sprinto the Discord Writing Bot is helpful, but now that I'm in so many different servers with writing bots I'm getting a little analysis paralysis about WHICH server I should be sprinting in. I used to sprint with Sugar practically every night in the lead-up to Wei Wuxian's Birthday Exchange back in October, but I fell out of the habit almost immediately after crossing the finish line on that particular project, only to panic and get into gear again for the Les Mis Holiday Exchange in December.

Anybody else here creative in at least two different fields and have the experience of struggling to divert energy from one to the other? I keep wanting to jump back into a Clip Studio window instead of Google Docs.

*the exchange is actually called the Wei Wuxian's Birthday Exchange, because the first one was last Halloween, and I guess we're keeping the name even though this one is in April?

Comments

[hiddenramen]

Oh man, does Dreamwidth have image hosting? I've been using cubeupload tbh, which is what I used to have to do for like... forums. And when you start combing through some of the older communities and stuff, I see a lot of images with tinypic / image hosting placeholders, which made me assume everyone was just hosting off-site.

I'm super new here though, so like... that could be me being a dipshit lmao

[merelydovely]

It looks like it does! See hebethen's comment below. Never heard of cubeupload but I guess I used to just throw things on imgur. I had an inkling there was some sort of hosting but that there was a limit to it; I'm not sure what that actually is, if there is any.

[hiddenramen]

Oh, nice! That's really good to know, actually! Thanks for letting me know, and to hebethen for explaining it!

[narie]

No, there's no image hosting - you gotta hotlink from somewhere else. It was something you could pay for on lj, back in the days before we became the product and hosting all my cat pics was worthwhile to twitter because they could sell my data to advertisers...

[hebethen]

There is actually image hosting. For the DW image hosting, you can either go to the DW homepage, hover over the "Create" menu item, and then down to "Upload Images", or bookmark the direct link https://www.dreamwidth.org/file/new (which is where that goes).

I think it is a little easier from there, it's just that the link is a bit buried.

[merelydovely]

Oooooh, thanks so much. I'll try to gear up for an art post tomorrow.

[narie]

Oooh this is great to know, thank you! You have helped me unleash cat photos on the poor unsuspecting folk of DW... :D

[hebethen]

Welcome back! I've been lurking a lot during pandemic times and I've even stopped maintaining the fully private DW comms I was using for personal purposes, but it's always nice reading my flist as a daily ritual.

[slightlytookish]

Hey, I'm here from the MDZS/CQL friending meme and I wanted to say hello. I'm looking forward to seeing your art!

[merelydovely]

Hello hello! Finally got an art post up since you're interested: Twitter art requests roundup

[friendlydangernoodle]

I think maybe sometimes some creative energy is transferable but not all of it. Or there's some kind of conversion rate of satisfaction from using the wrong fuel or something.
Desire to Make A Thing out of wood does not translate well for me to Make A Thing in Blender. I might be able to make a thing out of clay when what I want to do is write, but I'll get bored of the clay way before I stop wanting to write.

[merelydovely]

Yeah, the actual amount that the medium itself fights you has to be taken into account. That's one of the things that can be strange about visual art vs. writing. On the one hand, typing whatever pops into my head is orders of magnitude easier than the precision needed to draw something, but at the same time it can be much easier to draw, say, a room layout or a two-person physical interaction than it is to painstakingly describe it in words.