Ask anybody creative, and they'll probably have at least half a dozen projects they'd like to be working on, they'd like to have more time and space to develop and produce. A lot of times they won't have had time to work on anything at all creative for a long while. I'm absolutely talking about myself here, too. I think it tends to be pretty true across creative fields, tho, and especially for personal projects. Anymore, all of my projects are personal. Some I have monetized to small degrees. Others are more along the lines of curiosities, and things I may never be qualified to do very well, but they intrigue me enough that I can't help but wonder.

I generally eschew lists of most to least important, or best to worst. Too simplified, not enough context, and with enough context, the reasons become super subjective. So let's start with the obvious project: this one! This little blog. And, as it has been deployed and all the links work, it's pretty fidgetin' finished. But of course it also isn't nearly finished to where I'd like it to be. I would like it be a bit of an experimental playground, and maybe someday have it behave more like a proper blog on the backend side. And of course it isn't finished in that a blog begs to be updated regularly.

Next up: my little public-domain publishing company. I know, I'm being non-specific about all the stuff, including my name so far, but hey, right now nobody knows this exists. That company is the other website I've been building alongside this one, since Wordpress imploded. Like a blog, a publishing company needs to be on the move: constantly needs more books published. I've designed and published seven books so far, but that's in the past several years... I would love to get into a rhythm where I could put one out every month, or fortnightly. It's possible, but I'm a perfectionist and I agonize over the littlest, stupidest stuff. I've got two or three books 95% done, that have been done for at least a year or more, but you know, life happens, and the website implodes, and... excuses! All just excuses, damnit.

Let's see, maybe in order of most actively being worked on. Or let's go the opposite route: the project that I have given up, at least for the foreseeable future. I'd put a lot of thought into starting my own online used-book store. I've collected multiple copies of books over the years with the idea of someday offering them on such a site. I have the domain name. I mostly figured out Shopify. But! That's all on the back-burner. It's a project that would involve more time and physical materials, and may not actually be very profitable at all for a long time. That was my career for about a decade, so I know what I'm doing, but I also know that it would be a lot of work. So that's that.

Illustration! My wife and I want to do a picture book about our fancy fluffy white cat. She has the concept for it, we've been casually chatting about it for a year or two, but yeah: finding the time to actually storyboard it, write it out, hasn't happened yet. I'd love to write some simple stories and illustrate my own stories, too. It seems like it could be so much fun. Then again, I've never really finished any story I've started, and damn am I out or practice with my drawing capabilities. That's the main takeaway from this one: I want to draw more, and get better.

A step beyond writing straight-up stories, I have a fascination with old-fashioned text adventures. And technically, they don't have to be complicated very much at all! It can be a Choose Your Own Adventure type, or it could be parser-based and actually take commands from the reader. But you don't need to be parser-based, and you don't need variables, just basic choices. But you need a story to make choices in to begin with! It's hard to believe, but indie text adventures are very popular, even in 2024. Programs like Twine, or Inky are great to get started quickly, and appear to be pretty easy to learn, so far as I've delved into them.

Audiobook narration! Again, it just seems like fun, and like my publishing company, I could focus on public domain books to narrate. But which ones. Which ones suit my middle-of-the-road American male voice without accent range... non-fiction, maybe. Sometimes I'll check Amazon's audiobook program where you can sign in as a potential narrator and see all the little projects authors and publishers have made available. Dry technical manuals, nauseating self help booklets, cringy romance/erotica novellas (or long continuing series). Nothing super appealing, and nothing that would pay much regardless if you get paid upfront or for some reason think the audiobook will actually sell so you go for the royalty-share option: if the audiobook would start to sell, it would have to sell super well before you as a narrator see much of anything, and it'll be a few dollars here and there over years. As an alternative, I've thought about posting videos to YouTube or TikTok doing readings, with the idea that it would be more of a performance recorded live. The unpolishedness would be a feature.

What else? Well, I mean, writing is certainly something I want to do more of. And not just this sort of writing, this journaling/blogging, stream-of-consciousness stuff. I do want to write some simple but interesting stories, and illustrate them. And not just simply writing, either. I'd love to be able to work on my handwriting, dammit! I've purchased some Lamy calligraphy pens and I love them... until the ink dries somewhere/somehow in the nib and for the life of me I have the hardest time fixing nibs in these situations. While they work, they're a dream. So they feel amazing to write with, I just want some handwriting to match how it feels to write! Connected with this is something I have explored in the past, but may not explore much in the future: font designing. Typography is so freakin' cool. And so goddam nitpicky. I'm not quite sure I can explain why I love letterforms so much. Maybe that it seems so constrained an art form, but in practice is just as unlimited as any other art? (I currently have somewhere around 10,000 fonts on my computer. I will probably never use 9,900 of them.)

Bookbinding! I have ideas to do versions of some of my favorite books, and bind them by hand. I do have some experience with this. Gold tooling and suchlike I do not have experience with, and is merely one example of how I would love to be able to up my bookbinding game someday.

On to subjects I am intensely curious about but am never likely to ever actually produce anything myself. Pixel art, and retro style pixel games. I would never want to do anything too complex, but let's face it, I'm probably not going to do even the simplest little thing. I do love watching Youtube videos on game theory, the history of video games, how they work; I mean, it's an even younger art form than film, and 100 years of film history is still peanuts to the history of most art forms. So computer games have a huge history to look forward to, and that's fascinating.

In a very similar way I'm fascinated by Dungeons & Dragons. My only experience is a few months of meeting up weekly online with a group of people I went to a coding bootcamp with, and the GM had never been a GM before, and myself and another person had zero experience with any of it, a couple people were very familiar,... it just fell apart. One week we literally just ceased communicating and that was that. It was unfortunate; no hard feelings, just awkward ones. But! I know hundreds of thousands of people adore D&D-type role playing games, and I love that for them. I love it for the imaginative nature of it, and not for the volumes of rules and technical details. Board games in general, tho, too. I own a couple of amazing modern board games, but I know that we're kind of living in a renaissance of the tabletop board game: there's such a wide variety in difficulty, length, amount of players, aesthetic, story subject. Hell, these I'd just like to have the time and funds to get and try out for myself.

I often think of the idea of the antilibrary, as coined by Nassim Taleb.

The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

I originally knew of the concept from Umberto Eco, who wrote:

It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

John Waters seems to have put it most succinctly, however:

Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

and that's how I look at the things I'm fascinated by; my curiosities. I don't think I've mastered anything yet, and I suppose I might be considered a jack of many of them, and merely an interested bystander or audience member of the others. I enjoy these things, and that's enough.