Storytellersunplugged

Like most folks, I’m inherently lazy on some level. When there’s something I should be doing, I’d often rather be playing games, running around with my kids, or catching up with my wife. I’d be great at being independently wealthy.

Of course, I’m not, and I’m a full-time writer/game designer, so I drag myself to the keyboard every day to set my fingers dancing across it to create something new. Most of the time, I don’t have to drag too hard. After all, I get to set in a comfortable chair and make things up. It beats digging ditches any day.

At this point in my career, I occasionally have people ask me to pitch them something, to send them some ideas about projects we might tackle together. Often I want to do these things. The idea of working on them feeds my demons, and I know they could be lots of good-paying fun. But many times I never get around to doing it. There are just too many other things to do, professionally or otherwise.

Am I being lazy? That’s what the sinister voices in the bad of my head whisper. But the boisterous, fun-loving voices do their beer-drinking best to shout them down.

Nothing focuses my mind like a deadline though. It changes the parameters from having something I should do to something I must do.

Without deadlines, my gigs all seem like distant beasts, hazy outlines heaving up out of the horizon as the road rolls in their direction. They won’t become sharp-toothed monsters I must slay until they get closer. Until then, there’s danger I might nod off at the wheel.

I normally deal with this by outfitting my rig with atomic batteries to power and turbines to speed. I race toward those deadlines as fast as I can, then demolish them, all the while hunting for bigger, richer targets on my radar. As a writer, it makes me something of an adrenaline junkie, but that’s the way I like it.

It doesn’t leave me much time for those ephemeral pitches, but it keeps me sharp and active. Otherwise, I just get lazy—truly lazy—and along that slow and easy road lies madness.