Scatterbrained Efficiency

On ADHD, Creative Explosions, and staying in the Wack.

This is not self-help. It's survival.

My 7th grade math teacher, during a parent conference, suggested to my parents that we discuss medicating me for attention deficit issues with our doctor. That didn't go over well. I'm proud to say that, despite my parents' faults, I have never taken Adderall.

Would it have helped me in school? Most definitely, especially with the way modern education works (Sit down, shut up, take notes, no physical activity, no unapproved viewpoints). But I have always had this intuitive thought that if I were ever medicated for hyperactivity or attention deficit, my imagination would have been corrupted. Despite my current low volume of work, I believe my imagination to not only be an integral part of myself, but the most valuable gift God has given me, apart from my small, but growing family.

Gifts are a hard thing to quantify, especially if the receiver of the gift knows the Giver to be Divine. The Divine by His nature cannot be quantified, and thus neither can the gift. How many of us, from storytellers to Spenglerians, have had thoughts drift away due to inaction, never completed due to distraction, and never promoted due to trepidation. God's gift of creative expression is limitless. It is we that limit it.

God has given the talent. We, the servants, must not bury it. Whether out of fear, laziness, or other excuses, we must make that talent grow. So thus, we take our gifts along with our faults and try to reconcile the two. I know I've basically described human existence, but there is more to it.

I was plotting, worldbuilding, even having full dialogues between four or five characters with myself on walks. Yet no prose was written. Nothing was published. Soon readers will be introduced to my fantasy world. A world I conceived of and sub-created over a decade ago. Nothing from it has ever been formally published. Not in a contest and not on Substack. Part of this is fear, but the other part is that tendency that my 7th grade teacher picked up on. I, like many creatives, am all over the place.

I have, in the past three months, put some amount of work into:

Three fantasy works; Five science-fiction works; Two original tabletop RPG systems; Five German-style boardgames; Something between ten and fifteen reflection essays; And one alternate history timeline.

I'm not bragging. This is bad. It's too much. Obviously it's too much. This is not impressive. This is the reason why I have to give myself deadlines for uploading on Substack (and why I failed on the last story by a few days). Stuff has to go, especially now that I have people who are subscribed to me (shout out to all ten of you). Making Realms Untold was me burning the ships in my mind. Even behind a pen name, I'm out there. People I have never met have read a vignette of Concrete Sunrise. Despite the low numbers, it is still surreal. And slightly mortifying. So I need and system where I can keep my imagination going, while keeping the hyperactivity in check.

After January twentieth, the theme for the year dropped:

"You can just do things."

Simple, effective, applicable to national politics, personal fitness, fiction writing, and everything in between. You don't need permission to do what something inside of you is urging you to do. You don't need to follow someone else's system that they claim will work (for a subscription fee of course). You definitely don't need to operate within your perception of established rules and guidelines. I was afraid I was wasting God's time by writing and not publishing. I was afraid I was wasting God's gift by not completing projects. I was sure that no publisher would ever sign off on anything I wrote.

I just did what I felt compelled to do and the inhibitions and misconceptions disappeared.

Ten subscribers. Ha! I didn't think there'd be any!

The system I adopted for myself is something I call Creative Explosion. I have all these open projects. I force myself to narrow down to between three and five. When the opportunity arises during the day for me to work on them, I force myself to start. If I find the fantasy story to be a slog, I move onto Concrete Sunrise. Once that well dries, I move to the tabletop game. After crunching some number tables or writing abilities or getting interrupted, I'll swing over to my journal or some fitness reflections. Then I'm back again at the fantasy story, and it seems fresh.

I get in a groove, what my wife calls the 'wack'. "If it's wacky, but it works, then it's good. Get in the wack."

It is wacky, but it's worked better than anything else I've done.

There are drawbacks. A project I care deeply about may go untouched for weeks because I just cannot get said project in the wack. And it just has to be that way for now. I'm not Stephen King (thank God). I cannot get eight thousand words a day on a single work that will be gobbled up my millions of readers. If I get over eight hundred, it was a great day. Those words may be spread across five projects, but if I focus on one, work will slow to a crawl and everything else will grind to a halt.

So there's a little informal peep inside George Dismas. I hope you all gain something positive out of this that can be applied to your own lives. Optimism abounds, despite the hindrances of the modern world. God bless you. Stay in the wack.