Hard Work Is Its Own Reward, Or So They Told Me

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2020-07-14 08:00:00-04:00 No comments

Not a great week or so, to be honest. Much emotional rollercoastering, much of it project related. And not in the ways you might think.

I mentioned the blogging software rewrite earlier, which is both exhilarating and depressing at the same time. A blast because It Is Wonderful To Create (cf.: Kurosawa), but a downer because I look at code I wrote a year ago and I want to John DeLorean myself back to the guy I once was and hit him over the head with his keyboard. Just some horrible, overengineered stuff in there. I'm revamping it with the burn-it-all-down zeal of a ten-year-old who's been given permission to trim the hedges with a buzzsaw.

This in turn sparked another downer mood: the personal wiki app I've been writing, Folio, took a stall because of it, and I'm wildly unthrilled about that. So I kicked myself in the heiney the other night and tried to plow back into Folio all the stuff I'd been pouring into the blog-app rewrite. It actually turned out to be a good idea: the two things share a lot of common ground, so there was more cross-support than I first grokked.

But all this ... all this took time away from Subject Number One, the books the books the books. Well, sort of: Folio is a Book Project, and the blog software is sorta-kind a Book Project, because it helps me get the word out. But at the end of the day, the books are the real Book Projects.

I sort of have an excuse right now for not working on anything. Fall Of The Hammer is in final edits, and the next project Unmortal is under heavy wraps — there's an outline, and a bunch of Folio-organized research material to go with it, but not enough water in the pool yet for me to dive in and start swimming. And not for a while yet, either; at least not before Hammer is out and the Infinimata label is fully launched with that new title.

One disadvantage of being so self-guided, I think, is it becomes far easier to feel like a failure. Your goals are entirely self-determined, and so it becomes unthinkingly easy to shift them, and to feel like you have achieved nothing when in fact you've been working your fingers right off. I sometimes wonder if this is what poor Yukio Mishima was thinking about when he said, in the year he ended his own life, how astounded he was by its emptiness, how he felt he had barely lived. No goal of his own was ever really meant to be achieved; they were there just to spur him on until he fell over. That's not someone I want to be when I grow up. Especially not the whole suicide-by-comrade-after-failed-show-coup thing.