Making it out of the mud

There are few things that are worse in the world of creativity than spinning your wheels and getting nowhere. That’s how I have been feeling off and on for the last several months while being bogged down with all this infernal remodeling work around my house, but with all of that now finally done(ish) I’ve set my sights…. and fell flat on my face.

Over the last couple weeks I have been struggling to make cohesive sense of an ever evolving concept and story but as of this morning I can happily say that the crisis has been averted (at least for now). This morning I had an almost 3 hour long voice chat with a half dozen folks on the development and creative team for Odyssey as well as a dozen or so total comprised of some fan eavesdroppers and idea posers (posers as in presented, not posers as in pretenders… but I think you get me). Lots of great ideas all around and we made it about 3/4 of the way through the 9 act outline of the story, fleshed out Auryen and the various plot developments and ultimately ended with a pretty fresh perspective on how it all pieces together.

I spent most of the rest of the day writing like mad to get through the entire outline and make sure that all the primary concepts and plot points made sense, the order of progression felt natural and the desired incidental side elements had a rational reason for being where there were. All in all, I feel like a cloud has lifted and I can suddenly see more clearly again. I intend on keeping this momentum with weekly planning meetings at least for the next week or two to finish fluffing out the story before we really go balls to the wall with the start of quest development and everything else that comes with this ridiculously complicated process.

I know that I’ve felt often like I have been limping along in this project but I really feel like once we get the foundation laid and the stage built, the rest will fall into place very quickly by comparison. So onward we merrily stumble.