Procrastinating like a boss
While I'm sitting here procrastinating starting on my Silm40 War of Wrath art, lemme share another amusing (well, I thought it was amusing) bit from Tolkien's biography.
Sooo he's in his 70s now and retired and unexpectedly wealthy and people are willing to publish pretty much anything with his name on it so his chances of having the Silmarillion printed are pretty good. That means he's got to get 50 years worth of early drafts and disjointed tales and vagueish outlines and experimental family trees, plus the characters he randomly introduced in The Lord of the Rings (like who is this Galadriel woman? NOBODY KNOWS SHE WAS JUST SUDDENLY THERE) in some kind of working order. Basically it's a shitload of work and he really wants to get a crack on it because it's his life's dream and he knows he's running out of time and he sits in his study/garage and...
plays game after game of Patience* and does no writing whatsoever.
That's so... relatable? I mean, I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this has, at some point, put off writing something - be it creative or academic or work-related (or all of the above, if you're lucky?) - and put it off in order to do something completely different. Be it playing round after round of Solitaire or Minesweeper or some more elaborate computer game, or just obsessively checking e-mails or social media. (That's another thing Tolkien apparently kept on doing, searching for some early draft and instead picking up some piece of fan mail and answering at length.) Right? We've all done that. You might be doing it right now, reading your f-list instead of doing whatever you should be doing.
But I love that detail not because I can connect to it on a personal level, but above all because it shows that, yet again, it's not Young People These Days and it's not Those Damn Smartphones And Computers. It's just people, perhaps creative people in particular but it might just be people in general. When they had no digital means of playing Solitaire, they used actual physical cards. Before cards, they probably used dice or sheep knuckles or tesserae or whatever. Cicero's shitload of letters to Atticus are probably the ancient Roman way of obsessively checking your e-mails. It's just human nature and maybe we should just accept that instead of beating ourselves up over it.
(I mean, the Silmarillion did get published eventually. Somehow. Well, four years after the author's death and only due to the heroic efforts of his youngest son but whatev.)
(FWIW, I did rework my fail!sketches from back in March and am now a bit more hopeful that I might actually be able to pull it off. So there. I've totally earned myself a round of procrastination. UPDATE DAMN YOU. :P)
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*Solitaire, for those of you outside Europe or younger than 25.
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Crossposted via Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there.
Sooo he's in his 70s now and retired and unexpectedly wealthy and people are willing to publish pretty much anything with his name on it so his chances of having the Silmarillion printed are pretty good. That means he's got to get 50 years worth of early drafts and disjointed tales and vagueish outlines and experimental family trees, plus the characters he randomly introduced in The Lord of the Rings (like who is this Galadriel woman? NOBODY KNOWS SHE WAS JUST SUDDENLY THERE) in some kind of working order. Basically it's a shitload of work and he really wants to get a crack on it because it's his life's dream and he knows he's running out of time and he sits in his study/garage and...
plays game after game of Patience* and does no writing whatsoever.
That's so... relatable? I mean, I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this has, at some point, put off writing something - be it creative or academic or work-related (or all of the above, if you're lucky?) - and put it off in order to do something completely different. Be it playing round after round of Solitaire or Minesweeper or some more elaborate computer game, or just obsessively checking e-mails or social media. (That's another thing Tolkien apparently kept on doing, searching for some early draft and instead picking up some piece of fan mail and answering at length.) Right? We've all done that. You might be doing it right now, reading your f-list instead of doing whatever you should be doing.
But I love that detail not because I can connect to it on a personal level, but above all because it shows that, yet again, it's not Young People These Days and it's not Those Damn Smartphones And Computers. It's just people, perhaps creative people in particular but it might just be people in general. When they had no digital means of playing Solitaire, they used actual physical cards. Before cards, they probably used dice or sheep knuckles or tesserae or whatever. Cicero's shitload of letters to Atticus are probably the ancient Roman way of obsessively checking your e-mails. It's just human nature and maybe we should just accept that instead of beating ourselves up over it.
(I mean, the Silmarillion did get published eventually. Somehow. Well, four years after the author's death and only due to the heroic efforts of his youngest son but whatev.)
(FWIW, I did rework my fail!sketches from back in March and am now a bit more hopeful that I might actually be able to pull it off. So there. I've totally earned myself a round of procrastination. UPDATE DAMN YOU. :P)
---
*Solitaire, for those of you outside Europe or younger than 25.
- - -
Crossposted via Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment here or there.