It’s been 3 months since my last post – which was part of my (now defunct) daily creative journal. Shortly after that post, I fell horribly ill and then (after I was all better) I decided not to continue with the creative journal. Plainly, it was more of a chore and distraction (rather than fuel for my creativity). It turns out that I do a lot of creative things everyday anyway, and they require a lot of my time and attention.
(I think Ben was a little disappointed that I stopped, but I feel that it’s better to try something and then decide to stop rather than: never trying it, stubbornly continuing with it despite your dissatisfaction, or simply continuing without considering if you want to.)
Much like the last couple of years, the last few months have been full of challenges, opportunities, and work, work, work. Parenthood and Hungry Sky have been keeping me busy and very occupied (in my thoughts and feelings). I think constantly about parenting and business, and often discuss these topics at length with Heidi and Minh respectively.
Family
Amelia has grown from a baby into a toddler. She seems incredibly clever to me. (Although I’m not sure that her any of her actions are out of the ordinary for children her age.) At 16 months, she feeds herself, runs around, plays with toys (her favourite is the shape sorter), turns pages on books and happily yells out some of the words (Me: “Is Spot under the bed?”, Amelia: [lifts flap in book] “No!”).
It was particularly interesting seeing how her play with the shape sorter progressed. She quickly realised that the round shapes didn’t require any particular orientation in order to fit through the round holes. So she would tip the shapes out, immediately grab the two cylinders, pop them into the round holes, and then give herself a clap. A few weeks later, she had sorting all the shapes down to a fine art. She would grab the shapes in matching pairs with two hands so that she could put them in promptly one after the other. As Heidi would say: “Clever bunny.”
Business
The other day, Minh was surprised to see that we had sent our 50th invoice. I think it was for an app, or possibly to the Art Gallery. Either way, I suppose that it was a milestone of sorts… for it to be business as usual… if that makes sense. Writing quotes, undertaking work, sending invoices – it’s our day-to-day work, and (like Amelia with her shape sorting) we’re getting it down to a fine art (or at least a standard routine).
Maybe that’s why we had to make some changes. I always imagined that we could use contracting as a starting point (to bootstrap the business), rather than an end goal. Minh and I made some changes to our business partnership, which has resulted in 1/3 of our time (and 50% of my time) being allocated to developing products (rather than undertaking contracts). That’s the idea anyway. In reality, I’ve been working maybe 75% (and soon around 100%) on contracts by bringing forward contract days. The corollary is that I’ll likely be working on products for all of July. Woohoo!
In regards to speculative projects, we’ve been working on an indie printing business (for card games) and I’ve also working with a few others to put together a shared working space for Perth game developers (the Department for Being Awesome). There are a few other projects we have cooking, but I can’t say much about them yet unfortunately.
Other
It’s strange how when things change, it quickly becomes difficult to remember what they were like before. I remember not being a parent, but I can’t really summon how it felt to have even a day without interacting with Amelia. Likewise, there are many other aspects of my life that I’ve left behind and can barely remember. There are very few that I miss though.
I used to get terrible headaches well into my late twenties. These were often preceded by a sense of detachment (including loss of proprioception) and periods of intense deja vu (fairly disconcerting) but also absolute clarity (quite useful at times). Heidi called these experiences “Aura“, which seemed to fit the bill. I imagine she has some idea what she’s talking about, being a doctor and all. They used to upset me, but now I miss them. Odd how things work out. I’d even take the headaches to get them back.