Buridan's Maker

There are times when being a Maker places one in the same hypothetical position of the donkey caught between two piles of hay, unable to decide which is closer.

You see a thing that looks cool and think about buying it. But then you realize that -- thanks to the skills and tools you've accumulated -- you could make your own. So you circle around that for a while.

Building it isn't a neutral proposition. Is owning the thing worth the time and resources you'd have to invest in building one? Perhaps not. So time to reconsider purchase. Well, since you've now re-valued how much it is actually worth it to own the thing, and you have to subtract the added value of increasing your skills and, of course, that it would be fun to build, maybe it isn't worth buying either.

No matter how long you chase this one around the circle, you still end up stuck between two piles of hay.



(Yeah, I want a hand drum. I have a decent bodhran and a cheap darbuka but what the piece I'm working on cries for is the rough-edged, meaty sound of bare hand on stretched hide.)



I also had the shortest crisis of confidence ever. I've been writing all day, finished the chapter and the draft now stands at 10,000 words. And I've reached that point of exhaustion where it all starts to blur and I can't even make sense of my own writing much less the actual data I'm trying to work with.

I hit a YouTube video about a conflict I'd never heard of (Celtic invasion of Greece in about 200 BC) and in the comments section, people are beating up the video and quoting Pausanius at each other and having ridiculously detailed arguments with single posts longer than any of what I'd thought were overly long historical discussions in mine. Face it, the stuff about who bridged what river is trivial.

But I forced myself into chapter planning for the "Just enjoying being a tourist" breather chapter, and hit another video over dinner to get some ideas, and here is a guy who is doing very nice camera work and seems quite personable but is on the Acropolis and keeps calling the big building they have there the "Pantheon." (Plus a bunch of other just-read-the-signs mistakes).

So am I confident? No. Am I in fact feeling overwhelmed by all that still faces me in the novel? You bet. But I'm still going.

(I've got a hell of a Spartacus going on with my dialog right now. In the big pissing contest, Athena Fox, Signor Cosimo Nardella, and Vash go into lecture mode with identical sentence structure and word choice. I don't even know, now, how I'm going to get everyone's voices distinct.)