My 1-year blogging anniversary is fast-approaching…it’s September 12!

It’s remarkably convenient that this event coincides with the crazy new business plan that just popped into my head a couple nights ago: a plan that may integrate everything I’ve done my entire life under one umbrella concept. At least, that’s what it feels like. I’m probably just going insane from carb-withdrawal (yep, I’m doing that low-carb thing…)

I’m going to write this in a few parts:

1. Realizations that led me to the New Direction.
2. The New Direction, Itself!
3. The New Practice, and how it Affects the Web Site

Part I is a long and introspective tale…beware! Parts II and III will follow in the days to come…

The Core Interests

Nothing I’ve done up, career-wise, has really felt satisfactory. I have sought a “sense of calling” without success for many years. However, I did know that at the very heart of things were these two bits of my personality:

• I like to see people have that eureka moment when the realize that YES, they can DO that thing that they’re PASSIONATE about! I feel a sense of real accomplishment when I can do that. This is what drives my learning and teaching; I really enjoy it, and I’m good at it. I like empowerment. It is a primal feeling to me.

• I have always been drawn to video games and computer graphics, and from that base my interests have spread into art, design, production scheduling, scriptwriting, and so forth. I had assumed that this was just a natural extension from my desire to create excellent games, but the impulse to actually make them has never materialized. The authorship drive just wasn’t there.

Lacking the internal impulse to create, I tried to link these two things together by becoming a customer-oriented new media developer, specializing in educational media. This I have been doing for about two years with the Showing Evidence project, which allowed me to build a pretty cool foundation for doing Flash-based Rich Internet Applications. Not a bad start, but despite the sense of accomplishment it didn’t feel quite right as a “calling”. Then about a month ago, I realized that video games and the production methodologies for creating them weren’t the point at all. The point is telling stories. And not only that, but it’s not the telling that I am interested in, but in the experience of listening and learning from them. In other words, video games are actually part of the empowerment impulse! So now I know this: I want to create empowering situations and scenarios! Why? I just like doing it! I can finally see and accept that. This is a huge insight. ###Obstacles to Fulfillment## Now, here are other aspects of my personality that have been obstacles to my sense of success:

• Though I can do graphic design and other artsy-creative things pretty well, I find it incredibly draining unless I’m working with another competent creative partner. Then it becomes fun and…empowering! My good friend Bevan was the person who kept things fun and awesome, until his untimely passing in 2003.

• I have a low tolerance for bad organizations, which are born from poor leadership, which leads to mediocrity. I value independence over security, and thus I tend to leave those situations. However, I don’t have the resources that I might have had at a larger company, and I haven’t “put in my dues” either. There’s something to be said for sticking around for a long time and earning the opportunity to do something cool, but I’m too impatient to wait.

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p>It became of tantamount importance to me to find another creative partner. Although I have chosen to freelance, this doesn’t mean I want to work as a hermit. I like people! So I empowered myself by creating my own local creative network out of a few emails and a simple commitment to meet face-to-face regularly. I’m still amazed at how well it works. So now I have a number of creative people I can talk to and meet on a regular basis, and it is awesome in more ways than I could have imagined. Even more importantly, this got me thinking that yes, I could actually build my own organization, instead of holding someone else’s together.

It was, for me, a novel idea. But what kind of organization? I still had no idea.

Finding New Resources

The final realization came when I conducted that Actionscript 2.0 “bootcamp for one”, instilling (hopefully) a good foundation for further understanding. The material ended up covering more than programming, which reminded me of my old dream to start my own design school someday. I never considered it seriously until I ran the bootcamp, and enjoyed it immensely. It is something I believe I can do well, especially with practice. But to do that, I would need to teach or maybe get some more interns.

Hmm, couldn’t I use interns to make my own things? Like games? Or whatever? The ability to teach new media production, I realized, was actually a currency I could barter. But what do MAKE? What to DO? I could almost taste it.

More tomorrow later when I have some time!