I was having a little bit of trouble motivating myself this morning. Not that I didn’t want to work, but I found myself wondering why I was spending effort on writing words that are unlikely to ever earn significant quantities of money. That voice doesn’t speak up when I’m writing blog posts or private journal entries. It seems to understand that the value of those words is in sorting my brain…or it has just given up arguing since I keep doing that writing anyway. But when I pick up words with the intent of publishing them via paths other than tossing them on the internet for free, the thoughts begin. The particular refrain this time around is that I really should be focusing on the work which will assist in my goals of paying down debt as fast as possible.
I have counter arguments of course. I know there is value in creative work even if the only one changed by it is me. I know that the people I’ve told about Herding Wild Horses have expressed interest in seeing it complete. I know that I can’t always tell what will grow from the planting of seeds that happens when I write outside of my comfort zones.
And I find myself thinking of a line that appeared in today’s Schlock Mercenary comic:
“If you look close enough at the present, you can find loose bits of the future just laying around.”
And I think of a thing I saw on the internet recently which spoke of how the butterfly effect is always cited in time travel stories, but that somehow people neglect to realize that this means we are all the butterfly. Every small change we make has the chance to dramatically affect the world we will eventually be carried into via the passage of time.
So the answer becomes: I write these things because any future that contains my words published and read, begins with a today where I write those words without any guarantee that they’ll go anywhere.