What is it that inspires my muse to action?

Humble boredom, perhaps. City of Heroes is largely on hold in my mind until Issue 14 is released in the immediate mysterious future. Day or month, it's hard to guess. Champions Online isn't coming to my rescue. I don't want to play anything else. Therefore, that great motivator Boredom was free to begin its assault.

I invested 5 hours invested in BYOND development today after a break of nearly 3 months. With any luck, I'll have something to show for it. However, I don't want to tip my hand and mention anything about what I'm making, because it has a mysterious effect of completely destroying my motivation to do it.

My muse is an odd beast in that inspiring expectations in others simply prevents it from working. Perhaps it is as I read in The Now Habit not too long ago - perhaps raising the stakes too high is a great cause of procrastination. The analogy used is walking across a diving board: easy enough to do when it's on the floor, but quite difficult when that same diving board is suspended 500 feet in the air between two buildings.

I think I envy the kids because their inner critics are much less harsh. Consequently, they can forge ahead and be productive without doubts gnawing away at their progress. It is only through suspension of my inner critic - with an understanding that the greatest of palaces can only be assembled one board at a time - that I find myself able to forge ahead now.

I'm pretty rusty after a protracted time away from Dream Maker, but I'm finding that quite a bit of my previous experience stuck. About the only thing I really didn't learn to do before was manipulate the loading and saving of files, and that's not something I really need to worry about yet (though the earlier the better).