about the universe forum commander Shop Now Commanders Circle
Product List FAQs home Links Contact Us

Sunday, April 26, 2009

What Work is Hardest

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

There are different kinds of work. There is physical work (like digging a trench or hauling a steel-beam from one place to another) and then there is thinking work (figuring out why the trench has to be here, needs to be so many inches or feet deep, perhaps so deep at one end and deeper at the other end, or how to make all those I-beams come together to create a desired structure), and then there is the more mundane creative work. This last is of course a great deal of what we do here at Amarillo Design Bureau, inc. I often find this to be the hardest thing to do. So much so that I find it far easier (well . . . when I was younger and still had a good set of legs and working back) to do the physical work. Thinking work is also easy (laying out a company defense with fields of fire and obstacles and . . . well lets just say that is relatively easy even when you are constantly making adjustments, i.e., we do not have enough concertina, one of the machineguns was destroyed and has not been replaced, Battalion is borrowing my third platoon, etc.). Creative work, however, is the most draining and the hardest (at least for me) to do. Does not stop SVC from demanding I do the little bits of it he needs me to do, and of course I have never written a major piece of fiction (little historical background pieces, yes, but nothing about "characters" since we both realize that is beyond my ken). But sitting down to try to create a background to a scenario, or a background for a ship class generally takes a lot out of me. I am far more comfortable with just looking up data and inserting it (you can look at the various Monster Articles and Campaign Updates as examples). Creating something is very, very, very hard work because it has to fit with the known background.

I try to do my best at it, what there is of it I do, but I would much rather be digging that trench, or doing laying out a perimeter defense.