Published on: Sat Jun 04 2016
Reading or writing things, eventually they progress to the end. Sooner or later things need to be published. Released out into the wild for other eyes to view and process. That's something which is part of developing a career, the process of letting things become mostly material for the consumption of others instead of pieces of work under active development. Usually I have a hard time letting works proceed out into the general world. The closer I come to finishing a piece of writing or code, perhaps a tutorial, the more the short falls become apparent to me. I want to grab the work back and hide it. To continue to adjust, examine, proofread and refine it before letting anyone else see it. But if I do this to much, nothing would make it to the light of day. I remember an old digital drawing I did ages ago. A flower garden with a fountain in it. The image itself has become lost to time, in the maze of digital files that are stored on my old machines. But the picture was not that good anyways. The main thing I remember is how often it was reworked. By the time the image was abandoned, it was so apparent that the constant reworking had taken place, the image was hopeless. Releasing it earlier would have been so much better for the art. It might have looked underfinished instead of over finished. An underfinished piece always holds promise to me. An overworked piece shows my own limits. Whatever it is being designed or built, it's good to learn the flow to progress from a starting point to a stopping point where others could then understand the work. That is why I am working harder to leave unfinished pieces exposed, and to build up a visual history of projects. Things done and left for time to process, even though they are most certainly far from perfect.