Boom and Bust Cycles

So I mentioned yesterday on Twitter the boom and bust cycles, and it seemed to be a common thing among other folks that were commenting.  Basically, I find that with what I call "creative productivity" I go through dramatic swings of doing absolutely nothing at all to cramming and crunching ridiculous amounts of stuff in a short window.

This has gone on for years.  With music stuff I would go for months stagnating and maybe not playing and then write ten songs all of a sudden.  My poems would drop off the planet for a year or more, and then I would write fifteen in a month.  And I could get excited about writing novels for NaNoWriMo every November, but that excitement faded through the rest of the year.

This year, on the other hand, has been quite an overall shift towards doing more stuff on a more consistent basis.  As I'm in a "boom" cycle right now, I figured that must be it, but then I realize that this boom has been substantially longer than normal, and looks like it might continue for a little while yet.  That said, I figured I might try to analyze exactly why this is going on and try to isolate some "success factors" that I could leverage to keep trucking down the tracks.  So here are some interesting things about this particular "creativity boom:"

• Better schedule- I think this is the most significant driver here.  I am, by and large, a creature of habit, and it took several weeks of doing the same things to develop those habits, but I have set aside certain days to "do certain things" - so Mondays- I do beer reviews, Tuesdays-write poems, and Wednesdays-drop something in the writing blog.  The other days are free to do as I like, but having days where I want to have a set item come out has encouraged me to schedule content into the future, plan around things I want to write, and overall be more organized with it all.
• Better goals - I have set some goals for the year - namely to finish the draft of White Rock which I am ever so inching closer to, and I have some other goals with relation to poems, which always interest me, but seem to drop off the radar.  However, while I missed some interim goals on the way, I have built in flexibility to adjust those goals and still make them meaningful for the year.  At the same token, I am constantly shaming myself by missing the initial goal and working towards "making up for it" which drives me to get stuff finished.
• Better tracking - It all started with a calendar that I have sitting on my desk.  I would casually check off days in the calendar where I had written a blog post or where I had one scheduled, and I started to see patterns.  Then I started to see that I was producing a good bit of stuff, which, of course, made me feel slightly accomplished, which, in turn, made me put out even more stuff.  All of this resulted in my fun "decide to put out a post every day for August" project, but helped me visualize and trace accomplishment along the way.
• That je ne sais quoi - There's something else driving me as well, perhaps it is better inspiration, perhaps changes in my personal life, perhaps my newfound Twitter addiction and the tons of people that I find on there that are writers and authors and agents and publishers.  One or another, there's something floating around that makes me want to write stuff.  And feel bad when I am not writing stuff.  So maybe that's it.  The "I don't know what" factor.

Regardless, it has and will continue to be an interesting year of writing junk.  And there's more to come, of course.  In a couple of weeks on here I already have a post scheduled about how to start and finish projects which I seem to be heading towards more and more lately, and a discussion about tracking submissions of written material based on a poetry submission discussion yesterday (a day in which I also sent out 10 unpublished poems for consideration by various reviews and publications).  And then right around the corner, I am sure there will be a ton of NaNoWriMo planning and talk (is it too early for that?  Nah.).

So onward and upward, with the strange boom cycle enthusiasm that I am even experiencing when writing this post.  What the heck?