I'm sure that on one of those Belbin classification schemes I rank very low on the completer-finisher score and so i continue to fiddle with all of my creative projects and get none of them out of the door.
But then maybe the fiddling is part of the fun.
For the record, here is where the various projects are all at.
1. Game. "Hand to Hand Combat " was/is making a good card/board game after a bit of play testing but has now morphed into the "Battle Book" concept. Having made a dummy and shown it to a few people including the splendid Christopher Lloyd of Wall Book (soon-to-be-had) fame. Christopher's take is that it is about "re-connecting children with history" and i find that quite inspiring.
Apart from this being a publishing concept in its own right, there may also be a whole business concept here of sticking existing games together with history books. There are loads of games out there (i had a really good time playing Battle Line with the boys on holiday) that perhaps could be licenced and mashed up i.e. I don't have to invent a whole new set of (good) games to make the concept work . Boardgamegeek is a great resource here.
I think I am as much excited about the business idea as the book/game ideas here and so the next steps are to bounce this thought off people.
2. Book. After getting nowhere with my first salvo for "The Mathematics of Creativity" aimed at 7 publishing agents i have been having a re-think. Firstly, a friend of a friend has been giving me a bit of coaching on this one and i can now see how inadequate my first submission was. To do this properly I will need to raise my game.
While in Cambodia, Charlotte came up with a new title "The Creative Accountant" which i rather like. The sub-head would be something like "10 numerical tricks to boost your personal creativity" or something.
I also bumped into the publisher (via Christopher Lloyd again) of a book i had read and really liked : Alex's Adventures in Number Land. So one route is to send him my revised proposal.
A new chapter has also occurred to me on how creative people and accountants see change when drawn as graphs. So some more content is also a possibility.
Finally I got an encouraging note from Charles Frith on this blog that reminded me that some people would find the content interesting/valuable.
Next step : read the "how to get published" book and write a quality submission.
3. Website. The "100 thinking boxes" concept would definitely work best (first?) as a web site. The internal links and the external links are a keep part of the value.
I think the value of this thing is hard to figure out but i just want to make it.
Maybe I just need to take the time to set up a website and start putting at least a basic page up for each "thinking box" so i can start to put the links in. Perhaps its a "journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step" thing.
I also can't help thinking that this should be an open source wiki kind of thing but then again I want to make it mine (all mine).
Next step : put up a web site?
4. Art Work. Inspired by "Ideas from Fire to Freud" book the thousand most important ideas (prior to 1900) need to be mapped out on one (long) page. Again Christopher Lloyd has shown the way with his Wall Book.
The content is there (contained in the book ) and initial tests have shown that it is possible. I also have found a possible collaborator in the States who is into this sort of thing and makes very good looking art works out of them (not my skill). The challenge (again) is the hard graft of mapping the 1000 ideas out.
I was struck by the value of showing the roots of our ideas by reading Tom Holland's "Persian Fire" while on holiday. Just one small example : Zorastrianism was the Persian's religion and contains (invented?) the key idea of "good vs evil" that pops up in many religions since then. So there is an irony that George Bush, with his Christian informed view of "The Axis of Evil" is putting the Iranians in the "bad" camp when they are the descendants of the Persians who very much saw the Greeks (and Athens in particular) as a terrorist state who represented "the lie" what with all that Democracy stuff. Go figure...
Perhaps I should crowd source this? Although the value to me personally is to try to understand all 1000 ideas and how they connnect (so I can impress my Iranian chums?).
Next step : punt the idea out to my other colleagues with mild-asperger's snydrome (aka the plannersphere) and see if others want to play?
However, work beckons and as that is the Alpha to my Beta, this will have to do for now.