{"id":536,"date":"2016-12-15T00:33:16","date_gmt":"2016-12-15T00:33:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/idea-debt\/"},"modified":"2023-02-23T04:26:08","modified_gmt":"2023-02-23T04:26:08","slug":"idea-debt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/idea-debt\/","title":{"rendered":"Idea Debt"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first read about the concept of \u201cidea debt\u201d in a blog post by Jessica Abel<\/a> that Leighton sent me some indeterminate amount of time ago. Basically, an idea debt is that project you want to do but you\u2019re not working on. Abel\u2019s advice is to throw away that idea debt because all the time you spend thinking about it is robbing you of time that could be spent on the projects that will actually get done. I want to agree with the premise of the post, but there\u2019s a lot of idea debt I can\u2019t throw away.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Part of the problem is that I don\u2019t see most of my idea debt as the kind of debt Jessica is talking about. She\u2019s seems to be talking mostly about ideas that are never going to happen. I know a lot of people with that kind of idea debt, and Leighton and I have published something like 50 game books over the years while they\u2019ve been making vague references to \u201cworking on my book\/screenplay\/Jello sculpture of Millard Fillmore.\u201d Sure I\u2019ve got some ideas for big projects that will never happen (Hobomancer<\/a> HBO series), but I don\u2019t spend much time thinking of them. The Hex crew and I may occasionally spend more time than is healthy discussing our impossible and completely theoretical ideas at a con or something, but it\u2019s during the non-working or boring dealer\u2019s room hours where if we weren\u2019t trying to come up with a name for the W. Earl Brown stinkomancer character (because the W. Earl Brown was born to play a hobomancer), we\u2019d be complaining about Zak Snyder movies or geeking out over movies that Zak Snyder didn\u2019t make or talking about something equally non-productive. It\u2019s more \u201cidea fuck, marry, kill\u201d \u00a0than idea debt.<\/p>\n

The things that are never going to happen don’t interfere with my actual projects, since I know they\u2019re never going to happen so I don\u2019t spend much time thinking about them except when me and Leighton and Carter and Josh and Ian and Jeff and whoever else happens to be there are shooting crazy ideas at one another in a con booth or hotel room because we don\u2019t have anything better to do. Occasionally we stumble upon a viable idea; it\u2019s how we came up with Hobomancer, Laser Ponies<\/a>, and probably some other products I\u2019m forgetting. We come up with a lot of dumb shit that\u2019s never going to happen, but we also sometimes come up with some GREAT dumb shit that we actually publish.<\/p>\n

My problem is distinguishing between idea debt and what might be called \u201cidea inventory.\u201d Once an idea still seems like a good one after a night\u2019s sleep (the first viability test for any idea), I have a tendency to start what Jessica calls a \u201cbook of lore,\u201d or in my case a Google doc of lore. Usually these start out as a bunch of brainstorming ideas and get added to for a few weeks while the idea is still fresh. After that, a few things can happen. Sometimes the idea hits critical mass and turns into a product. Sometimes it just sits there collecting dust once the initial magic is gone. A few inspire random, short spurts of creativity every now and then and then either turn into products or go back to collecting dust. While the last category seems like idea debt, I have a hard time thinking of it that way because it\u2019s not like I\u2019m obsessing over them when I should be working on something else. I occasionally have new ideas, add them to the \u201cbook of lore,\u201d and go back to whatever I was doing. They’re not an excuse I use to pretend I’m working on something real when I’m really not. Also, for the most part the ones that I keep coming back to eventually turn into things that people can give me money for, which wouldn\u2019t happen if I wrote them off just because I\u2019m not ready to finish them as soon as I think of them. Qerth<\/a>, Rasslin\u2019<\/a>, and several other things (including my current project, Cinemecanix<\/a>, which started life as QAGS 3rd Edition idea debt) were idea debt for years before they became actual products. Maybe there\u2019s good idea debt and bad idea debt, just like with financial debt. I don\u2019t know, I\u2019ve never formally studied idea economics.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

You can invest in my idea debt at Patreon<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first read about the concept of \u201cidea debt\u201d in a blog post by Jessica Abel that Leighton sent me some indeterminate amount of time ago. Basically, an idea debt is that project you want to do but you\u2019re not working on. Abel\u2019s advice is to throw away that idea debt because all the time…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2000],"tags":[43,47,74,872,1532,1739,1749,1791,1793,1939],"class_list":["post-536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-design-ramblings","tag-qags","tag-rpg","tag-qerth","tag-hobomancer","tag-ideas","tag-cinemechanix","tag-writing","tag-creativity","tag-idea-debt","tag-rasslin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3323,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536\/revisions\/3323"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}