I want to live my life embracing positive productivity.
For many years, I’ve spent time oscillating between overworking myself, total dead periods, and rapid energy spent in random useless directions. Not just in my writing, but in so many different creative areas or skill paths. That’s toxic productivity. No matter how much I do in toxic productivity, it never feels satisfying, never feels like I accomplished enough or accomplished the right tings.
But, finally, I have had some great experiences embracing positive productivity. Experiences that made me realize just how much better it can be.
My problem for many years has been my terrible attention span and generally poor time management–I’ll overload myself on tasks I didn’t think all the way through, with huge time committments that cut into each other. I’ll never have enough time to finish it all, and prioritizing the actually important stuff falls by the wayside as I go off working too hard on stuff that doesn’t matter.
That’s how I ended up making that 100-chapter Bowsette fanfic. Sure, it was really tremendously popular, but it took away hundreds of hours I could have spent on my other existing projects, especially my original stories. Faced with that choice again, though, I’m sure I’d still take it… Even if it didn’t matter, didn’t earn me a cent, it was a blast to make.
This isn’t a post to bemoan failures or mistakes. It’s a post to think about embracing positive productivity. I want to know WHY I wrote that 100-chapter Bowsette fanfic, and WHY it felt so great making it.
I’ve watched Look Back in theaters six times since July 2024. It’s quickly become one of my all-time favorite movies, and if you have seen it, you’ll know exactly why.
My very first review captures exactly how I felt walking out of the theater the first time. For such a sad, emotional movie, somehow I felt only joy.
Isn’t it beautiful, making art with your friends? Impressing them with clever writing, or shocking them with long-secret plot twists, or puzzling them with off-the-wall ideas?
My idea of a good time is taking a road trip by myself for 2 hours and talking to a friend on the phone about their WIP novel. One of the highlights of my high school life was staying up to 6 AM powering through a round-robin collaborative fake children’s story. Nothing’s ever given me more pep in my step than waking up in the morning to a newly finished commission from one of my artist friends.
Look Back is all those things. It’s all about the WHY.
I’m thinking about this topic more than ever thanks to finally releasing my first-ever video game, Love is in the Airship. It wasn’t my dream project; it was intended as a small first-time project for my studio Yuri Kissaten that could be made quickly and released so we could make all those first-time mistakes with little pressure.
Obviously, of course, the project ballooned into a full-ass game that took six months to release, but that’s par for the course around here!
The project was filled with failures, and I consider that ballooning one of those failures. I kept spiraling out into different tangents that expanded the scope, or spending extended periods focusing on totally different projects unrelated to Yuri Kissaten. The game lacks polish in some areas and just BARELY made it out a day late because we didn’t finish a fully playable build in time to submit to Steam.
Yet, the final product is pretty damn good. It succeeded marvelously as that low-pressure first project, and more than that it’s found some fans already. It’s even been streamed a few times!
My brain usually only wants to focus on the mistakes I made, but actually… This time I just think about how awesome the project went.
The ballooning scope and project delays were annoying, but I had so much fun writing it. It only increased in scope because I couldn’t slow down making new scenes and cool hidden secrets. The art by Fruz is fantastic and helps flesh out this bizarre fantasy Earth that is so much fun to look at and explore. Even in that final two weeks of crunch time, everyone on the team was still working together to create final finishing touches. We searched out great Creative Commons music, crafted new last-minute scenarios, and promoted it across the internet with lots of weird marketing gimmicks.
All of it was worth it because of positive productivity. Because I worked tirelessly with Fruz to make the best silly lesbian dating sim we could muster. Because we conquered challenges, yelled at each other a couple times, and screamed in joy when the other made something cool. I met a new programmer friend, I met some cool people in the visual novel community, and I even got very negative publicity on one of those Woke game detector lists on Steam.
All of that and more swirl through my mind. I don’t care how well Airship sells or if it ends up being the worst game Yuri Kissaten released. What matters is I had a terrific time making it, and my friends and family and even total strangers enjoyed it very much.
Money is a means to an end, and that end is allowing me to continue making new stories.
Look Back isn’t the only movie that made me think about embracing positive productivity. So did The Colors Within, or Kimi no Iro in Japanese.
Absolutely crazy to me that this period of my life exists. That two five-star masterpiece films are in theaters at the exact same time. That I could literally watch both on the same night a few days ago.
Just like Look Back, it’s all about art and friendship. Three very queer teens make music together, experiment with instruments and brush up against rules and norms that keep them from living the lives they want. It’s a film about rebellion through friendship. I gushed about it in a very long review, of course, but I never want to stop talking about how good this film is. It made me tear up from the sheer bliss of their concert performance! I’m serious, this rarely happens to me!
It reminded me so much of my own teen life, where I’d spend entire weekends on Google Docs chats planning out stories far, far too ambitious for my skills, and enjoying it the whole time anyway.
That kind of productivity can become toxic. If I’m not properly managed, it can ruin my writing as I go into manic mode creating new project after new project and none of them go anywhere. But with the right friends to keep me on track, with the right drive to keep working with the people I care about most, that’s all I need.
Well, maybe and some ADHD medicine if it ever turns out I have that, but that’s a different story.
We’re seven months into Reiwa 6. My resolutions are still hanging over me.
And, as you might have expected, I overplanned. Overpromised to myself. Set myself up for failure with a toxic idea of mega productive hunkering down that I was never going to be able to do.
At the time, I was still suffering from the shock of nearly being unemployed in Japan, due to no fault of my own. March 2024 was an immensely stressful time, and I posted my resolutions a bit too soon after that was all finished.
Goal 1 probably isn’t going to happen in any meaningful way. I didn’t pass the JLPT N2 this summer, and was too busy in the fall to study for the December test. I’ve made a lot of strides in workplace organizing, though, and have tried valiantly to address the problems that nearly left me jobless last March. That alone is probably worth celebrating, even if it doesn’t pan out.
If I have enough money, and the job stuff doesn’t work, I might just attend Japanese language school next spring… But that’ll require Yuri Kissaten to be making some serious bucks. A good target to strive for.
Goal 2, I’ve of course finished a major part of–I indeed published a visual novel!!!! Yay!!!! I also want to publish a new short story and a journalism article, but we’ll see when that can happen. And for SURE I have been reading more books. My Kobo Libra Color has been a wonderful device that has gotten me way back into reading books, comics, manga, and nonfiction articles.
Right now, I’m reading through the old public domain Raggedy Ann books for a project so esoteric it may not ever exist. But I hope it does.
Goal 3, uhhh I’ve made some friends I guess… No new hobbies yet, no real social circle. But I was also away from Japan for a month and a half, and totally broke for about two! Cut me some slack, me!
I’m embracing positive productivity from now on. I don’t want to make stories by myself. I don’t want to be a solitary artist who’s looking for a market to dominate, who’s hunting for a social media platform, who’s working on projects that aren’t exciting but fit a popular niche. I just want to make the best stuff I can with the best people I know.
And, eventually, I want to be a full-time author for real. Not for the money or fame, although those are certainly nice. Just for the stability (“stability”) of a real career. Maybe I’ll fail, but I’ll do so in the most spectacular flame-out the world has ever seen.
With Look Back, Kimi no Iro, and Airship all bundled up in my heart, I move onto the next project with as much gusto as I can mustero.
