New Project

I get bored easily. This isn't a secret and if you didn't know, you do now. More than that, I really hate being bored. So what do I do? I complicate things.

It's not enough that I write. I love writing, but if it was all I did I think I'd go crazy. I'd pore over every phrase, every word, every letter. I'd drive myself nuts. To avoid this, I've been working on some side projects. One of them went live yesterday.

This Place started out as a simple idea. There is a place in my head that I want to explore - a city made of all the cities I've ever lived. There are people, businesses, utilities, and parks. There are roads and regulations and lawmakers. There are neighborhoods with their own unique flavors and personalities. I wanted to find these places. I wanted to see them, to smell them, to meet the people. Eventually I wanted to share them; so This Place was born.

The project is an experiment in podcasting/art. I go through the city, one building at a time, and describe it. I want to build a mosaic, brick by brick and day by day, until a visit to this fictional place feels almost as complete as a visit anywhere else. I'm inviting the denizens of the internet to be tourists in the city of my dreams and memories.

I like to draw and I think of my illustrative work as a hobby to balance out my more "serious" creative drive to write. So, each little podcast comes with a drawing of that place. I also want to invite anyone who desires to contribute their art to This Place to do so. Whether that's drawing the people, or your own interpretation of the buildings. I want to see the "photographs" people might take while wandering around this little-big metropolis of mine. I'm hoping people will be interested and engage in my world, because I think a city is too complicated for one person to completely fabricate on their own.

This Place is my brain baby, and right now I'm nervous that I've put it out there. I'm worried no one will like it, that it will be mocked or bullied or worse - ignored. But this is the nature of revealing my labor of love to others. There is the distant, niggling fear of rejection and a tinge of anxiety because you can never know how people will react.

To escape my boredom, I have side projects. To escape my anxiety, I have writing.

Please, let me know what you think about my little project in the comments! I'm looking for any kind of feedback - the good, the bad, and the constructive. Also, if anyone has any experience doing something like this project, I'd love to hear your story about how it went!

[Note: This post is a cross post to my main personal blog at http://reecallahan.blogspot.com/ ]