I've spent a week now building up and burning down designs for a system; which has to be oh-so-close to the reality of a situation but no closer, has to be enjoyable to use, and has to be modular enough to stick into an arsenal of future projects. I won't bore anybody with the details; but a point comes when I have to declare that enough is enough, and just file it down from there.
The real pain in this work is constructing a machine or system capable of beautiful things; but being wholly unable to express its beauty to any of the more conventional artists around me. I look forward to the day when, all at once, it collides together into a beautiful experience that speaks for itself; for everyone else, it will seem like my device or program materialized out of thin air. For me, I can already see it, boring into my skull, off on the calendar's horizon. I can see it there already. I can find a thousand system failures before they ever happen, and I sit, late at night, quill-in-hand, staring at the materials, waiting for my muse to come to me and cough up something functional.
It makes a man doubt himself. I've done similar things myriad times before, and yet every new one has to be a little different, a little more novel, a little more exciting than the last. In my heart and mind I see vast crowds of people absolutely groping at the galleries of my work, seamlessly using the UIs and controls and taking my gadget or program and really making it a part of them for a while. Everybody's got a dream, and therefore a function in the world, and this is without question mine.
I suppose I just need to gut up, and do this; I'll pick the periodic issues back into place as I go.
Thanks for being an out, SG. I needed to write this.