"Admittedly, that whole 'muse' thing isn't entirely wrong. I've learned for myself that while I may not be in the 'mood' to do one project, it's only because my brain is still percolating on it. It's not 'mood', that's emotional. It's intellect and problem solving of the creative sort. Your muse isn't ready because you haven't figured out how to turn the objective on it's head and take ownership of it. To really make it an enjoyable endeavour and not just another job to crank out.
"The way I've found to speed the process up is to continue to work on other creative exercises. Sometimes that means switching media entirely and maybe busting out the brushes to work in traditional media or cracking open some origami books to play with paper for a bit. The important thing is to keep it in the back of my mind and not be in denial over a project. Continuing with other creative exercises keeps my mind open and refreshed so that I can ponder the problem. Often this leads to a burst of insight such that I've already planned and discarded a bunch of options before I ever draw that first line, making the time I do finally spend on something much more efficient and productive."
-- Lar deSouza (artist on Least I Could Do and Looking For Group), 2009-03-13, "Flavours of Procrastination"
[Note that this is either a) yet another way that programmers resemble artists, or b) yet another piece of evidence that programmers are artists, depending on where you draw the line between artist and not-artist, and how much you know about the hacker mind -- right down to the line, "Many artists litter their workspaces with small toys and knick knacks [...]" When I was employed full-time, there were days when it looked like I was doing nothing, but I was chewing on design problems and waiting for the pieces to connect up in my head so that the next day the code (or the design documents) poured out of me at impressive speeds.]
[Oh, and happy 'The Whole World Is Irish For A Day' day, to all who celebrate it!]
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