This post will be a bit more, ah, self-indulgent than my usual news posts. Or I don't know that "self-indulgent" is the right word. Personal? Emotional? Reflective? Maybe "self-indulgent" is the right word after all.
Maybe I should go ahead and write the post and let you, the reader, decide what adjectives apply to it.
It has been fourteen years and a day since I first set up the Wongery and posted the first articles to the Central Wongery. Back then, it was a private wiki, with no one but the Grandmaster Wongers able to view it. That changed ten years and twelve days ago, when I made the Wongery public. However, we did nothing to advertise it, and so nobody knew about it, leading me to retroactively deem this only a "soft launch" of the site.
The hard launch, I decided, when we would make a serious effort to publicize the site, would be exactly ten years after the soft launch, on December 21, 2022. But we weren't making as much progress as we'd hoped, and it was clear it wouldn't be ready, and so, a month and a day ago, I decided it would be best to delay the hard launch. True, the round figure of ten years after the soft launch appealed to the pattern-seeking part of my brain, but then I realized that if I put it off until a little after noon on January 1, 2024, that would be exactly eleven years, eleven days, and eleven hours after the soft launch, and, well, that wasn't exactly ten years, but it was something.
(Honestly, I hadn't remembered that I first set up the Wongery on January 1. This actually makes the thought of having the hard launch on January 1, 2024 appeal to me more. Not only will it be eleven years, eleven days, and eleven hours since the soft launch, but it will also be fifteen years to the day from when the Wongery was first created. That's nice, I guess.)
That gave us one year to get the site ready, to fill it with content, to refine its format, to put in place all that we wanted to be in place when it first came to public attention. A year is not that long a time, though, and we'd have to put in the work. We'd gotten very little done on the Wongery lately; there hadn't been a new article since—let's see—since April (yikes!); if we were going to have it where we wanted it, we really needed to put in the work.
Which brings me to the main thing I wanted to write this post about. Namely, the fact that we haven't been putting in the work. (Well, I haven't put in the work. Let me speak for myself. I am the one who is holding this up.)
It's been, as I said, a month and a day since I decided to delay the hard launch, and in that month and a day there have been exactly zero new articles posted to the Wongery. It's not that I haven't put in any time on it; I have written a bit; but I haven't gotten any articles done. I said a few news posts ago that I would set at least an hour a day to working on the Wongery. That was probably a good idea. I didn't do it.
Why have I not done this? Why haven't I put in time on the Wongery? What have I been doing? Don't I want this to succeed?
Well, yes. I have a lot of other projects in the works. There are a lot of things I am working on, a lot of ideas I want to bring to fruition. But I think I can say that out of all of the (too) many projects I'm working on, the Wongery is the one that is the most important to me. If I could somehow choose for just one of my many projects to achieve full success, to become well known and well regarded, I would choose the Wongery, without hesitation. It is not the only project I'm working on, but it is the one dearest to my heart.
So why haven't I been working on it? What am I doing (title drop)?
I mentioned in a previous post that I strongly suspect I have ADHD. I've never been formally diagnosed, but I've thought about getting tested. The question is, though, if I am formally diagnosed with ADHD... then what? There's medication, yes, but from what I've read about it there are indications that ADHD medications may inhibit creativity, and... that's not something I want to risk. What good would it be to finally have the focus to get things done, only to no longer have anything I want to do? So yes, I do think it's likely I have ADHD, and if so I think it is likely that's a strong contributing factor toward my not getting things done, but even if that's the case I'm... not sure what I can do about it.
Is it that there's a part of me that doesn't actually want to have a hard launch of the Wongery, for fear it won't go over well? Am I getting in my own way to avoid the potential disappointment of an unsuccessful launch, the heartbreak if I do try to publicize the site and nobody cares? Is it fear of failure that's getting in the way? Eh... I suppose I don't fully know all that's going on in my brain and I can't state with absolute certainty that this isn't the case, but I really don't think it is. The Wongery is something that I want to exist. I want it to be popular, of course; I want a lot of people to read it and interact with it; but even if they don't, I want it to be there. I don't think I'm reluctant to work on the Wongery because of fear of failure... but like I said, I can't definitively assert that this isn't the case.
Maybe it's just a matter of prioritization. Doing a good job of publicizing the Wongery will take money, and the more money I have, the better I can get the word out about the Wongery. But the Wongery certainly won't bring in any money before its hard launch (it's by no means a sure thing that it'll bring in any money after the hard launch, either, but that's beside the point). Some of my other projects, then, I'm placing a higher priority on, on the basis that they do have the potential to bring me some income, which will then help me devote more resources to the Wongery. But I need to spend some time on the Wongery still to get it ready. I need to work out my priorities; I can't spend all my time on the Wongery, because there are other things I want to get done too, but I do want to spend more time on it than I have been...
And it's not just the lack of articles. Sure, we need to write more articles. But there's more to be done. There's a lot of programming work to be done, customizing the MediaWiki code to have the custom namespaces. There's layout and design work to be done, making the main page look, well, better than it does now (and of course that involves some programming too for the PHP backend). There are maps to be drawn—we do have at least rough maps of most of the Wongery worlds, but they're nowhere near ready for presentation. And, well, yes, we'll need art, but that we're going to have to outsource; none of the Grandmaster Wongers are professional-level artists. (Which brings us back to the issue of money, since we're going to have to pay artists...)
So much work that needs to be done; so little we've actually gotten done so far.
But. There is a glimmer of good news. There is a bit of hope for the future. I did not at any point in 2022 devote an hour a day to the Wongery as I said I would do, or at least should do. But I did devote an hour yesterday to writing articles. No, I didn't finish any articles (though a lot of that hour was spent looking things up and figuring out words), but I made progress, and I think if I put in another hour today—which I fully plan to do—then I can. In 2023, I hope to do what I did not in 2022, or preceding years, and actually put in the time needed to make the Wongery what I want it to be.
We'll see. If you're reading this after the hard launch, it means that at least one person found the Wongery, and had their interest caught enough to look back through old news posts. Welcome. I hope you enjoy.