I have so many different interests. Writing, I think, is the most obvious for people who follow this blog – it’s mostly what I talk about! Then art – I’ve posted a lot of my artwork here, especially last year. And conlanging.

Sometimes I feel that I’m spreading myself thin, that having so many different interests cuts into the time I could be using to actually focus on getting good at one thing. It’s possible to be good at more than one thing, of course, but I don’t think I particularly am.

In my mid-teens, I made a goal: to be satisfied with my art skill by the age of 25. I’m 28 now, and I’m definitely not satisfied with my art, whether it be digital, pencil, ink, or acrylic. If I could pick one of those things to focus on – say, acrylic painting – and work on it consistently, then I’d see improvement in my skills. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does mean improvement.

I spent a lot of time drawing in my mid-teens, and ended up going through a rapid period of improvement in the span of a year. My artwork from 2008 and 2009 don’t look similar at all. I improved because I was almost entirely focused on drawing. I did do a little writing, but not that much. My main focus was drawing.

I want to get better at writing. I want to get better at drawing. I want to get better at painting. I even want to get back into conlanging.

But working on one of those skills takes time away from all the others. I’ve been focusing on writing for the past few years, and as a result, I’ve become an artist who doesn’t draw, a painter who doesn’t paint, and a conlanger who doesn’t conlang. I didn’t want this to happen, but it did.

I don’t want to give up any of these interests. I don’t even want to “excel” at any of them – except maybe writing, since I’d like to be a published author someday. But I do want to get better at all of them, and I feel like this isn’t going to happen unless I pick one and stick with it at the expense of everything else.