Learning to Pivot

A Fun Little Project…

About eight months ago, I started to develop a story, Horizon 13. It was meant to be a fun space romp with a different type of development process. I wanted something to work on with my friends. We’d work on it together, develop characters and stories together. Record together. What I didn’t expect was the turn my health would take that threatened not only to derail this project, but my life…

I wanted something fun to do and get to hang out with my friends while I worked on development of other, “more serious” projects. So I gathered people I thought would be fun, came up with a concept, and started pre-production. It quickly grew into a primary project, with a bunch of people excited not only to listen to it, but to work on it. After we announced it, even more people wanted to get involved.

Then I started to notice something: I wasn’t feeling great. Not sick, but my congestion from allergies and headache never seemed to go away, no matter how many allergy meds my doctor prescribed or how many times I used a Neti Pot. No matter how much I dusted, cleaned, or how many air purifiers we used, I’d wake up exhausted and feeling awful. I had a constant debilitating headache(on top of my pre-existing migraine issues), and I was choking and coughing. And it was getting worse. To the point where taking a deep breath risked gagging and vomiting at worst, a ten-minute coughing fit at best. I couldn’t record, I could barely brush my teeth without choking.
So, for once in my life, I did the smart thing: I found a new doctor and advocated for myself. Demanded that they do something more than just look in my nose with a flashlight and prescribe Zyrtec. She sent me to a specialist.

You can’t wait six months

It took a month to get the appointment. It took fifteen minutes for the ENT to diagnose the problem, and a CT Scan confirmed it: A massive polyp had formed in my right maxillary sinus, completely filling the cavity and spreading into my throat where it is making contact with my soft palate, which is causing the coughing, gagging, and vomiting episodes and difficulty breathing and sleeping. If it’s not surgically removed, it could eventually block my airway. As the doctor put it, “You can’t wait a year. You can’t wait six months.”
So, the path was clear, medically at least: Surgery, as soon as possible. Get that thing out of my face and throat, and get back to being able to breathe. We scheduled the surgery for two weeks from the date of this post.
Recording was off the table before the procedure due to the polyp, and I would have at least a month of recovery during which I would have to be careful about even speaking too loud to make sure I didn’t reopen the wounds from the surgery.

But what about Horizon 13? A bunch of people were waiting on me to start this “fun little project”, and it’s not just my close friends anymore. Now there were other creators involved. Musicians, artists, actor/writers, all excited to get started. I told them immediately. Luckily they were all understanding of the situation and excited enough about the project to be willing to pause long enough for me to deal with my health.
For me, there was still a question, though:
What am I going to do in the meantime?

Time To pivot

I was amped up, ready to work. Excited to get started. I had already switched gears from mentally prepping to start a production to being in the mental space of actively working on a project. Now all of that was on hold. For some it may not be a big deal, but for me it’s the equivalent of pulling the handbrake at 60mph. A ton of energy, now totally out of control.
I’d been in this position before, and it didn’t go well. In fact, it lead to the worst two-year period of my life. I wasn’t going through that again.
So what should I do? After a couple days of thinking on it, I finally knew:
Pivot
Take the focus and the energy and redirect it. If I can’t record, if I can’t move into the next phase of this project that I was psyched and prepped to do, I can put that energy into other projects. Take those ideas that were just ideas and get some flesh on their bones. Work them out. Get them ready. Make progress on something else, or a bunch of something elses.
So, that’s what I’m doing. In the past two months, I’ve started writing and prepping seven other audio drama projects. A mix of older things that got shelved due to lack of time, some brand-new things that have come to me recently. I’ve had a burst of creativity like I’ve never had before. Because of this, because of my decision to pivot my energy rather than wasting it when the path I was on suddenly stopped, Lantern Audio Works could release more audio dramas next year than we have in the past three years combined. They’ll all be sitting, ready to go, as soon as I am healed and ready to start production.

So, what’s the point?

In every creator’s career, there will be hiccups, speedbumps, delays. This is especially true of creators to collaborate. For every other person you work with in the process of making your art, the odds that there will be a delay go up. Sometimes you’ll be the cause, and often delays are unavoidable.
Beyond the skills necessary to create, one of the most important skills any creator can learn is the ability to pivot. To take that energy you were directing wholeheartedly at an in-process project and redirect it to other creative endeavors when you hit one of those delays. To be able to shift focus, at least to other aspects of the same project, if not to other projects entirely. It can make you more creative, and it can keep you sane. It did for me.