I have every tool. Every idea. A Google Drive full of half-started things.

And for three weeks, I kept opening this episode... reading what I had... and closing it again.

I have a word for that now: creatination. (cree-AY-tin-AY-shun) It's the specific paralysis that happens when nothing is actually missing — except the doing. It's not writer's block. It's not burnout. It's something in between that I've never seen named, so I named it myself.

This episode is about what I did about it — and what I found underneath it.

In this episode:

• What creatination is (and why it's different from writer's block or burnout)
• Write Week — the one-week creative sprint I gave myself, documented on Instagram, and why putting structure around focus actually worked
• The video setup collecting dust in my office, and how Write Week finally made me turn it on
• What came out of that week: two articles, a podcast script, a vertical series, a pilot, an Alpha 8 episode, and a slight pivot that I'm counting anyway
• The harder thing underneath all of it — fear, imposter syndrome, and what the steady paycheck was really giving me permission to do
• AI in creative industries: where I sit in the gray area, and the questions I'm still sitting with (voice cloning, AI-assisted editing, the abundance of AI slop — and whether responsible use changes anything)
• A fascinating Audible experiment with screenwriter Scott Z. Burns that I won't spoil

Mentioned in this episode:

• Tuned In — my audio drama discovery app, built on Lovable
• Descript / ElevenLabs — voice cloning tools
• Submagic — AI video tool
• What Could Go Wrong? — the Audible/Plan B Entertainment experiment with Scott Z. Burns