Nova Daily - 11 May 2026: Last-minute inspiration

Hi!

With the new BlogChamps season ahead of us, the standard questions will arise again: what to write about, when to write it, and how to do everything in such a way that @VOB96 will not imagine your avatar glued to a set of clay pigeons. The usual, in short. We're closing in on 100 participants, which is the largest number that we've ever seen.

With a lot of deadlines awaiting me outside writing, I haven't been able to make up my mind as to whether I want to participate or not. However, I will make up my mind before the season kicks off.

One thing I will certainly not need is last-minute inspiration. I have a good set of topics that I want to put to text regardless whether or not they would be entries in any writing competition. 

Last-minute inspiration

For school assignments I used to postpone everything until the very last moment. Back then I didn't know how annoying that was for everyone. Mostly myself, because it meant that I had to do my work last-minute and miss out on some of the fun that other people were having. And I could make a promise to myself to start earlier next time, but somehow that hardly ever worked. I kept repeating my cycle of doing everything last-minute.

There are some instances in which doing things last-minute has definitely improved my creativity. One of the instances I recall was basically an educational assignment in which I had to choose a piece of music and analyse it as well as I could. In the end I decided to do the silliest thing and analyse a part of an opera with the help of Robert Greene. I was on fire, wrote 3000 words of text in one night, and finished 2½ hours before the deadline. In terms of serious writing, it was the strangest and most risky thing I'd ever done.

Because I finished so close to the deadline, I had no time to revisit my text and proofread it for myself. I fully expected to get slapped on the wrists by the teacher. Who in their right mind would use radical-realism books that mostly belong in the shady category of self-help literature to analyse a piece of music? I would. To my astonishment, however, I passed that assignment with a pretty good mark.

Last-minute inspiration can be quite useful. The following game, while entirely different in context and type of last-minute inspiration, was one in which I had read something that flipped a switch in my head before the game. It'll come to the foreground during the game because it was in my thoughts.

Here is the blog by Attila Turzo that I read moments before. I can't say that the "calculate before they understand" idea fully applied here, especially since the game is so short and the strategy was basically all within the boundaries of my pre-game knowledge, but I still experienced reading that little snippet as a useful thing to keep in mind.