I am frustrated at the slow pace of my creations; much of the excitement of an original idea is lost as time ticks by and ticks by and ticks by with no progress towards reality. I am frustrated by my inability to respond to bugs and requests in a timely manner, by my inability to share knowledge as I gain it, by my inability to explore all the new areas that interest me. I stick with it, drawing inspiration from websites like StevePavlina.com and Escape From Cubicle Nation, and books like Finding Your North Star and The Diamond Cutter. I agree with their consensus: find what you love and do it; the rest is details. I've found what I love to do, and now I want to find a way to do more of it.

So I have given a fair amount of thought to "going pro" and building a self-sustainable level of income from my creating. I considered developing a commercial software product; I have ideas, but none that inspire the passion to justify putting myself through that wringer (except for one which is simply too big...I tried). Instead I am taking a cue from the bloggers: create many small streams of income -- such as AdSense and Amazon links -- duplicate them across many projects and articles, and repeat until...done, for some definition of "done".

The advantages are appealing.

• I can start right now.
• I can build up my "portfolio" with nights-and-weekends work.
• I don't have to deal with sales and fulfillment (unless I choose that route).
• Because my income is spread across many sources, it should remain stable.
• I'm not tied to a single product, and can express myself in many different ways.
• I can develop as part of an open-source community, which is more fun than slaving away alone.
• I can leverage community-provided infrastructure, such as SourceForge.

The catch? To make this work I will likely need to conceive and execute a lot of ideas -- I'm not going to get the kind of income I'm looking for from Premake alone (right?). And I have no idea how to quantify the potential of this approach, other than to try it and see what happens, so I have no measure of success. But since I'm going to be creating anyway, what the heck?

I expect that there are plenty of other people in my situation, people who love to create and share their creations, and who would be able to create so much more if they could just find a way to get some income, some value, out of it. So I am going to dive in and explore this space, with intention of Going Pro. I'll share what I learn (as always), and if I don't quite make it...well, so what. I love doing this stuff, so I'm guaranteed to have some fun along the way.