Welcome
Neuroscience has shown that juggling encourages the development of white matter, the nerve fibers that carry electrical signals and connect different parts of the brain. I’m a pretty mediocre juggler, but I’ve become good at keeping a number of different creative projects on the go. Having multiple projects in progress means that I can jump between projects when I get bored with any one of them. It allows me to reflect on resonances and connections between projects, from which new ideas can emerge.
Juggling projects is a creative act itself. To do it well, one requires not only the focus and concentration to keep one’s balls in the air, so to speak, but the flexibility and ingenuity to slip from project to project, shaking-off the pressures and preoccupations of one to adapt to the details and demands of another. This involves some self-reinvention. I find that the most satisfying aspect of the creative process is that it enables me to get free of myself, to an extent – shaking off the person, or persona, that I’ve cultivated in order to tackle and engage a certain project, while working on a new persona for another set of tasks and challenges.
In exploring this site, you’ll discover four different Tim Rayners: an academic philosopher, a screenwriter, a novelist, and a teacher. These personas, like different parts of the brain, are linked by a network of paths and impulses. Viewed from a distance, they no doubt converge and fold together in a semi-coherent whole. I find that it facilitates the creative process to keep them as divergent as possible.
I hope you enjoy what is here. Please feel free to add comments to my novel in progress, Lord of Swarms.