{"href":"https://api.simplecast.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Funderstorybard.simplecast.com%2Fepisodes%2Fmake-it-a-thing-MsEjuLNL","width":444,"version":"1.0","type":"rich","title":"Make It A Thing","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_url":"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/acb2966f-32cd-4cec-bc04-ebb68022dac8/f14dde7a-3bb8-4b94-98b1-86259c230cd8/understory-picture.jpg","thumbnail_height":300,"provider_url":"https://simplecast.com","provider_name":"Simplecast","html":"","height":200,"description":"Ideas don't belong to you until you earn them. In this Creative Peril episode, Wade Skalsky (the Understory Bard) digs into what it actually takes to make a creative project \"a thing\"—not a napkin outline, not a couple chapters, but real substantial progress. For his Sojourner portal novel, that meant finishing Act One (~32k words and counting); only then did he feel like he owned the idea enough to talk about it in public.\n\nHe walks through the same lesson from the other side of the ledger: the electrolyte business he built into a real operation—marketing, fulfillment, sales—then shut down once it was a thing, because as a lawyer he couldn't live with the risk of an ingestible product. That \"make it a thing\" grind is also how he found the physical-product business he's in now.\n\nStarting and continuing are different decisions. Get out of what-if land, pick something, push it far enough that you can honestly ask: do I want to keep going? That's the heuristic."}