One of the most apt metaphors for my life is the “strange mood” from Dwarf Fortress.
Sometimes a dwarf will randomly be “taken by a fey mood” (or some other kind of strange mood), and they will spend every moment working on crafting something. You cannot get them to do anything else. They spend up to a couple of months on it, and if they succeed, the object is a legendary +1 [[something]]. Sometimes something entirely useless, but if so it’s a legendary +1 useless thing.
If you prevent them from completing the thing, or don’t have the required workshop, they go insane and die.
It’s a little more dramatic than what happens to me, but this general pattern is extremely evocative of what I feel when I have a project I’m really excited about. It’s impossible to focus on anything else. I JUST NEED TO BUILD THE MASTERWORK Q-TIP. WHY YOU EXPECT ME TO GO OFFICE AND LOOK AT SCREEN THAT DOESN’T EVEN MENTION MASTERWORK Q-TIP. DON’T YOU KNOW MASTERWORK Q-TIP STILL DOESN’T EXIST.
Right now the masterwork Q-tip is “maximally portable 2m Yagi antenna”. Previous ones have been: