Late last year, I turned 26. So, in the tradition of the great panel show QI, for the first half of 2014 I will be running through an alphabetical view on 26 things in my world so far.

My roommate, Sydney, has a muse called Rain. Rain in a foul-mouthed little bitch of a kitsune. And, obviously, doesn’t actually exist. She’s just in Sydney’s head.

But when Sydney needs to write, she’s helpful. Not only because that’s a muse’s job, but because she has this whole persona. Rain has a name, a face, a personality, everything. So when writer’s block shows up, no problem. Just shift over to Rain’s adventures for a while instead. In a way, she’s not just in Sydney’s head; she’s gradually become her own entity.

So after I was told of her existence and background, I got thinking about the concept. And I like the thought of anthropomorphizing your muse. Which led to me, one day, heading down to Finnegan’s and staring at their wall of stuffed animals for a while. The plan was to pick out whatever one jumped out at me. It would be the avatar of my muse, so it had to click. (My imagination isn’t quite strong enough, I wanted a physical version.)

What jumped out was a honey badger. I’m not good with biology, I thought it was an echidna. It was fitting — whereas Sydney’s muse is crass and vulgar, my muse (which I’ve since dubbed Walter) loves to mess with your expectations. Walter don’t give a shit.

The approach actually seems to work pretty well. Giving more detail and personality to your muse seems to help direct creativity when it starts to meander. You start to think, what would Rain suggest? What would Walter want these characters to do? Should I even go along with that? Those sorts of questions also make for a great plan B to break writer’s block. Overall, I have to recommend it.

Just over a month ago, on a Friday, I was trying to think of entrepreneurial projects. It was week E, after all, so the topic was on my mind. I was “talking” to Walter, trying to think of problems that I could identify but weren’t being solved very well. Those seem to be good startup ideas, generally.

Shortly after conceding I had bugger-all for ideas, I had one of those, as Adam Savage calls them, “what the hell are we doing?” moments. My muse was a stuffed animal. My roommate’s is an imaginary kitsune. And we come just short of having conversations with these creatures. And it works.

…Would it work for other people? Would other people be interested in the approach? Could it be generalized and put together as some kind of service?

Tada. Project.

By the end of the weekend, I had a landing page up for Dolittl. Today, the alpha begins.

Dolittl is sort of Fitocracy for creativity. (Or a real-life MMO, if that’s more your thing.) Answer a few questions about your muse’s personality, or the sort of personality that you best respond to creatively, and Dolittl pulls up a muse character that would work for you. Pick your creative track (writing, music, etc.) and your muse will help nudge and incentivize you along your way. When your muse isn’t enough, you can always lean on your fellow creatives-in-progress to get you moving.

The muses are all animals, mostly to avoid any uncanny valley effect. You know the muses aren’t real, so if one tries really hard to be human, it comes off as almost tragic. That, and we already have all sorts of identity details associated with humans. Dogs don’t really have one specific personality, for example, so they’re more… malleable.

It’s still alpha, so most of it isn’t really done. Which is fine; it’s so early on that I don’t really know where it should go from here anyway. I have to imagine that’s true of a lot of very early projects, but it doesn’t quite register that that’s the case until it’s your project.