Blood sacrifice made but, more importantly, on the drive in, listening to The White Stripes, three ideas: One, that I want to take more of a songwriting approach to writing my weird shit by which I mean a more write it and move approach; I love the feel of things like that sound like a creative explosion – The Beatles's White Album, the oeuvre of Jack White, etc – and less a polished thing (novels, screenplays, etc). Second, I shouldve made a five year plan in the vein of Cal Newport’s SLOW PRODUCTIVITY ten years ago; better late than never, I suppose. And finally, I really fucking hate this switch back to cold because my blood sugar is out of control and it pisses me off which makes it even more out of control. But, ah, matcha: that stuff really is great.
As I've been experimenting with adding a third reading section to the day (basically, post-breakfast, lunch, and dinner), I'm finally using my Kindle for something other than hospital visits and waiting room time-slaying via short stories: reading non-fiction (currently, Cal Newport's latest, SLOW PRODUCTIVITY). Whereas I previously penciled up books with brackets and an overabundance of illegible scrawls that I'd hate myself for never reviewing, now I can read, highlight and, when I'm done, send the highlights to myself and put them in Obsidian. While fiction (except short stories) will remain corporeal-exclusive, it's not unlikely that non-fic will switch to digital-only - though if I want it on my shelf, I'll buy a physical version later.
Efforts at slowing down or, rather, at eliminating that feeling of rush from my day, front and center: little things like not acceding to young Kirby’s demands to play Derbzball as soon as I return from the run; like letting myself take 30 minutes after each exercise chunk (one after each meal) to read before going on to the next 90-minute thing. Appropriate, I suppose, that Newport's latest, SLOW PRODUCTIVITY was delivered to the Kindle this morning: not sure that I need help with writing slowly, I'm managing that just fine on my own, TYVM – but I would like a little less rush to nowhere in that as well. Old habits, I suppose.
healthy distraction and the art of comics (re)bagging and boarding
Stated yesterday that I know that the writing's not going well when I've (re)bagged and boarded a lot of comics and I've (re)bagged and boarded a lot of comics this week and while I do stand by what I said yesterday, I’ve evolved my thinking through the recognition that it's become a largely automatic – the winnowing is more or less complete – distraction to help me think things through on The Work at hand and, whereas, normally, I’d get pissed at myself for such an attention-switching (while I like and use some of what Cal Newport has to say, I don’t believe that he has as solid a grasp of the creative impulse as he seems to think he does); Rick Rubin, in THE CREATIVE ACT, is, unsurprisingly, far more on target:
The key is that you must have a problem in mind, as I certainly did – my problem being that I didn’t know what the problem was only that there was a problem, my old standby, "What am I not seeing" – and, while little writing-writing (the placing of words in order on a screen is, after all, only a part of the process) was actually done over the last couple of days of bagging and boarding, not only was the problem found but solved: I realized I had committed my cardinal sin of thinking of form first and attempting jamming the story into that.
Egregious error corrected and words flowing, somewhat, though fragmentary. A new focus on one thing only, a simultaneous all in AND lowering of the stakes: I’m not going to run out of chips; this is only being written so it can be finished and I can do the next thing and so on and so on until I’m no more. (Does lowering the stakes allow me more self-permission to let things come as they do? Perhaps.)
Side note the first: never underestimate the amount of video game and toy history you can gleam from 50+ years of comic books advertising.
Side note the second: whoever came up with the adhesive comic book bag is a both genius and a bastard: those static film adhesive coverings are all over the place, stuck to every part of The Paintshop and my person, the forget-me-nots of the collecting world.