i am ready to go back to bed

in

Rain continues and portends a DerbzBall-deficient day ahead but on the bright side I might have gotten somewhere in one of the Things: this is the morning's victory, so far. Shifting schedules a bit in an effort to make my day less clumpy– or am, perhaps, simply without anything valuable to contribute to the world in text-based form; if that’s the case let this casting into the ether live here in this little space of mine carved with a plastic spoon in the dollar store soap that is the internet.

(non)emergent rhythmic backburning

in

Current operational theory is that this feeling I've had for a few months - at least since the final days of PRESS (A) 01 – is that I'm moving on to a different rhythm – or, rather, a different representation of my voice – with PRESS (A) 01 being the final statement in that particular epoch (which began with DESCANSO in 2021) and what this this TBD is something new.

(Or perhaps PRESS (A) 01 was/is the start of this new rhythmic epoch?)

Either way: this new unknown rat-a-tat is most likely why the current FictionThing (part of AnotherFictionThing though I suppose now it's MainFictionThing as I've decided to move both MainFiction and ComicsThing(s) to the deep backburner - at least until some sort of new rhythmic permutation emerges, from somewhere) is so appealing – in spite of empty/nowhere: it's in such a nebulous state that I can fiddle with whatever this new/different voice/rhythm is; probably revisit other things only when I can devolve they're back to a similarly nebulous state and find a way for them to fit in with this new? Let things emerge in the writing, not the planning: this is what I'm telling myself.

In the meantime, all I can do is hunker down and stare and fiddle and make sure I don't cross the line into what my therapist once so perfectly likened to forcing myself to fall asleep.

“Hard work doesn’t always pay off”

in

Fantastic episode of the CLEVER podcast featuring Taylor Levy, one half of CW&T, the (oft-mentioned here) design studio behind beloved essentials such as the Superlocal and the Pen Type-C. Great interview, with this bit, “Buy lots of lottery tickets,” from their Principles page, really speaking to me:

We’re not suggesting you should gamble, but launching a project often feels like rolling dice. Hard work doesn’t always pay off. There’s no correlation between how much time is spent working on a project and the ultimate payoff. That’s why we try lots of things. We make tons of stuff. And once in a while we get lucky.

While how, precisely, that will manifest in my own work remains TBD, I’m definitely looking to what Taylor and Chei-Wei are doing and using that as a basis for reconceptualizing my practice and how I think about the processes within. You can check out the whole interview here:

write(?) / feel (?) / feral morkie

in

Fact: the length of these posts is indicative of the quality of the morning's progress on the MainFictionThing(s) / the work at hand: short here = long there; long here...

Not that these are an "instead of" – rather, they are a tool to clear away cobwebs and to write something, anything. But, as of this morning at least, I'm still staring at screens / scribbling by hand (or what remains of my hand – my left one, the dominant hand, naturally – after The Morkie went feral (again) yesterday morning (she takes her status as eldest dogchild (much too) seriously, RESPECT MY AUTHORITAW, etc etc) and I had to step in and break it up; handwriting not happening for a bit), in search of that rhythm that brings it together. And I'm not hearing or feeling it. Yet.

Question I wrote to myself in large block all-caps: WHAT DO I NEED TO WRITE TO FEEL THIS? (Alt, I suppose: WHAT DO I NEED TO FEEL TO WRITE THIS?)

Rewatched THE FUGITIVE for the umpteenth time this weekend and it remains one of my favorite films (need to publish a list of those sometime). Everything just works, clicks – in spite of apparent production issues with the script leading to Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford rewriting much of it on the fly: let them rewrite more things. All the things.

Like this thing.

wrong number

in

MacroParentheticals 0089, a 2200-word tome on the tenth anniversary of COMICSTORYWORLD, is now in the inboxes of subscribers, so non-fic/zuihitsu morning brain is at low ebb but I can't let this bit of local-ish flavor go unmentioned:

An unnamed business on Canterbury Road contacted Westlake Police on Thursday, Oct. 13, at around 10:45 p.m. after receiving suspicious voicemails.


The individual contacted police after hearing a man leaving a message about "putting a five grand hit on another person."


"It's a five grand hit on him," the unnamed suspect said in the voicemail. "I don't care where he's at or what he's doing or who he's with."


According to Westlake Police Department, investigators discovered that the caller misdialed a person's phone number when he left the messages at the Westlake business.


"We weren't sure what we were getting into," Capt. Jerry Vogel told 3News, "if it was real or a prank or what."

A prank it was not.