obsidian victories

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Victory the first: I think I've figured out how I'll digitally index physical notebooks: while I had once subscribed to the romance of the analog, card-based system, two things have brought me 'round to using Obsidian for that as well.

  • One: my handwriting is, has been, and will always be shit (I've given up) and, thanks to this, I have as much of a chance of losing my brain "data" in analog form as in digital, cloud-based form.

  • Two, that forming connective tissue via effective tagging is far simpler and more facile via Obsidian; now that I've found my way to a more effective tagging system, the benefits far outweight my erstwhile digital resistance.

Current victorious method of indexing physical notebooks: tag each entry NB30 -PageNumber/TIME (PN & T outside the tag) in my Obsidian Daily Notes; if it warrants a separate note (or requires it later) it gets one – though I do try to keep all notes on a single Daily Notes page because while I can abide cluttery, messy pages, I have a hard time dealing with cluttery messy file systems.

Victory the second: my quest for an iOS shortcut to access today's daily note in Obsidian from the homepage is at an end: (Daily Notes Shortcut V1 ). YAY.

"My whole creative endeavor..."

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"But part of me thinks, They liked my last book. Hurray. Now we move on. That moving on will undoubtedly involve massive disappointment on the part of others. It never happens this way twice. In a way, I find that sort of freeing. My whole creative endeavor is the repudiation of my last work with the new one... Stop getting better? There's no excuse for that."

This has long been a favorite passage of mine from one of my favorite authors – and it’s particularly resonant this morning as I scratch my brain and bang my head against the desk on the new thing.

update: short-edge binding and other sanity-saving print options

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(previously…)

After much wasted ink and new bits of scrap paper, impositions are in place and the first print tests of PRESS (A) 01 are done: it is possible to both assemble and maintain a modicum of sanity. All that remains now is to finish the cover design, a few tweaks on the conclusion, and modifications here for its release and my first longform non-fic piece since 2013 will be ready to go. Rinse, wash, repeat every six months (though the next one will be fiction, probably.)

update upon a deadline met

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DONE.

Will start the process of putting it into Affinity Publisher tomorrow – which will, inevitably, bring with it further edits and tightenings (though nothing structurally significant, hopefully). Won’t rush this part of the process just to hit an artificial release date; aiming for next Sunday, but willing to push it into the second week of August or so if it’s not quite there yet.

Regardless, relief.

ten days to go

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I've plunged off the precipice and into the final zine gauntlet, shifted the self-imposed deadline to Sunday morning (needed a break from it; I compared writing it to taking sandpaper over an open wound in Sunday's newsletter, scratchy scratch), and completed a first vocal read-through edit. Sounding right, where I want it. Might wrap sooner than Sunday, but who knows; either way, Sunday's the final day I'll be writing it (though inevitably, some edits will happen as I move to the typesetting and publishing phase – page turns make all the difference): the only way I see fiction until this first issue is done is when the final result is stapled and assembled and ready to go.

Also: I need to get semi-competent with rubber stamps. I'll get stamp those letters sans edges this I swear damn it. I WILL BE CRAFTY.

from the writing to the written

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In the final throes of revisions, ever the open wound, for the first zine, reading the thing over and again and making changes tiny and large that make it so, with each return to the top readthrough, I make fewer and fewer adjustments until finally, it feels like I am no longer writing it but have written it in the past and it feels done.

Recognition that my process is infused – as best I can – with this diamond from George Saunders:

How, then, to proceed? My method is: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, with “P” on this side (“Positive”) and “N” on this side (“Negative”). I try to read what I’ve written uninflectedly, the way a first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”). Where’s the needle? Accept the result without whining. Then edit, so as to move the needle into the “P” zone. Enact a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments.

And so I revise on, from the writing to the written.

"I tend to live in a world of miniatures..."

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When I write, I’m not aware in any kind of way of like, “Oh, this is a long song,” or, “This is movements.” If anything, I’m truly in awe of people who work in larger, scaled projects, someone who does sit down and write a symphony or an opera or a novel. I tend to live in a world of miniatures, so even my biggest work feels like a blink to me. It’s just a tiny little thing that comes and goes and floats away.

Definitely where my thinking has drifted over the last few years. Can remember being in music school as a composition major and envying songwriters because of the immediacy of their craft. Applying that to my own work now as I move forward in efforts at being honest with myself.