victory(!?)

in

One of those (pleasantly) surprising (and rare) mornings: think I just finished MainFictionThing, the feature for the second issue of PRESS (A) TO START. Hopefully it heralds the dawn of a faster, more pulp/punk ethos of creation: that was always the goal with it – though this one took a lot longer than I expected (or hoped). Current plan is to hold off on putting the second issue together until January, until after my grandfather's house is empty and in the hands of the new owners (read: no longer my problem), and spend my mornings working on new things through at least the end of the year, then do the final pass in the typography and design of the issue itself. Very excited to send this one out into the world. I'll happily notch the victory.

sitrep/20231120

in

After being in various stages of fuck if I know for much of the year, moved the main story for second PRESS (A) TO START release from the brain-vomit of my Obsidian canvas to a single text document for revisions and making it read less like the semi-assembled scraplings emergent between two distinct epochs (before my grandfather died and after) and more like something worth reading (though still possessed of my glitchy, channel-changing rhythm, if you think that's readable to begin with).

Grandfather house emptying continues though now I'm past the "disassemble everything except the pool table and depersonalize it so you don't feel like you're working in a mausoleum" stage and have moved to the "preparing it for people to help so you can concentrate on disassembling the pool table" stage which is more difficult than doing all of it by myself.

SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF is all kinds of wonderful. A bit strange, though, hearing the same voices as Wright's film with different music...

principle09 :: this is it / this is me

in

Updated Principles page with 09 :: this is it / this is me:

I'm not aspiring to anything other than continuous progression and improvement at my chosen art: this site, the newsletter, and the zine are, until they are otherwise, my chosen, wholly independent delivery systems for whatever I think, ponder, and create. The expressions and experiments and explorations shared in these spaces are neither aspirations nor stepping stones for anything bigger: I've spent more than half my adult life caring about things out of my control and, as I enter the back half of same, I've little interest in continuing down the same path. This space is – and these spaces are – for better or for worse, the truest expression of myself in this moment; whatever the next moment brings will be dealt with when it's time to deal with it. Until then, this is me, and I'm good with it.

happy / done?

in

Two notions duking it out across brainmatter battlefield:

One, that I'm happy writing what I'm writing and publishing it the way I do. No interest in aspiring to go beyond short things and experiments published to newsletters and zines. Aspiration pointed only towards increasing the quality of the work.

And yet:

Two, the emptiness I've felt around most aspects of my life and self at one point or another has, as of this pondering, consumed nearly all aspects and, for the first time since I left music school 20 years ago, seeped into the one area I didn't think it could: Am I writing now only because I haven't a clue what else to do with myself? Or because the alternative, not writing, is too scary to fathom? Is there something else I should be doing and if so, is the only way to find it to stop writing?

Synthesis(?): while I'm about 98% certain that writing will remain part of whatever the new normal shapes up to be (and that notion one will win out), that two percent is – or, rather, I'm in a state of mind where that two percent is – compelling, perhaps dangerously so. Likely cause: utter exhaustion.

Duly recorded here solely as a reflection of the current status of my process of processing.

in

Every time I play a game (in this case, GHOSTRUNNER – for me, a far more interesting cyberpunk gameworld than 2077 – or MWII) and the start screen says PRESS A TO START I get the urge to release another one so I take that to be a good sign. On the other hand, I can also tell I'm getting older because my video game reflexes aren't what they used to be – see item one – which also explains why I suck so hard at any game involving parrying and timing of swords (see ELDEN RING, SEKIRO: SHADOWS DIE TWICE, etc etc); this is, I think, the defining manifestation of advancing years for aging cuspers like myself.

no more deadlines until it’s time to have a deadline and even then

in

I suppose that it's a good sign that getting to work on The Main Thing this morning felt like being able to breathe again, a creative tracheotomy freeing me from the suffocation of the last several weeks and/or months and finally letting me ride the wave as it were of whatever waters I'm navigating and while I'm uncertain of what, exactly, changed (or maybe it's nothing more than the happy pill dose readjustment finally started to work), I'll – no, wait, I'm actually fairly certain of what changed: two weeks ago I made the announcement to subscribers that I didn't know when or if the second issue of PRESS(A) would come out and followed that up yesterday morning in a note to myself written in pencil on a "note to god" while not spontaneously combusting during my annual (grand)father's day endurance test of fire and brimstone horseshit (seriously, these people have gotten even nuttier than last year – it was more than moderately terrifying, whatwith the addition of "more jesus in america" callouts from the usually taciturn and silent crowd of 20) that I wouldn't make any further announcement about PRESS(A) until I had at least two more main features, for 03 and 04, in a state of forward motion as I've found, on a visceral level, that adding a window of release / self-inflicted deadline is, at this point, the most sure-fire way to fall off the wave, get hit in the head with the board, and become narrative fish food. Guess that's that then – end of story, as that one guy said in FARGO.