processing

in

Thinking today of how my means of processing life, my processings of processings, have changed over time. Writing - journaling in notebooks and reMarkables or blogging here - used to be the main way, but now I seem to have moved more over into fiction and cartooning. Attendance Cards as graphic blogging, having replaced the old daily maunderings that gave birth to this space for the last two years now.

In an effort to figure out where I am now – who I am now, creatively and, perhaps, more deeply – I've spent the last few years revisiting all of the art forms of my past: while it wasn't unpleasant to work thorugh Stone's STICK CONTROL, a return to music yielded little more than a reminder of why I left music in the first place (it served its purpose, to get me out of Ohio when I needed it most) and so here I am, even further back, playing with drawing and the memories of stick figures with my grandmothers at their respective dining room tables. Maybe this is where I was always meant to be, having given it up in my late teens, or maybe it's nothing in particular but what it is. Doesn't matter. I'm enjoying myself either way.

in

Might be getting ahead of myself here (surprise, surprise), considering there's a lot to be done (thinking I'll start insulating the roof and loft areas today) before I can fully move my process of processing operations to NuShed, but, if The Paintshop is, currently, about results – working while surrounded by things, by The Collection, the library –, then The Shed (probably the best name for it) will be about process: working through my own processes while being surrounded by original comics art, process pages, tools, blueprints, plans… Come to think of it, maybe that's why so much of The Collection consists of early character merchandising (within the first five years of their existence, largely) and Depression-era entertainment delivery systems (Big Little Books, especially): they are as much a process as a result, a process of iterating how best to represent that character in other media (and, yes, how to milk them for all they're worth).

braingarden

in

Efforts continue to free myself from the self-inflicted / half-a-lifetime prison of timers and timeblocks, relics of a former perceived need and identity piñata of inflexibility, and allow myself to work / write / make much as my wife toils in her garden for all hours of the summer day: by default. Make it, working / writing / making, like breath in meditation: it's what I do first thing, what I return to, my inhales, my exhales, one through ten, etc etc (note: I quit meditating long ago and have found that, since I started this process of time-freeing and making doing my work the default activity for the day, I no longer have a little voice telling me to consider meditating again).

Happiest when I spend my time doing things that are actually in my control because, as I've slowly learned, precious little is.

A long ways to go to parole myself from the mental constraints that will, undoubtedly endeavor to fuck me up but, on the best days, the days of assigning guilt for a failure to attain a set number of hours are over, what I do being nothing special – only what I do.

healthy distraction and the art of comics (re)bagging and boarding

in

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:

"Distraction is one of the best tools available to the artist when used skillfully. In some cases, it's the only way to get where we are going....

We might hold a problem to be solved lightly in the back of our consciousness instead of in the front of our mind. This way, we can remain present with it over time while engaging in a simple, unrelated task...

Distration is not procrastination. Procrastination consistently undermines our ability to make things. Distraction is a strategy in service of the work." 

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.

stuck stuck stuck stuck stuck

in

OK that didn't last long: now it's irritating. But now I know I can, if necessary, move over to something else for a couple of days or a week. Not sure it will help, though – this thing's been like this for awhile now. Last time I let this happen, it took me seven years to realize it wasn't a novella but a paragraph. Won't let it subsume me that much again.

(Unlike then, not afraid of running out of ideas if I give up on one: those things are a dime a dozen. What takes doing is finding the rhythm that both satisfies the present moment (got that part) and provides a means of continuance to the next (that's the tricky part).)

At the point of using Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies (which are very cool and helpful in getting me to think outside my normal thought patterns)

Might be doing two daily text things here (depending on the number of workblocks in the day), just to give me something to jump to if I get stuck like I am now. PARASITE post-script in afternoon, probably. Already on my favorite films list. So good.

Also: POKER FACE is brilliant.

clear opacity / opaque clarity

in

For the first time in awhile, I've found myself genuinely enjoying the process of being lost and possessed of no idea of where to take The Work (this as opposed to hating myself for same).

Perhaps it's the clarity I brain-stumbled upon earlier today regarding the form of Press (A) 02: clarity, even a small bit (and in something totally removed from the main) I've found, begets pleasure, creatively - or at least an increased capacity to deal with the opacity inherent in any creative toil.

All this subject to change, tomorrow or in the next hour or minute, of course – but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

project / process / anvil

in

Each project requires its own process: how does it need me to toil – beyond the universal dayin/dayout ass-to-chair / feet to floor in front of standing desk – to bring it to life? Hurl passages and broken rhythms at the screen until something sticks? Draw it? Hurl drawings and broken rhythms until something throws passages back at me?

All I know is that the actual process won't resemble anything I had envisioned amid the non-working hours of accumulation and subconscious processing. Sometimes it changes midway.

Frustrating, to be certain – especially when the project won't budge and stares back at me, arms crossed, from across the chasm between notion and reality as I stare at it, from the other side, waiting, like Wile E. Coyote, for the anvil to appear.

Worth noting: my week tends to go better if I shift between different projects and different processes – which would make that part of the process of each, I suppose. Exercise each part and give the other some space to work itself out.

(Meep meep)

in

Though it's been the case for the whole of my creative life, I'm still stunned by how much of my process is simply tolerating the chaos of that process – assembling scenes and sequences here and there from fragments and shards and combining them, throwing them up in the air, etc etc – and not kowtowing to the overwhelming desire to organize too soon: a heathen's exercise in faith.

in

Reached an acceptance - though probably closer to a resignation - that my "career" as a writer will (most likely) go nowhere. Unlike previous resignations to this, I'm good with it. Doesn't mean I'm giving up or quitting writing – to not write would be akin to not breathing for me – but rather that I'm going to keep doing what I do: show up each morning and write what feels right in the moment, release it, and let the chips fall where they may. Whatever happens happens; I'm going to focus on what I can control – namely, doing work that holds meaning for me and striving to always be moving forward with my craft. Beyond that, fuck it.