This interregnum between the penultimate drafting of the main thing and final typesetting and design might be granting me a peek into where I'll be heading, creatively, once it's done: a full embrace of Rubin's experiment train of stake-lowering thought, a practice of tinier, smaller projects, each project existing solely to explore and finish and move on. Partway there with the weekly Shards, but I'm aiming to expand aspects of its intent (namely, that they're nothing but experiments) across the totality of my creative practice; now that the ambition to have anything resembling a creative career is dead and buried, I’m having fun simply tinkering or, as my late grandfather would say, “potting around.”

This whole "I'm finished for now with one project and don't have another except things I started a long time ago" space is weird. I know it would be the space that Rick Rubin would call the seed gathering phase (or something like that) and I've got them percolating around and about, but it's been a long time since I've been here. Not sure I particularly want to revisit those things I had started long ago, before my grandfather's death (or even, in some cases, before my mother's death more than a year and a half ago): I'd rather find something new to play with. On the other hand, I do feel like I can't get on with this next chapter of my life (and my work, perhaps) until his house is empty and out of my hands; anything else would be in the "before times" and I want whatever I write to be of the moment (which would be this slightly maddening "between"). Think I'll consider the best I can do right now to be to show up and write something and will duly consider this to be that something until something else pops up.