in

Finding my bliss inside The Shed by moving back and forth between seeding a comics story on one end and tearing apart a reel mower on the other – I have designs for / on that reel – which has, from all the bits and bobs I've found as I dig towards the reel, spawned potentially two-three other metalwork pieces. While words remain elusive, the desire / need to transform the woodscrap leanto out back into my outdoor metalshop is anything but.

How would I write if I were starting now?

in

This being the question I've been asking myself since I threw out nearly all of my previous notions, WIPs, and ideas from the last 20 years (save the two I'm doing for others) around Christmas. Happy / merry, all that.

How would I write if I were starting now?

Start by cutting myself some slack, giving less of a fuck, certainly; getting there but hey, perfectionism and abandonment issues are a tangled match made in hell. At this rate, should be good by my early 60s. Goals.

Real goal, ideal: write as though I'm always starting now.

(WHAT would I write if I were starting now? This / that / the other. Probably.)

current status of various projects in various stages of yaaaay or fuckit

in

Writing this more for myself than for anything/one to give myself a lay of the land splayed out ahead that I can ignore as needed as I traipse about to wherever it is I'm going.

Writing: abandoned anything and everything that I'd consider aspirational, as in: anything that I hope leads to something else or a "writing career." Working solely on things that I either want to write simply because I want to write them (two short fictions) or that I'm writing for others (a short comic that could become more and a concept album) the latter of which came after I said I was considering being done with writing (cue Michael Corleone, GODFATHER: CODA). Nearing the end of one but have to dive back in on the other: been too long since I've looked at it and don't want to lose the feel for it as much as I'm fearing that I'm losing the feel for it.

Talking to others: my MacroParentheticals newsletter is dead; long live the titularly-challenged "whenever I finish something / feel like it" dispatch. I did the magazine model for more than a decade and I'm worn out. Sticking with this space as my main vessel for comms, as it has been for many years now. Haven't gotten sick of it yet, so I'll take that as a good sign.

Metalwork: I had a lot more fun tearing apart a glockenspiel than I ever had playing it. As for what it becomes, your guess is as good as mine, though pieces of its frame have already shown up. Toying around with some ideas for the keys. I also have a torn-down lawnchair waiting to become something, and a burnt-out recliner frame which has a design for its next life, though I have to bring its metal carcass here first.

Also have a portable welding table to assemble because now people are asking me to come weld things for them.

Cartooning / comics: Informalties - now borderless! – continue, as ever. Want to do another A.A. VOID. Starting to miss the little guy.

Painting: had fun – 15 minutes, to be exact – plan to have more fun. Best guess is that it might become a useful brain-unsticking exercise (15 minute / 30 minute time limit) than a full-throated vehicle of expression.

The Paintshop: The Collection's home and the workout area are complete. Unwanted / needed books delivered to the used bookshop, trash and other detritus either disassembled for metalwork or placed at the end of the driveway as an offering to the belching truck. All that remains is the ripping out of a sink and final clean-up before pool table reassembly and placement. And moving slate. Once that's in, I'll figure out how many more shelves to build.

And a next project. Probably another shelf for K's Botanical Garden set.

tuning

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In keeping with yesterday's clean break with the past and much of the present, I started something new today – and loved the process. Indeed, much of the impetus behind the great split / divide / whatever was a desire to bring my now-quarter-century-long writing practice in tune with the beginner's mind lent by my new practices of cartooning, drawing, and metalwork by banishing most if not all of my previous attachments and intentions: gone are the designs and hopes and dreams on and of a career, the designs on anything; I want to view whatever I write moving forward not as a stepping stone but as a thing that was written – like each day's Informality, like Miggy or Weldo – nothing more than another means of expression and communicating whether I'm heard or not: if I'm to be a tree alone in the forest, I'm going to fall where-, how-, and why-ever I damn well please.

clean slate

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Following yesterday's successful execution of a really shit draft of something really cool and the requisite making of distance between shit and un-shittifying, I returned to another thing I'd been playing with for a few years and, after staring at the same words and the same stuck spot, felt the magic wave a middle finger at me as it skipped town. So I've decided to do something I've never done before and – with the exceptions of current commitments to other people (hi Uzi, hi Jess), my daily Informalities and the ongoing adventures of A.A. Void, and this space and the newsletter – make a clean break with my current project slate AND with all of the past, failed fragments and notions to which I'd normally turn in these times of void. Time to start a new day creatively and prepare and till a new field for whatever seeds may spring; I suppose starting my notebooks over with a new 0001 after 37 volumes and 15+ years this week wasn't just a fresh start at numbering but a herald of the creative Galactus that landed today.

nowhere -> somewhere(ish)

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After yesterday's mental kerfuffle of nowhere, managed – as is usually the case after one of those days (as Nick Cave reminds us, "When something's not coming, it's coming") – to get somewhere. Somewhere, yes, but more specifically that somewhere where I can dig deep into small, tiny pieces and rip and tear them apart until they become something new that works.

Been doing these mid-day daily text things again for a week now and I'm not quite sure if I want to continue doing this as part of a new way forward or if it's a remnant of the old to which I'm clinging like a dog clings to the last strip of their beheaded and desqueaky-ed toy.

For now, though I'll return to the clarity of yesterday's "creative principle": Fuck it, might as well.

leave a message and beep

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It's been a week since I stopped taking my phone with me to The Shed. Usually took it not out of some need to check in on socials or things like that (though I did let a search for new music distract me into countless little rabbit holes; I've since stopped listening to music while I work – hence the decided lack of EarBliss)) but because I was worried about missing allegedly essential texts or calls regarding absolutely urgent lifethings. But not only have those texts and calls, with the deaths of my mother and maternal grandfather (12 years of various stages of caretaking take their toll), ceased – but I realized that (most) people contact me these days only when they need or want something from me. They can wait. Living my life on my terms can't – not after 20+ years of facilitating the lives of others.

in

I've become mildly obsessed with figuring out how to use a hand plane and what, if anything, among my wooden dalliances might make use of it. If nothing else, a useful way to think through the roadblocks in the (narrative) WIP(s) for which I’ve a notion of how to move forward that I want to explore this week. Not sure how it'll work out, but it might give me room to breathe on both – and leave open room for seeding two potential other things.

fallen bits of planed wood