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

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.

clean slate

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)

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.

process space

Now that I'm in month four of working in The Shed, I've finally figured out what the space is (beyond the obvious, a Shed in which I work and figure out the right heater-solar panel-grid balance, especially in today's brutal wind): it's a space where process – not result – reigns supreme, the spatial equivalent of my "Working" folder. Over the last few weeks, I've been removing anything finished or completed from the space, be it Weldo Quixote or Miggy the Shovel Creature or comics or finished drawings or scripts or anything so that, with the exception of a few pieces from CW&T and odd antiques and entertainments, The Shed's filled with nothing but the tools I use to make things and the limbs and sinew of various works in progress, a space of freedom from result in which I can alternate between planing a drawer built by my great-grandfather and writing another tale of REDACTED for mi hermano's musical inspirations.

processing

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.

Continuing on with the Fictions, but also with one eye and one or more braincells focused on transitioning to more of a balance between prose and cartooning / comics. If I were being honest with myself, I'd tell you that my goal is to shift entirely to cartooning but, alas, I'm too chickenshit to go all the way without a bit of a fallback (and, I can't forget that the medium is the message, right, Marshall?); suppose it’s moderately poetic that it only took me 35 years (and will probably take a couple more) to get to where I wanted to be when I was eight.

Blood sacrifice made but, more importantly, on the drive in, listening to The White Stripes, three ideas: One, that I want to take more of a songwriting approach to writing my weird shit by which I mean a more write it and move approach; I love the feel of things like that sound like a creative explosion – The Beatles's White Album, the oeuvre of Jack White, etc – and less a polished thing (novels, screenplays, etc). Second, I shouldve made a five year plan in the vein of Cal Newport’s SLOW PRODUCTIVITY ten years ago; better late than never, I suppose. And finally, I really fucking hate this switch back to cold because my blood sugar is out of control and it pisses me off which makes it even more out of control. But, ah, matcha: that stuff really is great.