👋🏻

You ever just stare at a timeline and think "How am I going to fill this up? There is so much to do. Maybe I'm not cut out for this..." That was me a couple of days ago.

I see all that blank space as a daunting wall to scale or an amorphous digitized bonsai tree and I have no clue how to trim it up into the shape it is meant to be. A big hangup for me this go around is all the film footage. It feels like it requires an entirely different style and structure than a game essay. I've watched countless film essays, but how do I make one? Not to mention the DMCA dance...

The creative process is fraught with doubt and distraction. My mind wanders, suggests completely unrelated tasks that must be done now for surely they are more important than the time I carved out to edit a video. All matters are more pressing than making The Thing™ in the dawn of the day.

But you just stare at the screen for some amount of time that is never as long as it feels and then you make a decision. "Well, I need a title here. Let's do that." "Oh, this is where the interview clip will go. Plop it in and tighten it up later."

I know I've been on an Anne Lamott kick thanks to Bird By Bird. It's what I do. I fixate. I see said fixation everywhere. Just take it as a sign to read the book. Or a sign that I am cracked. The namesake of the book though is this story about Lamott's older brother cramming an assignment about birds he had a month to work on in one night. Been there. Done that. The story is the excerpt on the back of the book.

"We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead."

Sounds familiar.

"Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

Bit by bit; bird by bird; clip by clip—it's all the same.

It's not much more, but it is more.

Until next time...