Strange Animals / 2022 / #7: Ten on Twelve
I took a fairly long pause from writing this newsletter, as you might have noticed. With the last edition, I told you how I was taking a hiatus from my work. Funny thing was, on the first day of my new reduced schedule, I sat at my computer and thought, Okay, this is our first writing day, and then immediately backed away in horror, realising that my immediate instinct had been to replace one kind of work with another.
Instead, I turned off my computer, left my office, and just … read a bunch of books. Watched a lot of tv. Quite a few movies. Hung out with friends and family. Took a couple of short trips. You know, got some bloody rest.
And of course, in all of that, it only made sense to stop writing this newsletter for a bit. Rest means not doing labour, even if it’s fun labour like this.
I’m now settling into a nice new routine. I still have some work from existing commitments, so I’m working 1-2 days per week. But the rest of the time, I have scheduled physiotherapy workouts, I learn how to draw (at my own pace – no schedule) and other than that, I just read a lot. God, I’ve missed reading! (More on that below.)
I am very happy to report to you, though, after the sheer misery of the last few emails, that I feel quite well-rested now, and I have been much healthier, though there’s still a lot of work to do on that count. And I’m definitely recovering from my burnout, and actually starting to be excited about things again (oh, how I have missed that).
I’ve started writing again too, after putting a solid two-month pause on that. I was in the middle of outlining a mini-series when I began my hiatus, and I had been stuck somewhere near the end of issue #1. I’ve been tinkering with that over the last couple of weeks. I revised it from the ground-up with ideas that had been percolating recently, and I now have a solid outline halfway through issue #3. Once I wrap up the full four-issue treatment, it’ll go to some friends for feedback, and I’ll give it a month or so before I start doing a first draft script and then, fingers crossed, approach an artist. It’s not a project I’ve mentioned here before, so, let me give it a codename. Hmm … CODENAME SEASIDE. That sounds about right.
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So, now that I’m not doing much lettering, at least temporarily, I want to try and reconfigure what this newsletter is for. I’m clearly bad at doing these regularly, but, y’know, there’s a lot of newsletters around these days, and I’d like a reader to know they’re going to get something out of mine when they click on it, so I’d rather just keep writing when I have something particular to say.
What I decided, though, was that I needed to resurrect my website as a blog, and use that as more of a repository for thoughts of variable length, and keep the newsletter going with a combination of updates and essays.
So, here’s my website: http://adityab.net/
It’s fully functioning now, though there’s still some design work left (e.g. I need to find something to represent me better than a couple of plants, you know). So this leads us to our new “On the Blog” section, which I hope to keep going.
And on the blog this week, you’ll find:
- An introduction to the blog, which better elucidates what kind of stuff you can expect on the blog versus here.
- A short note on a podcast interview Dave McKean did about AI-generated art.
- And finally, this one’s already been shared around a bit, and has seen my blog’s biggest day yet – I had some thoughts about The Bear, a tv show I enjoyed a lot, and I ended up writing a critical essay about it. Quite happy with this one. You should start here.
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Like a lot of people reading this, I used to be a voracious reader till I grew up and got a job. And like a lot of others, social media and phones kinda ruined it for me, along with work, and I struggled with reading for about a decade.
Focus was a big problem, and the fact that it was difficult to find dedicated time around the “important” stuff. If I had twenty minutes spare, would I rather watch a sitcom episode, or try and find my groove back into whichever tome I was tackling?
Then right before the pandemic, I got into audiobooks, and that was a turning point. Suddenly I was reading more, and I found audiobooks a great accompaniment for workouts and chores, where you were doing something unpleasant, and the audiobook could motivate you to simultaneously not stray from your task and read some more. And I found audiobooks a great way into some “difficult” books, because apparently I have slightly better aural cognition than textual.
But still, I was working a lot, and audiobooks are far slower than actual reading, so I kept trying to just read, and every time I picked up a book, I was calculating how much time it’d take me to finish it, and how much joy I would get out of it in that time. Now, don’t get me wrong – I think you should definitely abandon books you’re not enjoying. I’m not a believer in finishing something just because you started it (sunk cost fallacy, anyone?). But even if I was enjoying it, a longer book, especially a dense one, felt like work. I’d constantly be checking how much time was left, rather than enjoying the experience.
It turns out both parts of the problem above – efficiency and immersion – had the same solution. Time. In the last couple of months, I’ve had a lot of time, and consequently, I’m not measuring my reading against the clock. Just as efficiency is a terrible measure for creative output, turns out it’s also a shit measure for enjoying someone else’s creations. When I’m reading someone’s work, I’m entering a world, and what matters is the feelings I’m getting from it, and what it’s making me think about, not how much time I spent in it, and how well it helped me spend that time.
And I’m finding myself, like my teenage self, excited about big books again, because I am able to see again more clearly that the reading has no point to it other than reading, and what a pleasure it is to be immersed in a world – either fully made-up one, or someone’s specific vision of this world. It’s not inspiration, it’s not research, it’s not (ugh) brainfood. It is the thing itself.
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I’ll close with a recommendation. I wrote this entire post, and my last couple of blogposts, using a new font I purchased, called Comic Code. It is, as its promo image says, a monospace interpretation of Comic Sans.
I’ve tried using Comic Sans alternatives before, because I read somewhere that the rough-looking nature of the font is great for drafting, and helps you treat the text as non-final. But they were either terribly kerned, as with the original, or too clean, as with most of the interpretations. This one feels … different. It’s still bouncy like the original, but it’s designed for monospace, so the kerning issues don’t show up. And it’s got true italics, and they’re also very thoughtfully designed.
Mind you, I’ve only been using it for a couple of days. But so far, worth it!