So I made a mistake when I scripted out my initial timeline and even as I was making that initial timeline, I knew subconsciously that I was making a mistake. Because when I pitched my three six-week long phases, a part of me knew phase 1 and 2 were intermingled, but as I was sitting down and trying to organize my thoughts it didn’t click.

When I started my work on the chapbook this week, it struck me pretty much immediately that my framework was wrong. I spent most of week 1 looking at things in isolation. This is not inherently a bad thing. However, I was/am/will continue to be making a whole chapbook, which is a collection of things and a collection of things needs to be in conversation with everything else. Which of course let to the realization that I needed to be thinking what the final shape was gonna look like a whole lot sooner than Week 7. It would have to be now.

As a fun aside, since this is a hybrid chapbook that mixes prose, poetry, comics, and several artifacts from my mom’s writing, I knew that I need to arrange things in a way that made sense to me, which given that this is a book where everything is talking to one another, I need to be arrange things in space as though it would be in a book. Now, since MS Publisher is days away from being cast into the digital void, I did have to find an alternative, but my friend Steenz came through and I have been stumbling through learning Affinity, which lemme say, is really intuitive 90% of the time and completely alien 10% of the time. But that’s okay. Having to learn a new thing has been useful.

The arrangement immediately helped the structure though, and while it likely change over the next 7 weeks, seeing everything as a whole and not just the individual pieces has helped immensely.

Additionally, it prompted me to include some things from this newsletter that I wasn’t originally planning on, but made sense within the greater context of the work, which was.

But all of this is to say that I’m in a phase 1 and phase 2 sort of thing. Phase 1 is going to be “Personal Cultivation.” The goal of these first nine weeks is to make something I am happy with. This is gonna involve some generation. This is gonna involve some workshops. This is gonna involve some experimentation.

Phase 2 is “Does this thing I just made make sense to other people” in which I will hand off copies to as many people as willing to look at it and try and cobble together a tighter version of the end product. Which is a terrifying thought, but also the entire point of writing is to be perceived.

I got choices to make. I got things to transcribe and play with. There is work to be done, but it’s… fun work. It’s almost play, or maybe it is play. But it feels right to write and curate and compose and create, and I’ve missed it much more than I realized.