I apparently forget to schedule this, which means I broke my however long streak of Tuesday posting. Ah well. Take this today. Week 4 will be tomorrow. I’m not counting this against myself.

It’s been an eventful week, as noted by the small but significant change in the title of the series and the title of this prospective book. But that’s the joy making a thing is watching how the thing changes over time.

I started the week still fumbling with Affinity. I mostly got it to work. It doesn’t handle text formatting as well as I’d would hope, but the process of making layouts and spreads and seeing how things would sit on the page was useful. It’s a little clunky, lots of precise clicks to get things to move where I want them to, but seeing the whole helped clarified things. I’ve confidentially filled 34 out of the 40 pages, and the remaining six pages have a clear direction of what needs to be done with them.

I don’t think I’ll submit the exported PDF from Affinity. I think now that i have the structure, I am going to port over to Google docs where it’ll be easier to share and distribute and crucially reorganize and generate the table of contents easily.

Nothing is final of course. Even as I type this, I have Affinity open in the background and am thinking about things moving, things being consolidated to accommodate more work, to make sure that the work is cohesive and minimally redundant (I think the nature of the collection is that it’s going to be redundant).

After the bulk of composition, I did a transcription of some of the archival materials. It’s the only thing I am transcribing (everything else is scanned), largely because of what I want to do with the transcript and that was a whole thing.

Then there was printing. Lots of printing. Preparing things. I have considered riso-printing several elements of the book, but there is realistically only thing I am going to do a specialty thing for. Maybe if I self-publish I’ll do significantly weird things, but for now, self contained.

And as I looked at the shape, I saw the pieces I chose to start and end with, and I saw how they connected to the title and how their own titles needed to change to reflect their new dynamic. So that was fun.

I ended my week doing a generative writing workshop and the resultant piece needs some polish but will probably find a home in the book. Out of the six remaining pages that need solidifying, one needs revision, five need to finish the execution, and one thing needs to be written in totality. There’s a workshop in September that is perfect for it, at least based on the premise.

The first third of this phase is going well. Things will slow down in the coming weeks. Progress will slow down now that the adrenaline is doused.

I have it on my calendar that I’m sending the packets on 9/22. That is both shocking far and shocking close. The contest is officially live. I will continue to take all the time in the world.