I’m beginning to realize that I may have gotten my numbering wrong, at least insofar that I probably shouldn’t have indexed on Week 0… I’ve never claimed to be good at math these days.

The point stands, I’m officially at 39/40 pages filled in this hybrid chapbook. And I will now spent the next 3 weeks doing two things:

1) Getting all my pieces to play nicely with one another.

2) Writing the final page, a task made even more daunting by the fact that I have saved the introductory piece for last.

I personally felt like I needed to do the introductory piece last because it’s only after fully rendering the rest of the book that I am able to properly prologue it. The general thematics are also very attuned to a workshop SLICE is sponsoring in the middle of September, and given that part of this project is the intentional slowing down of my creative process, forcing myself to wait seems correct.

The fun part about composing is how often you realize pieces were actually in conversations that you didn’t originally intended. Sometimes, it’s because they weren’t juxtaposed originally, so it took a second to realize that’s why they harmonized. Sometimes, it’s because there were temporally displaced, and a section needed to be be modernized for the error.

So as I continue to mend 38 pages, I have been appreciating the bespoke page 39, a riso print. It’s the second one in the book. There’s a lot of paired media, semi-intentionally. This one I did not have a clear vision of how it would turn out, but it ended up looking even cooler than I could have hoped.

Which I think is a neat microcosm of the book making process itself right? Every week, getting a little bit closer to a thing that didn’t quite exist before, in a way that I couldn’t quite have imagined.

Exciting times.

Three weeks until I start sending out packets to my alpha readers… Oh, how time continues to time.