Matching Mixed Media - On The Topic of "Do A Thing Every Day for Month"
The day after SLICE ended, I was sitting in my house laying on my couch attempting to do nothing. I’m not particularly good at doing nothing. Back when I was more a more prolific poet, one of my favorite lines I ever wrote was “when you’re used to moving faster than the speed of light, standing still feels awfully like going backwards.”
Now mind you, I am desperately trying to do less, which is why I consider it in an intrusive thought when one side of my brain said “what if you made one zine every day in November?”
Part of it was probably because I saw something about the aznzinefest, but still.
A vast majority of my life can be attributed to the fact that in middle school, one of my teachers said “you’re good at writing. Have you thought about writing more?” And I, being a simple person of a simple persuasion, said “sure” and proceeded to write more.
In high school, my sophomore year English teacher (Ms. Curry) told me about NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Really, should have been called National Novella Writing Month, but I disgress. The point is the goal was 50000 words in a month, or roughly 1667 words a day for 30 days.
The goal of NaNoWriMo was never to make something good. It was simply to make something. It is very much inline with a meme that began circulating earlier this year.
This image is my entire ethos as a writer, largely because the act of doing a thing made me better at the thing. You have to do the thing to get better at it. Repetition as a core tenant of my life, who would have thought (they said sarcastically).
In college, I went to a weekly writing workshop called Inklings and my goal during these sessions was to write as much as possible within the allotted time. Free flow, unbridled, unlimited. Just words on the page and see what sticks later. When April my sophomore year came around, I took to Facebook Notes for a 30/30. Thirty poems in thirty days. That shit was like breathing. It came easy. It was not always easy, but I suppose the discipline of 1667 words a day a couple times helps make it possible to do significantly less words.
I’ve done Script Frenzy as well. Circa 2015, I bored of the NaNoWriMo format, did a National Micro Fiction Writing Month on my Tumblr (and yes, they’re still out there on the old blog). Hell, we can fit the Twelve Pages, Infinite Options experiment into this as well.
My old writing coach Tatyana Brown once told me that getting good at writing is a lot like getting good at pie eating where the reward is more pie. A fitting image for someone like me who constantly consumes.
Despite the fact there is a large part of me telling me empathetically not to make 30 zines in 30 days, there is another part of me telling me that is exactly what I need to be doing but maybe not for the reasons you and I are thinking.
I do a lot for my communities. I have made it a point to be social and make spaces, and these are objectively good things, but I also haven’t been as selfish this year as I think I needed to be. I haven’t done things for just my sake this year.
I think part of it comes the ever present concept of stagnation and the ways to improve once you reach that plateau.
One way is collaboration. I had the vague notion for a month long project called Panacea: An Anti-GenAI Experiment (get it, because antigen?), where I would solicit prompts from people and make things based on that. A project driven from pure ego and the fact that my friends keep assigning me resolutions for me to keep. It ended up being too logistically complicated to endeavor, and also perhaps too egotistical and ambitious, and I ended up needing that month off mentally for entirely different reasons.
But the other way is stress. The other way is seeing what happens when you’re exhausted. The other way is to keeping push past your limit and see what happens. And maybe that’s why part of my brain is blaring the latest Mountain Goats’ song at full volume as a I pen this post.
God, I think I have convinced myself to make 30 zines for no other reason than I think it might be fun and I might find use later.
But I think mostly I just need to make things for me, unabashedly, unafraid, unrelenting.
And we’ll sort out of the rest in post.