ON WHERE, WHY, AND WHAT'S NEXT
This may read as a confessional, an essay, a scribble, a laundry list, or all of the above.
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I am so full of wanting. I feel as if I am meat and nerves and hard feelings wheeling endlessly in tornado force winds. The images that rattle around in my head are some combination of road side trash swirling down a slimy drain and glitter bombs exploding in a frosted glass of water. There’s good in there, I know there is, I can feel and see it in short shutter bursts but everything feels so raw, so real, it hurts.
There are plenty of reasons for this state of being. I just got off a feature film that went as well as it could considering we had to dodge and weave around a hurricane during production. The month leading up to the shoot was involved. I’m home now with certain lessons learned and new friendships to cultivate. I know it's been three months since I wrote to you. In my world that’s basically like trying to catch you up on three years. And when all the details feel important, my brain/heart sorta melts down or freezes up. Lacks functional processing skills.
I’ve been rummaging through old sketchbooks to find notes on a couple old screenplay ideas I’ve been batting around in the clogged up recesses of my headspace. I stumbled on those notes and a few others, one section caught my eye. Familiar feelings of being both so capable, so restless, and so paralyzed to do anything other than internally panic and crawl back in bed. So full of wanting. Wanting solace but craving the weird security that comes from a crisis. I am so goddamn good in a crisis. Like give me your very best crisis and I’ll absolutely ace that shit. Level headed, thoughtful, strategic, caring. That’s been the last 8 months. Crisis to crisis. I know it's taken its toll, I’m feeling it now, where my body is giving up, I’m in pain in ways that I find very scary.
I am planning to provide less explanation for my private state of being in these zines moving forward. I am grateful for y’all’s readership and a place to put my thoughts but I’ll be moving away from creative non-fiction and personal essay style material and more toward experimental fiction and sensory explorations. I think this separation will allow the work to get better and find itself wandering less into tumblr era style musings and more into the work and not me as the work. No one but myself has subconsciously assigned a higher value to my confessional style essays then to my sensory explorations or fiction and I have to break myself of the association. I am choosing this because it feels more sustainable. The amount of times I’ve poured out thousands of words for a deeply personal essay and appropriately came to the conclusion that it's too raw to send out in its current state this year has been at least twice an issue. Which is one reason issues of have been delayed. I don’t want to do that anymore.
I want the work to get better and for that to happen, I must create some boundaries around the work and assign it its proper place. Its interesting in a sorta banal way that the personal essay or creative non-fiction has dominated the pages of this zine, mostly because I don’t actually enjoy reading either forms all that much. I’m a fiction fiend. I would like to get back to that. Maybe I found myself writing creative non-fiction or personal essays because there’s almost an armor that is imbued with it being about me. As if it's safer and more true than fiction.
I’m currently working my way through a collection of essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy writing by Ursula K. Le Guin and its giving me a lot of hope. That I can put aside the armor and write fiction the way I enjoy writing fiction. I can take it deathly serious and enjoy myself. Bold strokes, hard swings, sharp characters and enough grit and general swagger to keep the thing pounding pavement. I think I’ve found myself trying to write more “literary fiction” cause that’s what “serious writers do” but it's not my bag. I also don’t enjoy reading it. Like at all. I will never be able to write “white woman has a thought” style stories. My world is complicated and messy and full of magic and tech and surrealist imagery and fingers inside hollowed out chests and dark earth. Robots, monsters, ghosts, witches, and alternate universes reside there and so do I. I want the work to become weirder and more true.
As for sensory explorations, all the grounding exercises I’ve been doing in regard to dialing in my physical senses has been life shifting, I’d like to enrich this and go deeper, these pages feel appropriate to do so and it really harkens back to the idea of how I experience a Prismatic Slant, the wandery walks through analog and digital worlds.
So couple things before I move forward: Officially the zine is moving to quarterly release. Expect an issue every four months which means the next issue #27 will drop Sept 15th. I looked at the backlog of issues and every four months almost exactly revealed the issues I was most pleased with. I’m a one man band who needs a lot of mucking about time to chew and write, and edit. I can no longer fire at all cylinders because half the cylinders are unpredictably malfunctioning (aka chronic pain). This shouldn’t be inherently surprising due to how inconsistent the release schedule has been since August of last year.
The zine will be capped at 20 pages. I’ve been wandering into longer issues and while I like having flexibility, I think capping it will help me publish more consistently. The issues will compromise of Nodes on the Senses and some exploration of fiction meets another medium, either photography, music, or video. I’ll be keeping the Culture List but I plan to integrate it more into the overall issue theme rather than just “What’s MJ read/watched/listened that’s stood out to them in the last couple weeks?” I recognize that I need to be a better editor, both in a creative structural sense but also just in a boring word count, proofreading, page count kinda way
Housekeeping: My current laptop is limping to a slow death and I’m currently waiting for the replacement parts to arrive in the mail. When it arrives, I’ll be back up to full scale design etc. I will also be divesting from all Adobe programs. I don’t like their AI policies and the fact that everything is a cloud based subscription service that one has to pay for monthly. I will be moving to Affinity for my Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign needs, DeVinci Resolve for film editing, and Reaper for Audio. It’ll be an investment upfront to purchase all of these pieces of software but it will be a one time investment and it all works offline. This is not a judgement for other folks who use those softwares, they are industry standard for a reason. I’m just at a point in my creative endeavors where I am no longer industry standard or industry invested. I’ll be editing two short films that have been stuck in Post limbo since 2021. My goal is to finish out this year with all pending projects from the last 4 years finished. I need a clean slate because there are things I want to create and the world is getting harder and will continue to do so. I need all the mental/emotional/creative acreage I can manage.
This zine is almost 3 years old and its gone through so many variations in form. I’m grateful for the readers who have been here since February 2021 and those who have joined recently. I do think these choices will make the work better. Thank you all for sticking around. I’m immensely grateful.
In Solidarity,
MJ