Not much headway these last few days, no.
Mornings are quiet. Dripfeed of podcast content straight into my ears aside. Once I'm off the train in Evanston, I'll walk up and down the North Shore Channel, either by way of the hiking trail (which goes beneath the bridges) or over the grounds of the golf course. Usually there's one if not two to three rabbits out. If I'm lucky-- like this morning --something larger will happen along, say a deer or-- like this morning --coyote. This is my second coyote, the first of this year. It was last january I saw my first one.
Today I managed to forget my scripts so I couldn't re-read & line edit, as is my habit. Reading and re-reading stuff is how anything gets done. Falling back into the world(s) I've been building. It's strange re-reading these text pieces alongside portraits of the characters. I didn't honestly know how they looked when this project began; like, I knew what Ian Sommerville looked like, generally enough, from the photos I've seen, but I'm as familiar with Kiki, which is to say I've only seen a handful of shots. Now I know what my versions of these people look like, which is far the fuck along from where things were a year ago, when the word order was still cooling. I have a much different idea of how Robert Barlow looks (in contrast to my own sense of his self-image), and am surprised to find myself charmed by the portrait I've built. It's not often I find likenesses in my own work "attractive" or "handsome" much less Sexy, so things are going well. David Kammerer's portrait is the one I'm teething to start inks on, but I'm not doing that until I've gotten Michael Portman's seance drawn. Ian's portrait is fab, it's the background that's proving a nightmare because there's geometry and projected light, so, yeah. Fuck my bright ideas.
Have I mentioned having no great confidence in my penciling, recently?
At any rate. It's strange looking at all this writing. As I insist, I'm not a writer. And generally the world backs me up by not reading my work. There has been one fresh (read: trustworthy) source of flattery for my prose, who's steadfastly refused to engage with my illustration work, so I'm not going to get a big head about either. These are private glaciers, to be scaled and mapped and studied and sampled as my stamina permits. It used to bother me that it takes so long to find satisfaction and completion. Now I'm not very fussed about time. I've survived dying three times. It'll get done when it gets done. Just because it takes a long time for it to get done doesn't make it any greater or lesser than any other work of art in my studio. They all get equal weight: none is epochal, no particular work is more meaningful, more weighted than any other.
I feel like it's the sanest way to approach this stuff. One day at a time. It's how life gets lived.
Gives time for rabbits, coyotes and long walks by the water.
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