Underway

It’s been over a week since I last updated here, and a lot has happened in that time. I lost and regained my job, took some production gigs, pivoted with my own life to some extent, and came to a sudden recognition that people are actually looking at my website. It’s a bit scary to be honest. If you’re reading this, hit me with that Venmo.

I have gotten to the point where I am about to put a lot of time into one of my projects and push it through to completion. I know myself. When it gets to that point, I will push myself to that limit and beyond, move into the world of sacrifice and dedication, wring out what I have until it and I pass over the finish line, me in collapse and my work as the best of what it could be, something worthy of pride, and of disgust, depending on how the light hits it. It feels a bit cliched at this point to knock one’s work, because that habit is either untrue, an exercise in humility, or overdone. I think for me, having not really released much work other than writings, I often feel shame that my completed work doesn’t match what’s in my head, but how can it? It’s a bit of a silly back and forth, to put hours and efforts into a work just to doom it to the trash without giving it its chance with any kind of audience. That’s gotta stop.

But, to get back on track, the focus of my attention will either be on a novella, an animated sequence, or an experimental short film. Those orbit me now. Of each, I have the prologue and a rough outline of the novella done, and of the experimental short film, I have something brewing in the realm of freedom, as a theme. I came to this one because I realized that a lot of my work and ponderings are about what is wrong with the world, and how to fix the world, but I forced myself to ask this: what is wrong with me? How can I fix me? Well, its a rabbit hole that I didn’t want to spelunk into. Ultimately, I feel I did myself a disservice and stopped myself from digging because nothing satisfactory came, and the exercise was over rather quickly, maybe within thirty or forty minutes. Freedom was my answer, and it is a bit humorous to me, writing that down, that freedom is somehow what is wrong with me. But, more exactly, it is that freedom is a fallacy, and that there can be no thing such as freedom, that we all abide by structures, and those structures dictate our lives and give us comfort, and freedom might be adjusting those structures, but the structures cannot be entirely done away with. Or something of that nature. I’ll explore it in story. Essentially, for me, my feelings about freedom, about my freedoms, are false, and I often feel that people are not free enough, that people tend to act and live in fear or structure that limits the experience of life, but then, I am in a prison of my own, aren’t I? I hope I’m not giving away the plot here with all this.

Anyway, so you know of my feelings of freedom, and that would be the experimental short. I could theoretically do that one in tandem with one of the other two projects, the novella, or the animated sequence. The animated sequence, it is a scene or sizzle of a work I’ve written, to help me sell a project. I think, to me, it really makes sense to focus on one, but at most do two. Writing the novella, that’s quite the sink, creatively and time wise, because I like to really dedicate when I’m in the writing space. I don’t like splitting my attention, but the same can be said for pushing through a production and animating a sequence, because a big part of both will be the editing process.

No matter. The decision will be made, and one will leap into my hands and I will have to carry it to term and birth it and, despite myself, release it someway, somehow.

I hate to use this blog as a stream of consciousness for working through these kinds of decisions. But it seems to have helped. I feel, even though I have no clear direct plan of action, some clarity has come.