Week 1562

Releasing something new redeems even the lamest week; it's a bit of a cheat, actually. I mean, how lame can it be if you released something? Not as lame as that other week where all you did was play Dragon Age, that's for sure!

Though I didn't give Gogomain the time it needed earlier this week, I made up for it on Friday and Saturday, and it's on track for a full rough draft by tomorrow. My rough drafts are truly rough—not like those fake rough drafts that have been polished up for inspection. Over the years I've become pretty comfortable sharing stuff that still sucks, and at this point I think it's a true strength. (See: Ed Catmull on sharing stuff that sucks at Pixar.)

Pilgrim abides. Did I mention I released something this week?

I have a wee story-let—a contribution to a larger project that you might have heard of—due on Wednesday. I haven't really started it. Let's call that Jumbo. (You can tell I'm as excited about the code-names as I am about the projects.)

I had another story-let assignment back in December—it actually paid shockingly well—and I have to say, I love writing stuff that's very short under very specific constraints. It's not that it's easy; I mean, we are talking 250-500 words here, so you have to choose each one very carefully. It's that it's easy to begin: You can see the whole shape of it, and you know that if you start typing right now you'll have a whole rough draft in, like, fifteen minutes, max. There will be many, many revisions after that... but that's no problem. The draft is the thing.

I read Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist all the way through on Friday and absolutely loved it. It's a book about constraints—specifically the constraint of rhyme in poetry, but I think this applies to a lot of things:

All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It's like chain-smoking—you light one line with the glowing ember of the last. You set up a call, and you want a response. You posit a pling, and you want a fring. You propose a plong, and you want a frong. You're in suspense. You are solving a puzzle.

I can't recommend this book highly enough; it works on every level, from the tiny cutting-cucumbers-in-the-kitchen micro to the huge meaning-of-life macro.

Makes me think of Yosa Buson's poem, too:

    Lighting one candle
with another candle—
    spring evening.

So anyway. East Wind was a prototype in the truest sense: much more a proof-of-concept than an actual product. I like the way it turned out, but I don't think the story is particularly earth-shattering or the images particularly coherent. (With one exception! The part of the story where the pendulous white moon comes rumbling into view is, I think, one of the best moments I've ever engineered.) I was just supremely anxious to try the format—and I think the format was a success. Already I can see the toolkit coming together: the arrangements of words and images that might reliably deliver a certain effect.

The grammar of the long-ass scroll!

So now I'm thinking hard about where to take it next. Someone made the comment that East Wind "feels lonely" because it's the only story of its kind—certainly in my world, and maybe in the larger world, too. (Even its inspiration, the long scrolling essays of Maira Kalman, are really something else entirely.) So that makes me wonder about a series: a story told in chapters, each one a long scroll like this. Or maybe it's a bunch of stand-alone stories that all orbit around some central point. One prerequisite would be greater coherence: in the language, in the images, in the overall design. Or maybe I go in the opposite direction entirely and enlist other writers and designers with wildly diverse styles! You can tell this is quite unsettled in my mind. I tested the prototype; now I want to make something that kicks ass.

I had a lot of fun doing the sound for East Wind, so I think my first A/V project is going to be sonic. What would you think of a fairy tale done in the cut-up, hyper-modern style of Radiolab?

In any case, I will not be releasing anything this week, so it will have to be really truly productive. There's more Gogomain; there's time allocated daily to Pilgrim, no matter how little (because it's such an easy thing to neglect; it makes not a peep when I ignore it); there's a sprint on Jumbo (on Monday); and, early on, there's the results from the Remix Fund.

I'm also going to share some semi-interesting findings from East Wind's first week in the wild. Here's a preview:

Can you guess what's being depicted?

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