Finished redraft of the short story. Still not quite there, but I think it’s heading in the right direction. Will pass on to #1 reader, which is always exciting / terrifying.
Another iteration of the board book constructed. I have the prints for one more. I figure I’ll make it and then try and find a girt big guillotine to trim them with.
Posted a cryptic cyanotype pic to Instagram stories to fulfil my social media obligation for the day. I still don’t understand the division of posts and stories on IG. Add Threads to the mix and my bafflement is cubed. I still don’t know what to do with social media. Twitter is increasingly full of bile and it’s feeling increasingly icky to even be there.
2023-10-12
Redrafted the text of a physical story. I think the form’s OK, but the words needed refining.
Left some Platform Bee stories at Perkyns coffee shop in South Tottenham. Get ‘em while they’re hot.
Started a fairly extensive redraft of a short story (though quite long for me). Not done yet, but heading in the right direction.
Typed up the introduction / sample chapter for the non-fiction project that I’m almost certainly not going to do.
2023-10-11
Wrote a rough intro chapter to a non-fiction project I may or may not pursue. This was done longhand and typing it up will probably be the litmus test for whether it goes any further.
Submitted a story to a magazine.
Finished reading “Everybody Knows” by Jordan Harper, which was great but really quite bleak. I’ve been reading a lot of brutal crime fiction at the moment and could really do with something softer.
2023-10-06
Exposed two more cyanotypes.
Drilled some of the hardest plywood known to science.
‘Bound’ the entire wooden book.
Took photos.
Wrote blurb.
Submitted to gallery.
2023-10-05
Treated and exposed six Cyanotypes on wood. These actually worked pretty well. Two more and I can bind them.
Made another board book prototype. This one was so nearly right, only let down at the last moment by wanting to trim out a bit of exposed card. Think Father Ted and the small dent on the car. I need a better cutting solution for the trim and may have to accept that a metal rule and a Stanley knife isn’t up to the job.
[Edit @ 23;45] Learned a bit of cloth simulation in Blender to knock up a new image for the cover of the book. Using real netting didn’t work as expected, so I had to fake it. We’ll see if it convinces.
2023-10-03
Posted a tweet about a ten year old TV programme.
Cut some wood. Badly.
That’s it.
2023-10-02
Prepped Cyanotype chemistry for an experiment tomorrow.
Redrafted a short story.
Got a little depressed about said redraft, so made notes on a next draft and felt a little better.
Submitted 3x short-short stories that may or may not be connected.
Realised that I didn’t log activity over the weekend. Wondered whether that was a good or bad thing. Failed to reach a conclusion.
2023-09-28
Made new envelopes for Third Eye Test so it can be sold in shops.
Took stock to bookartbookshop and had a chat with Tanya who runs it.
Started another version of the board book and wondered why everything isn’t matching up as well as I would like.
2023-09-27
Sold 5x copies of Ten Regrets to a shop.
Contacted two Book Arts Centres in the US about possibly stocking some of my books.
Desperately brainstormed for an upcoming submission deadline.
Laid out a potential concept for above and had a little panic when I realised it was only 4 pages.
2023-09-26
Submitted three pieces of flash fiction (which may actually be one short story) for publication.
Submitted a short story for publication.
Prototyped a physical story using Affinity and the Cameo cutter (new band name?)
Posted said story to Instagram, here.
Added a few more bits to Stupid Book Idea.
Looked at Threads and wondered if I really need another Twitter in my life.
Logging work
I don’t know if this is a good idea, but I’m trying to log work here in an attempt to make myself more accountable. It’s also a vain hope that it’ll make adding to the blog will be second nature.
Made another prototype of the board book, this time without boards. It makes everything much slimmer, obviously, but I think two layers of 400gsm card means it has enough weight to maintain the necessary rigidity. I’m also using a different adhesive. Spray mount might be right, but it’s a pain in the arse to use.
Rough additions to a stupid book idea I had the other day. It’s lots of little bits, so it can be added to piecemeal. Whether it’ll add up to anything, I don’t know. It might never see the light of day. When I’ve got a rough draft I might have a better sense of whether it’s worth pushing further.
A prototype text object which (hopefully) will be part of a series.
Murdle, et al.
I’ve been enjoying Murdle, a logic-based murder mystery game with a new variation every day, a la Wordle. It uses these logic grids and a series of clues to work out whounnit, where and what with (and sometimes why). I’m still finding them quite difficult, bute njoyable all the same.
Whilst digging around the creator’s site, I was interested to see their take on Murder Tarot. I had a similar thing as one of my 52 Murders (one of the few ideas in that exercise I actually liked), although the approaches are somewhat different.
I like the semi-authored, semi-programmed approach of these things. I have absolutely no idea how to go about making one, though.
Edit: also, these Bite Sized Horror games are quite nice. Brief little Twine-y experiments that are done quickly and well.
Interactive lift-up flaps
This is a test of how the interactive elements of Bobby’s Bottles might work in an ebook. It’s also a test to see whether I can embed Instagram posts on this blog.
Exhibition: 'The Power of Play' by Work Show Grow
I’ll be showing some work-in-progress at the Work Show Grow group exhibition ‘The Power of Play’ on the 3rd and 4th of June. It’s at the Old Court House in Kennington. Hope to see you there.
The Turnout – Megan Abbott
Oh no…
That was something I said to myself, out loud, more than once while reading The Turnout. It wasn’t that the terrible things that happened were surprising, but instead that they were so grimly inevitable that it somehow made it all so much worse.
The story of two sisters and a spouse running a ballet school and having issues with renovations might not sound like a recipe for high tension, but believe me, this one turns the screw with excruciating precision. When I told my partner the basics of the plot she thought it sounded like a teen romance. It is not. It’s an adult story, but like most adult stories it carries a lot of baggage from childhood.
Zadie Xa at the Whitechapel Gallery
Korean-Canadian artist Zadie Xa (b.1983) brings together new sculptures, textiles and paintings in an immersive installation. Drawing on her own lived experiences,Xa explores a multiplicity of hybrid and diasporic identities in her work. Korean mythology and folklore provide the narrative framework for her investigations into systems of power, home and belonging.
In the exhibition, Xa pays deference to funerary and worship practices in Korean shamanism, and creates a journey through the space led by different guides: deities, spirits and animals.
Upon entering, the viewer is confronted by the first guide: a suspended cloak representing the deity Princess Bari or Bari Gongiu (translating as 'throwaway' or 'abandoned princess who leads souls to the underworld after death.
The marionettes on either side are haetae: horned beasts that resemble both lions and goats. In East Asian mythology, they are protectors that help society distinguish between right and wrong. Many other animal figures in the artworks, such as the orca, fox and dog, are also drawn from folktales. The artist perceives animals as 'avatars*: embodiments of ecological, political and cultural shifts within our world.
Designed in collaboration with the artist Benito Mayor Vallejo, the large central structure is inspired by Korean domestic architecture and contains artworks that represent household deities who offer protection and good fortune. Through choreographed lighting that evokes the transition from day to night, and audio comprised of sounds from nature, percussion and voiceover, Xa traces a ghostly presence, pointing to the passing of time and a journey into another state of consciousness.
Two Projects, April 2023
Running two experiments concurrently has its advantages and disadvantages. The good thing is that when you get stuck on one thing, you can flip to the other and vice versa. These hitches can be technical and creative, but there’s also the despondency factor that comes into play — those moments when you ask yourself “why am I doing this? what on earth was I thinking?”. For those moments, it’s nice to have something else to turn to.(Of course, there’s always the possibility that there will come a time when you lose faith in both projects simultaneously. So far that hasn’t happened, but that’s not to say it won’t.)
It’s probably also a good idea to have the projects be in broadly different areas, so that when you get tired of exercising one creative muscle, you can switch to another
Anyway, on the projects. I’ve decided to use code-names for the moment, not because anything’s bound by an NDA, but because it’s more fun.
Project Braun has been a rollercoaster, even in its short existence. It spawned from a story I wrote a few years ago called The Reader, which was one of those quite good but not quite there things that I never managed to get into a decent shape. It was science fiction, which is a genre I don’t much care for, but keep coming back to , perhaps because it feel like a legitimate framework for speculation and half-baked concepts. Anyway, the story wasn’t great but at its core was a technological concept I really liked. It’s not something that I can make happen, but there is a version of it I can make. This involves learning some electronics, getting to grips with microcontrollers and a few other things on the periphery of my skillset.
It’s going… OK. I think one of the problems with it (aside from my ignorance) is that I made the mistake of giving myself two options to work with: the Arduino starter kit I’ve had on the shelf for about a year now and a Raspberry Pi Pico, which is smaller, cheaper and more powerful, but has less documentation and examples out in the wild. The Arduino has its own programming language which is quite similar to Processing, something I’ve used on and off for a while now (again, not with great success, but I’m familiar enough with the core concepts and syntax to bodge together basic programs). The Pico uses a variation of Python, which I’ve also used before, although nowhere near as much and not for years. I’m not good at programming so I rely on the familiarity to get me through.
This project relies on audio and the Arduino isn’t powerful enough even to play back a .wav file without an additional board to power it. The global components shortage means these are difficult to source and the one I was able to find comes in the form of an unassembled kit. My soldering skills are also poor and even reading the instructions for the kit made my head spin.
Theoretically the Pico has the horsepower to playback audio on its own, but I’m finding everything about it difficult to understand. The diagram explaining what the different pins are forbidding to the newcomer and there’s various complications that I can’t get my head around. I know that the Pico has the power and flexibility to do whatever I want, but my lack of Python coding and a few other things (why are the pin numbers on the underside of the board, where I can’t see them?) means the Pico just isn’t for me. For the moment, anyway. You can use the Arduino IDE with the Pico, and I suspect this is going to be the way I go. I just need a sense of the pin references and a few other things and I think that might be good to go.
For the moment, though, what’s been most fruitful has been using Arduino and Processing in tandem, with Arduino handling the sensors and sending messages via the serial port and Processing interpreting the sensor data and doing the things I want done. Ideally, I would have all the computation happening in one hardware box, but that’s a ways off now. For the moment it’s a board and some sensors and a pair of headphones, all connected to the Mac.
I’ll have to settle for this Arduino / computer combo for the moment. I might be demonstrating this in a couple of weeks, so I’m telling myself that the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Project Gielgud was my backup, a project that I turned to when I was getting very depressed about my ability to make progress on Braun. It’s an idea that I had a few years ago and has been in the ‘I should do something with that’ file for some time. It shares some low-level DNA with Braun in that its a story-telling mechanism, but you could probably say that about most of what I do. Unlike Braun, though, the technology involved is limited to bits of card that slot together. That’s very much in my existing skillset, although it’s not been implemented in quite this way before.
I had a crit with Work Show Grow on Sunday, so rushed to get a presentation together for it. One thing that came from that was using Blender as a way of putting together a virtual physical version of the structure. It was very rough, but Blender’s SVG import function makes it easy to move 2D shapes around in 3D space. After 15 odd years of using the open-source 3D software, it felt good to actually use it for something practical.
I don’t know about Gielgud. I think it might be all right, but I feel enthusiasm waning a bit. But even if it’s just something to bounce off, I think it’s worthwhile. That tick-tock schedule seems to be working pretty well for me. I do my best work when I’m meant to be doing something else.
I’ll try and post updates as I go, but that’s something I’m pretty bad at. Feels a bit like homework and I spend all day working at home anyway.
Daft Wee Stories – Limmy
Definitely a book for dipping in and out of. I’ve had it for ages and will read 2–3 at a time, although even that might be too many.
The stories aren’t more than a few pages, are often very conversational. If you’re familiar with his TV show or Twitch streaming, then you can hear his voice very clearly.
My favourite so far is ‘The Werewolf’:
Every full moon, he changed. He was a werewolf.
You wouldn’t notice him if he walked past you in the street, he looked like any other guy, but the following morning, he would change back, back into his natural form. A wolf. A wolf in a Travelodge room.
No recollection of how he came to be wearing human clothes. Nor of the newspaper lying under his paw, the crossword complete. Or of the toast crumbs on his chest.
The toast crumbs.
Oh my God, the toast crumbs!
What did he do last night?
The Five Obstructions (2003)
I first heard about this some fifteen years ago when I was loosely associated with some documentary film-makers and it was one of those ‘catch it one day’ films. Finally, I did.
The basic premise is this: Lars Von Trier tasks his friend Jörgen Leth to remake his film The Perfect Human five times, each with a new ‘obstruction’ imposed by Von Trier. From the off, these obstructions are multi-faceted. In the first remake, Von Trier insists that no edit can last more than 12 frames, that the open questions in the original must be answered and, when Leth is seen smoking a cigar while waiting for his mission, that the film must be shot on location in Cuba.
What emerges is a back and forth between the two film-makers, with the obstructions being challenged and reinterpreted between them in a gentle wrestling match as to who is in control of the project. Von Trier is on a mission to take Leth out of his comfort zone and Leth, while receptive to the process and gladly accepting of the obstructions, seems quite content with who he is.
These kinds of formalised restrictions on creativity are always interesting. I’ve done a few of them myself, both as writer and film-maker.1 The end products aren’t always satisfying or satisfactory, but the process takes you to places you wouldn’t necessarily go to under your own steam. This is certainly the case for Leth in The Five Obstructions as he heads into waters he finds deeply uncomfortable. Von Trier just seems like a sadistic weirdo, but that’s kind of appealing to watch, so long as you don’t actually have to work with him.
The Five Obstructions (2003) is available to rent or buy from Amazon Prime Video, or DVDs may be available on eBay.
The 3 Day Novel Competition, 48 Hour Short Film Weekenders, my 52 Murders project and a self-initiated piece of masochism called The October Tapes that my fetid brain came up with while Up at the Big House. ↩︎
The Odessa File - Frederick Forsyth
Frederick Forsyth is one of those names I remember seeing a lot on bookshelves when I was a kid in the 80s, but perhaps not so much any more. I had never read one, and now I have. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this caper about catching Nazis went along quickly enough. It’s strange, looking from a modern perspective, to think that there was a time when the atrocities of the holocaust weren’t really talked about or acknowledged in German society. The Odessa File was written in the late 60s or early 70s, I think, and there was clearly a lot of coming to terms with history still to be done.
It’s a historical document, of sorts, not just of Germany’s post-war psyche, but also of the type of Fiction for Men which I’m not sure still exists. There’s lots of technical details about cars (the main character drives a sporty Jag and this is a crucial plot point in the latter half of the book) and guns and just how the Nazis were organised. The main character is a German journalist with a weirdly British name, hunting down a Nazi who ran a concentration camp. Our hero likes the finer things in life, like sports cars, fine wines and making love to beautiful women. His girlfriend is a stripper, hoping to entrap him in marriage and our hero first fell in love with her when he saw how big her tits were.
Amazing.
The plot pootles along at a fair old clip and while reading it I had the image of Freddy Forsyth, happily bashing away at a typewriter while smoking Rothmans and chugging on Johnnie Walker. I don’t know why, but I found it strangely comforting.