This is just a quick entry to let those of you still reading this know I am in fact still alive. My intention to try and write something, if not every day, then at least every week, has taken a fairly comprehensive beating in the last few weeks, though I am a little buoyed up by the realisation that this entry, when it goes live, will mean this blog already has as many entries for 2025 as it does for the whole of 2024. This is largely to do with my having moved or, more precisely, me still being in the process of moving - having been forced out of my old flat due to a disagreement with the landlord about what constituted a reasonable amount of rent for the property, I am currently staying with family while trying to find somewhere else to live. I'm sure it will come as a shock to you that this is not proving easy: as an underemployed multiply mentally and physically disabled fat trans woman on benefits you would think private landlords would be goring each other like bulls in Pamplona as they beat a path to my door but this does not, in fact, seem to be the case? Weird. And my attempts at sorting out social housing are proving similarly frustrating though there, at least, I have people on the case. But obviously all of this is taking up a lot of my time, so snatching a moment to jot down an update here and there has been difficult.
One thing I have been managing to snatch time for fairly consistently has been preparing a new version of one of the earliest projects I attempted when I started drawing a little over a year ago - specifically, creating a comic book version of my poem 'The Author Has Been Tweeting'. It's been gratifying to see how much my skills have improved, especially when it comes to drawing stuff outside of my usual comfort zone like boats, furniture, architecture etc. There's a two-panel page in this which I'm really proud of not just in terms of subject matter but in terms of my understanding how comic book pages work - the weird cinematics of the comic strip space. I'm thinking that when this is finished and I can get it scanned I might release it somehow as a zine.
Yes, I am still working on stuckfearkarma too. I have an MSS ready to go in PDF format there, and just need to sort out the cover and get it printed. Whether I can stick to my original plan of handbinding the pamphlets remains to be seen, however. I guess it depends on how important that is to people compared to getting hold of a copy sooner rather than later. However I wind up publishing it, though, it won't be through Kindle Direct Publishing - I'm thinking it's time to get out from the shackles of the Bezoid permanently. Which might mean delisting the existing books I have on KDP at some point and looking at getting some new editions printed, maybe even working with an actual publisher, assuming any would have me. Who knows? Maybe it might be time to do a selected...
Other projects I'm working on include a new video for my YouTube channel about an old sci-fi story I've been thinking about a lot lately. Unlike a lot of my videos, which I tend to produce as just visual companions to essays posted on here, I feel like this one really does need to be done in video format - it just feels more 'tubey'. There might even be a couple of companion videos to go with it, because I've been rereading a bunch of other old stories by the same guy and I have Thoughts about those, too. If you want an idea of the general vibe, check out that thing I wrote about Elon Musk a few years ago, but with some more stuff about AI, art, and how hard the basic assumptions of some of that embarrassingly old sci-fi seem to be to shift, in the case of certain peoples' minds at least. A deficiency of imagination.
Finally, with one fairly obvious exception: the pictures accompanying this entry were all taken at Minster Acres Retreat Centre on a retreat with some colleagues from the local Recovery College at which I volunteer. This is not something I discuss in any great detail on this blog, both for reasons of general confidentiality and my own tendency towards reticence on some aspects of my life, and to be honest this is not going to change much. But I am, as I've mentioned before, in the process of developing a programme of creative writing workshops for students there, so I imagine some insights from the process of devising and giving said workshops may well find their way into this blog in some general way.
And at some point, I need to write a piece about Paul Schrader that I really am not looking forward to writing, but given how much I've written about his movies, and how much many of them have influenced my own ethical outlook, I guess I kind of have to.
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