Years ago, I had a vision for something.
I tried to shake it, but it was sticky, like a glob of mint chewing gum pressed onto the bottom of the middle-school desk inside of the back of my skull. We all know what happens to that gum, it just turns to something like concrete, but with fingerprints.
I tried to abandon it, and kind of did for a while, but kept coming back to it. Less like a puppy, and more like an old Nintendo game I never really liked, but once in a while would decide to boot back up again, but surprising me that I got a little further to the end each time even after walking away for ages.
For whatever reason, it feels like the universe won’t let me move on with my life until I deal with it. Maybe that’s actually just my own damage and I’m blaming it on the universe, but the universe hasn’t told me it minds and in fact has kind of acted complicit, so it’s guilty by association.
Funny timings, like when I was 80% done with a manuscript and had struck out with a printer, a buddy working on another project told me about who he was using to print, and badabing, it was gonna work.
Then, the first prototype arrived.
P.1
Two copies.
Like any appearance model, getting the thing in-hand is magical.
THIS VISION IS A REAL THING WE CAN TOUCH.
It has texture, kind of silky on the outside and just papery enough on the inside.
The pages make a swooshing sound I muted for you because I want you to eventually buy one to hear it properly.
The layout sucked, the graphics didn’t look good, there were whole-ass sections that I wrote just to have them in there to send it to the printer.
But the words were all painstakingly written by me, the illustrations are kind of mine iterated over hours and countless tweaks with generative and other digital tools, the layout and design (shitty as it might be) is my hackjob.
Hours later, I turned it around with edits for P.2, arriving next week, ten copies. Also not perfect, but better.
The beatings will continue until my morale improves, when I feel satisficed. That will be the end of P.x and into V.1.x, and the beginning of a new journey.
While building the booklet, I gave it all of my focus, letting things wither a bit here and on productbriefly.com. This was necessary, to give some space for that next phase, but now the work from the booklet is starting to map back to the digital domains.
Seems unlikely that it will be anything other than sporadic and messy, but if that’s your thing maybe you can keep me company and we can move through this together.
With love,
Colin