Looking for my Next Book in My Archives
A new working title and a surprise announcement
Hello, Weirdos!
Before I get to this week’s Book Project Update, I have a couple of updates. First, I made a free downloadable PDF from last week’s digital zine, A Study in Loneliness. Feel free to download your copy here, share it, print it out, or just look at it instead of scrolling social media.
Second, my next full collection of haiku comics is coming very soon! Below is my current version of the cover—it still needs some work. I’ve decided to indie-publish this book. Since the book is complete, except for the layout, I will be launching it in late August or early September. Pre-sales will begin in the next two weeks in the Weirdo Poetry store!
Haiku Comics from the Anthropocene features some of my best work. I’m excited to get it into your hands!
And now onto the show!
The Next Book Project Update #2
I’m still wrestling with what this book wants to be. I wrote a few paragraphs in the guidebook vein, but it was all fairly bland.
As part of this process, I’ve been thinking about the elements of my unique artistic voice. What makes something a Weirdo Poetry project? What are the strands of my artistic DNA?
The words that keep coming back to me are:
Haiku
Poetry Comics
Punk Rock
Solar Punk
Hopecore
Weird
Wabi-Sabi
Human
Beauty
Collage
This may not seem like much, but I see them as clues that I can follow as I move forward.
One of the unique things I need to consider at the outset of a book project that will be partially, if not fully, illustrated is the trim size of the eventual book. The trim size affects the size and dimensions of the illustrations I make.
All of my previous publications, with the exception of the two Surreal Haiku zines, have been 5.5 x 8.5 inches. But this book feels like it needs to be bigger. I’m leaning toward making something 8 x 10 inches. However, I’m still learning about what this book is, and what it’s whispering to me throughout each day.
Most of my work on this book this week was looking through my photos on my phone and my physical and digital archives.
One thing I found was the cover for my very first book, published way back in 2012. I ended up unpublishing it in 2013. It was a collection of personal narrative essays, an early attempt at memoir. The book had a lot of problems, but every so often, I get the feeling I need to revisit it.
Here was the last cover it had before I killed it:
For now, I’m making the working title of this mystery book, Sneaker Waves. I will probably add a subtitle later. I love the idea of resurrecting the title Sneaker Waves and reshaping some of the material in that first book.
Here are some of the photos I pulled out to use as inspiration and reference as I write some haiku and create some illustrations:
As I was rummaging through stuff, partly procrastinating and partly letting my creative discovery process work in the background, I found this file box containing a treasure trove of index cards from 2019-2020.
These cards show a mix of different experimental phases. I used to have the creative practice of doing something with index cards every night before bed. I started this in 2019 after being diagnosed with kidney cancer and getting sick with a nasty intestinal infection that landed me in the hospital.
In 2020, as the pandemic struck, I added more visual art.
The categories these cards were filed under are: poetry comics, Twisted Haiku comics, micro-memoir, doodle flash fiction, and essay graphics. I may have published some of these in this newsletter when I was first starting back in 2019, but I don’t think I’ve ever shared most of these cards before now:
What does all this stuff have to do with Sneaker Waves? A lot. I’m going to go back to working with index cards as a regular part of my creative practice. I’m going to get a new box and keep index cards and ephemera related to Sneaker Waves. I feel that this book is going to be some combination of collage art/comics, illustrated memoir, poetry comics, and storytelling about not just my life, but also the beaches where so many important events in my life have happened.
From the outside, it may not look like I made any progress on this book project this week. A productivity guru would surely be shaking their head.
But now I know what direction to head next. It’s time to write some more coast haiku comics and write a new personal essay about one of my beach stories.
I can’t wait to see what happens this week!
Be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
It's fun watching your mind at work. Productivity gurus don't know from Shinola.
Setting direction and purpose for any book is essential not only to its coherence but to its success.