Incorporating Images

Had a very busy weekend. Started by transferring all of the post its I currently have into a Google doc, which I have shared with everyone via email (hopefully - let me know if anyone didn't get it). I'll also leave a link here to the doc in case anyone wants to revisit the document later as I add to it and can't find it otherwise.

New writing from the weekend - selections typed below

Why do people shove bibles in your face when you work retail? Do they decide who’s a godless heathen in need of salvation or do they distribute the word of their lord indiscriminately? Do they have a mental checklist to identify who will apparently be going to hell without their immediate intervention?

I wish I didn’t hate driving. I think it would be a great escape for me - let me go wherever I wanted, whenever I needed. Driving at night in the rain, low beats thrumming through the speakers as I leave my worries behind me, if only for a little while. Too bad I fear death every time I get behind the wheel, no matter how safe it is. Certain experiences are hard to forget.

I can’t imagine how some people value money and power over human life and safety. It hurts to know that to some people, the lives of others is worth less than what the NRA can stuff in their coffers.

Signs you’ve been awake too long: getting weepy when your Dad texts you to let you know they ordered a bag of your favorite coffee for you after you mentioned running out a week ago.

I’ve a new found appreciation for music that has been muffled to sound as though it’s coming from another room, or played in an empty shopping center. I can’t explain why, it’s subpar quality in some respects, and harder to make out subtle musical details the artists worked hard on, but it just seems to cater to my creativity late at night. It evokes this mood that I can relate to, even if I can’t put a word to the exact feeling it creates within me. It’s calming and just a touch somber. 

Spent several days by myself - I can’t believe how much I missed the silence. Missed the comfort of quiet music without interference while my shoulders slowly sink from their constant position up by my ears to a relaxed [read: normal] posture. The calm is absolutely rejuvenating in a way I can’t describe.

Also spent a portion of the weekend creating and updating my website so that I'll have one to put on business cards for the show when the time comes around.

Then as I was transferring the post-its, I came to realize I've written very similar things multiple times over the last few weeks, which was a bit frustrating. It made me think that perhaps recording these in this method is only a step toward a better way to use the writing I have done so far. Rather than keep all of these idle, one-off thoughts, I think I'd rather take them in a more narrative direction - give some cohesion to the writing. Especially due to the fact that most of the post-its keep to a limited selection of topics, I think it would be better to split the topics up and place them into separate books/zines. It would get my points across better, and now that I have a huge body of work to draw from, I feel its time to tell the stories I want to tell, in the way I want to tell them.

Going along with this idea are a few quick photos I put together with text as models/mock-ups for potential zine/book covers or I was thinking of creating some large (18x24"-ish) screen printed posters of similar imagery to the photos below, as I noticed while going through my old phone pictures that I've taken a lot of "moody" (for lack of better term) environmental pictures over the last few years, and think it would go well with the over-all somber nature of what I've been writing. I still need to tweak them, and ideally as I said I would do these as screen prints or at the very least large scale digital illustrations rather than as photos since it's more along the lines of what I prefer to do since photography admittedly isn't my strong suit.

Testing potential titles for separating the main topics into books

I think I'll remove the brackets next time around, they seem unnecessary looking at it now.

I do think if I were to do them as posters rather than as book covers, I would omit the text or keep it down to a few words or a title, as using too much text tends to make them read a bit like memes or badly made self-published book covers which isn't quite what I intended, or it just fits awkwardly on the image.

I'll work on the illustrative portion over this week to have more concrete examples to show for when we next meet.