So I spent most of the last week either sleeping or suffering from the kind of low grade brain fog that makes forward progress seem impossible, even when, objectively, you know you’re making some. But, to paraphrase the Mountain Goats, I made it through this week, even if it killed me…
Progress updates first, then rambling:
- PROJECT JEAMLAND – teensy, tiny incremental progress because it was largely a recruitment phase. That said, everyone I’ve invited to the project has now replied, and I have enough warm bodies to go ahead with it.
- PROJECT PERIANDER – again, made a little progress, still trying to convince myself that leaving the house to do data collection for it constitutes ‘work’ under Victoria law, and behind that, wrestling with the anxiety that planning to do so brings on. Still, that won’t be too far away, because I need to do it to complete the current (which is to say, the first) phase of the project.
- PROJECT GALEN – is never-ending, but that being the case, I think it can go public: it’s my Reading Orders site, which, as per usual, has seen a lot of tinkering (because most of the pages in it only need small updates every so often), and a major project within it that I’m currently devoting a lot of time to, which is the Marvel Comics Multiverse. But I’ve added a good forty or so books to that over the last week, in addition to other bits and pieces, and I’m happy with how it’s going. Why, I should catch up to the present any week now! For obvious reasons, this is a marathon project, and as such, so long as I’m adding new content to the site faster than publishers are putting it out, I’m happy with how it’s going.
- PROJECT KASEM – previously un-named, is likewise a marathon project – it’s the ongoing Rock’n’Roll History of the World idea over at The Centre Cannot Hold. And I’ve added enough entries this week to feel okay with my current progress (although the ones I’ve added are reformatted previous entries rather than wholly new ones, and I very much want to do those too). This is a project I’m more or less content to let chug along, safe in the knowledge that every so often I’ll be inspired to really go to town on it and do a bunch of stuff.
- PROJECT PIPER – I have done, I am fairly sure, nothing at all on this project in the last week. Which is fine, it’s a longer term project that is queued up behind JEAMLAND anyways.
- PROJECT METAMORPHOSIS – this is a project I haven’t mentioned before. It’s an extensive writing idea that would be a marathon project with a word count in the hundreds of thousands of words, and honestly, I’m still not sure I want to commit to it. But I wrote a character sketch last night anyway because I was worried I’d lose it if I just went to sleep.
- PROJECT HAEDI – Which is an old, old project idea that I really should have done, oh, any time in the last 18 years or so, but which I am finally starting to do the work of figuring out how to do, thanks to a friend pointing me at a really cheap online course on Udemy.
I think that’s everything I have at the moment that’s either been previously mentioned or had some movement in the last week.
I did mention last week that I might explain what the project names mean, but it’s late and I don’t really want to go into that now (and my urge to ramble disappeared down an internet rabbit hole). But since I’ve already outed the projects in question, I’ll explain two of them: Project Kasem, the Rock’n’Roll History of the World, is named for Casey Kasem, a formative DJ in my childhood. And Project Galen is actually misnamed – it should be Project Galan, named for Galan of Taa, the last survivor of the universe before ours, who was reborn into the present universe and will live to see its end. Also known as Galactus, Devourer of Worlds.
See you next Wednesday