... And Now for the BTS (Patreon)

So. It's been awhile since I've had something I needed to lock up behind some of the tiers on here, but this warrants it.

Only $5 and up patrons are getting this message, because this is still largely secret.

I have a thing about projects I work on: the less people know about it, the more I want to work on it. However, this one feels like a journey worth writing about.

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In the summer of 2014, I purchased one of the weirdest, most mysterious novels to ever be suggested to me from my favorite local oddities and geek culture store. It was a big volume, intimidating when flipped open to the middle, and the most wonderfully confusing mess I'd ever seen laid to paper.

I hadn't read a proper novel since 2012 at that point, and I had been a voracious reader all my life until the pause. It felt good to get back into something, especially such a unique treasure.

Over the course of three days, I got lost in the ______________.

When I finally came up for air at the end, I wasn't the same. I think that can be said for many of its readers. That novel, it's not just a book--it changes people. It takes your sensitivities in immersion as a reader and exploits them in ways you've never felt. It's a ghost that you welcome into your home and let haunt you, and it stays, always in the background.

Sometimes you forget it's there, until a webseries comes around and features it prominently for a moment, showing off a passage that brings back memories.

And when you remember, you remember over and over again, until the new haunting gets too strong. It's time to go back, time to enter again and see if it all looks the same or if time and experience has granted new insight. 

I have finished reading it again, and its accompanying volume.

And this project, like "Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared" before it and "Marble Hornets: Explained" before that, is bigger than me. Grander than my capabilities right now.

And yet, it's all I want to make. I've got visions that are stronger for this than any I've had during October and it's of the same flavor of desire instilled by the novel itself. 

This will take time. This will take preparation. This will take me doing things I'm genuinely a little bit afraid to do.

And yet, it has to be done, because it's the only way it offers itself to me.

There's no fighting this story--there's just going inside and allowing yourself to be at its mercy. See what comes of it, see if it eats you or reforms you or returns you right or even better than you were.

It will take a bit of time, but I have time. And I have a new obsession.

And when I have an obsession, I do my work and do it right and do it fully.

Currently: Re-read is done. Notes taken. Lots to think about. Need to let it simmer and need to attend to this month's public work. I still have initiative to make videos on other things right now and celebrate the season. Besides, if there is an art and a rhythm to this project (and there will be, as is the nature of this paper beast), December must hold Business As Usual, followed by the great disturbance in January, and from there, the telling.

I need a new camera.

I need to do research.

I need to consult my musician friend and give him what is very long overdue. 

I need a beat-up leather jacket and a young man with old eyes.

But first, I have an SCP Foundation special to make and a December to keep in tone of the year before Night Mind goes down a very cold, dark hallway.

I've had a lot of fun in performance, standing next to the art in a lot of work this past year or two. Now, I want to stand behind it, offstage, and just let it play. It's the only way to go deeper.

I know you understand, and I love you for it.

2019 is a good year to fix things and find things worth discovering.