Project-updates, Part 1.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a collected update here of the assortment of projects I currently have in the works. It seems overdue, since I have a lot going on, and only make passing mentions of various parts of these things in assorted places online. Here, then, is a bit of a catalog of my present endeavors, collected conveniently in one spot (though broken up into three entries to pardon your eyes and attention-spans.)


It might go without saying if you keep tabs on my work at all, but as someone who is rather transfixed with various ideas of “intermediality,” the media and format of most of my projects overlap and intersect with each other by design, concept, and necessity. Regardless, I will attempt to structure these updates by artistic-medium as an attempt at SOME semblance of coherency for those who happen to be outside of my head (you).


Writing-

I currently maintain four tiers of shorter-than-book-length content in various stages of the publication-submission process. These tiers are short-fiction, poetry, academic/ scholarly, and mainstream-non-fiction. In all of these tiers I try to maintain a sort of “go-big-or-go-home” submission-strategy… My thought is, why sell content to tiny, accessible outlets with extremely limited readership before you know for sure that the biggest fish in the sea don’t want the work… right? In certain tiers, then, I’ve been joking with friends lately that my current “job” as a writer is collecting rejection-letters from The New Yorker.


In addition, I’m currently working on a somewhat-unorthodox book-project. The piece is (at least tentatively) titled “Frantic Overture in Gray Minor: The Neon Sonata.” It’s not exactly a novel, not really a short-story collection, not quite a combination of the two… yet somehow all of that at once… with some additional intermedial, format-blurring twists thrown in.


My idea with this one, in terms of the goal, is self-publication… partly to help myself try to overcome a knee-jerk distaste for that “scene”… largely by allowing myself to think of that format as an experimental way of bypassing the conventional book-market in order to find unconventional sources of eyeballs for experimental works. In other words, this book is intentionally “unpublishable” by traditional “gate-keeper” publishing-industry channels, but possibly marketable to an entirely different sort of readers. (Of course, I’m well aware that this idea is particularly dicey at the moment, in the recent wake of the “50 Shades” phenomenon demonstrating so aptly WHY the traditional “quality-control” gate-keepers are in place- to keep the masses from hand-selecting complete and utter garbage… But I digress. I would be lying if I claimed that the challenge provided by such dicey-ness doesn’t excite me. I tend to like challenges.) This work is deeply connected to and overlapping with my current musical projects... which I'll talk about next.


…to be continued…