INSIDE TWICE - The Journey so far: Part 2

SUBSCRIBER NOTES FOR EPISODE FIFTY SEVEN:

Hi again, and welcome back to the second of three posts on my experience of the TWICE serial project so far. But before I plunge back into that, just a reminder: I am still interested in feedback from any of you about whether occasional ‘small-group’ Zoom video gatherings with me to talk more freely about TWICE or other creative arts topics are or aren’t of interest to any of you. If you’ve got an opinion about this, I hope you’ll let me know!

Last week, I talked some about when and how TWICE started as project for me, and how it evolved prior to my decision to present it as an illustrated online serial. This week I’m going to share some thoughts about how I imagined this serial when I first put it together a little over a year ago, and how things have actually turned out since then.

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HOW HAS MY ORIGINAL VISION OF TWICE STACKED UP TO THE REALITY SO FAR?

Unsurprisingly, this project has steadily evolved since its commencement last year. What I’m doing here, how best to do it, and even WHY I’m doing it have all changed—and continue to change—as I go about putting the serial out each week. And, as always, looking at my initial plans and assumptions—and what happened when I started trying to enact them—provides an interesting view of ME and my—er—personal foibles. :]

When I began planning how to approach an online serial of TWICE, and building the web infrastructure to do so, my decisions were shaped by all kinds of utterly untested assumptions.

FIRST, I was not out to make money. Not right now or anytime soon, off the story itself, at least. That was not the point. The point was to get this story I’d been working on for years moving toward completion, and to build two things: an online audience, and a community of readers with whom I could have direct back and forth contact as I worked to continue constructing and shaping both the story itself, and the web-venue through which it would be shared. If there were ever opportunities to ‘monetize’ this work, they would involve secondary off-shoots of the serial itself: (published hard media versions of the tale, secondary publication rights, sale of art-related products, other writing work… ) somewhere well down the line. With those goals in mind, I didn’t want people to have to struggle with the decision about whether or not to subscribe, so—against the advice of some writer and online entrepreneur friends—I decided just to offer subscriptions for early access to new episodes, so that I had some way of gauging interest and participation ‘out there’ and connecting with readers, but to make those subscriptions free, and let anyone read previous episodes on the TWICE site. It costs nothing, so why not?…Right? Well, I clearly didn’t understand at least three things (among others I likely STILL don’t understand). One was that just just the subscription itself was going to be an extra layer of ‘complication’ for a lot of people who have come to expect instant and effortless access to ‘free’ things. The second was that some people were going to be made uncomfortable by the very concept of ‘free subscription.’ Why’s he doing subscriptions at all? What’s he going to use our email addresses for? Is he going to sell the list to someone—or use it himself for some other purpose? Nope. But it didn’t even occur to me to say so overtly on the site. And, thirdly, the rinky-dink, homemade manner in which I implemented subscriber links to each week’s latest episode made those links a breeze to hack. So, as time went by it became clear that there was more and more traffic to the site, but no increase in subscriptions.

Plus there was the fact that, unless you subscribed early on, subscribers started getting links to new episodes they ‘shouldn’t read’ until they’d read an ever-expanding back-list of previous episodes first—which they never had time to do—so why keep getting links you had no use for ‘right now’ when the back-list was always waiting there on the TWICE site’s Archive page anyway?

All of which is to say that—one year in—I have no real idea how many people are or aren’t actually reading this serial, much less who they are, or how to connect with them about any of it. I continue to explore this issue and how better to approach it.

SECOND, I made the hilarious calculations that I would have “all week to do ONE drawing” and that since “the first half of the story was already written,” there’d be “lots of time to write the rest before I got to it.” …Let’s all just take a moment to laugh ourselves sore, wipe our eyes, shake our heads, and wonder how, after 63 years, I can STILL be so clueless. …Okay. Got all that done? :] Great.

As NO ONE BUT ME will be surprised to hear, I have never, NOT ONCE, since launching this serial last year had ‘all week’ to do ANYTHING, much less illustrations for TWICE. Even before we lost yet another close family member very unexpectedly in January—and couldn’t arrange a California memorial service before the pandemic made travel and gatherings too risky—life just never stopped tossing virtually weekly surprises our way to leave me with virtually NO time to sit down and do the beautiful illustrations I had originally imagined. The pandemic actually just increased the amount of time my wife and I had to spend fulfilling commitments to family, clients, and community programs we’d already agreed to, or which became necessary because of the world’s changing circumstances.

At the same time, it quickly became clear that the 60% of this story I had written and polished—a decade ago—had been executed by a…um…much less experienced writer. That writer had missed all sorts of important tricks and opportunities, failed to fully understand what important chunks of the story were really even about—and frankly, just wasn’t as good with basic mechanics as he seems to be now. So, instead of just publishing existing episodes through much of last year, while I worked on remaining episodes months or years ahead of time, as I’d imagined doing, I’ve been rewriting nearly every episode—and radically restructuring the whole story—every week—as I go. Is this exciting? You bet! Am I happy about the results? Elated! Has it allowed me to concentrate on all the other things I thought I’d be free to do during the same periods of time? …Nope.

One of the biggest issues to become clear early on was that I was going to have to concentrate on EITHER the writing, or the art, here. There wasn’t going to be anything like time to take both of them ‘all the way’ to where I’d imagined going. You can go back and look at early episodes and literally see this happening, if you know to look for it—as you watch completely hand generated images change to images cobbled together with filters and ‘found components,’ and different images above and below the episode text become alternative crops of a single image… The story itself has always been the main event for me, and I saw no point in beautifully decorating a mediocre rendition of that tale. So, I resigned myself to approaching the serial’s illustrations as what ‘illustration’ so often is: ‘decoration.’ An image to make the experience and feel of that chunk of story more vivid and stimulating. Hopefully these images have succeeded in performing that function well. But the lion’s share of my real creative attention and potential is being lavished on the writing itself. Someday—when the whole story is complete, and the writing’s done—I may go back and do new illustrations for it, when I can apply ALL of my available time and energy to that one creative task. But for now, I have learned that famous old lesson—yet again—that the best way to do nothing well is to try doing lots of things well all at once. :] Never too old to learn, it seems. And I AM still trying to learn.

AND THIRD: There are so many more things I could say about the ways in which my own understanding of this project has changed and is still changing at this point. But, having ‘bent your eye’ for quite a while already, I will confine myself to just one more.

Even the WHY of this project has changed considerably for me during the past year—very much in keeping with changes in my understanding of and approach to life in general as we all navigate the unforeseen challenges of 2020. When I launched TWICE, I had ideas about how this project fit into some larger, longer strategy in regard to building my career as ‘a creative.’ During the past few years, I have been coming to understand, more and more deeply, how much ‘professional agendas’ can distract one from the value of simply living one’s daily life. I’m referring to a growing sense of the value in doing things that are of worth to do in and of themselves, and the dubious wisdom of wasting time on things that are NOT intrinsically worth doing for their own sakes—if you can avoid it. I’m sure this shift in focus is partly due to the experience of watching so many people I admired and cared about grow old or ill and die during the past four or five years. I understand now, more viscerally than I ever have before, that things can’t just be postponed forever, and that no one is going to have EVERYTHING finished by the time they need to let ALL of it go. So—either we start MAKING choices at some point, or they end up making us. But that understanding has has only been accelerated by our move to a place with as much beauty and lively experience as Orcas Island offers us—and that we all too often ignore in our rush to finish other tasks—everyday. And, of course, it has also been driven home by the amazing array of historic challenges confronting not just one group or another, but the entire human community these days, and a growing awareness of how depleted the world’s general supply of, or even capacity for, careful attention, contemplation, and reflection seems to have become. So MUCH noise, about such VAST things—all of it crucially necessary and important—but requiring as much or more quite careful perspective in balancing proportion than ever.

Which, in regard to TWICE, is just to say that during the past year—and even more during the past six months—I have come to care much, much less, if at all, about where TWICE ‘gets me’ or what it does for me professionally—somewhere down the road, or even now—than I care about becoming more attentive to the pleasure of DOING IT—AS I’m doing it. I have found a weird, but potent sense of freedom in trying to put together each segment of this long, rich tale for the task’s own sake, then—as I have said elsewhere—‘curling it into a bottle,’ so to speak, and ‘tossing it over my shoulder into the sea,’ without looking back to see which way it drifts, much less what, if any, other shore it ever washes up on. To my own amazement, it seems I am reaching that part of life where one must start doing things that ‘matter’ to one’s self, even as one prepares to let go of them. Completely.

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That’s it for this week. Thank you SO MUCH for subscribing to these posts, and for sharing the journey through TWICE. See you next week!