The State of Things: November 24, 2024 (Sick Week Edition)

This week feels like it’s gonna be a bear: four assignments to juggle—including a partial rewrite of a big paper, a mock grant pitch, and a mock grant application—plus Thanksgiving. To top it all off, I’ve come down with a cold and the sore throat from hell.

So this is Sick Week, where my diet has been reduced to cough drops and Triscuits, I contend with mental fog and nutritional deficiency, and I try to make sense of the world (more than usual) while drowsy from cough medicine.

My savior has been salt water. Warm, briny water bubbling over raw flesh, drawing out the impurities. I wish I’d done it sooner—it would have spared me a horrible, sleepless night. If I could install a salt water fountain of the back my throat, I’d do it.

Amid the bullshittery, there have been some bright spots in the online world. A wave of brave creativity seems to have swept through a few of the content creators I follow. They’re tiptoeing out of their comfort zones, trying out new ideas—whether it’s taking commissions from their chats or trying their hand at storytelling.

It’s almost like a hint that the streaming landscape might be shifting with creators experimenting with different gigs or hobbies. After the challenges I’ve had to face this year, it fills me with hope, because I would like to see this online space improve with some leadership and overdue change. Fresh paint in an old space doesn’t hurt, either.

I hope these creators keep at these side projects, whether they’re diversions for a “change of scenery” or ongoing endeavors that may lead to new ventures. In any case, it’s nice to see or hear that they’re genuinely happy about doing something new. And I’m pretty happy for them.

Speaking of something new, I’ll show you a new method of planning my story projects:

Ever since I discovered the convenience of typing in a word processor, I’ve kept most of my projects in electronic forms. We can debate how working exclusively on devices impacts the brain—there are plenty of studies and books on the subject—but I find myself less motivated to work on a project if it’s on my computer or in a cloud. I can easily log in or power up the machine in seconds, but the drive to actually work on the project is barely there. On a screen, even with the ease of Affinity Publisher, the work feels lackluster.

But planning a story on paper? There’s something deeply satisfying about taking plain sheets of paper, cutting them along folded edges, and gluing the spines together to make booklets. Scribbling on sticky notes and rearranging them feels tactile, somehow more alive than typing on a keyboard. I can physically see the book forming in my hands—where illustrations might work, where pages need the most text, how the final product might look.

That’s what I did with Eximirene and Stincorp not too long ago. Ideas started brewing. Why limit Eximirene to an audio drama? What if Grin’s private confessions were dreary charcoal illustrations before the story switched to script? For Stincorp, I could have faux government speak interspersed with digitized “photos” from Farseer 9’s potato device—maybe even a few chapters where the photos are arranged like comics, which would be a nice homage to the original Stincorp. These projects could still become audio stories, but turning them into books—or zines—has given them a new life I hadn’t expected.

This brings back memories of being a kid, sitting up in bed with a flashlight and hoping the glow wouldn’t show under the door while I scribbled longhand in a five-subject notebook meant for school.

Even in my cough medicine haze, this way of working makes me feel strangely, wonderfully happy.