As I’m writing this, a feeling of guilt creeps up on me. This feeling of guilt is a different feeling of guilt than the feeling of guilt I had for not writing a post for this blog/newsletter (strike through whatever is true for you) for a few weeks.
Thanks to a severe bout of sheer pigheadedness I’ve put myself in a damned-if-you-do corner by starting work on yet another zine, which splits my attention once more from all the other five million things I’d like to do in my spare time.
This time, it better be good, I suppose.
While I don’t want to spoil the surprise – though can you spoil anything if no one out there is really clamouring for it, anyway? – this zine is actually a bit of a more involved project that collects multiple smaller zines. Currently, I’m at the stage where I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the basic layout formula for these smaller zines and am quite a way through putting the first one together.
That’s not the only way I’ve made more work for myself. I’ve invested in a nice printer, a paper cutter and an industrial stapler since I decided to produce these zines myself. In the past, I’ve had them professionally printed but:
My insane brain decided to create zines in a size that most printers don’t actually offer.
Most printers have a minimum amount of product one needs to order and as I’m writing this, I’m looking at a pretty significant stack of unsold issues of my City/Country/Concert zines. Being able to print just a few to sell and reprint as needed will help save me some money and, perhaps as important, save me from gaining another significant dent in my pride.
This new process will also give me a shitload of extra work. But that’s fine, I need something to do while I’m waiting around to die anyway.
I hope folks will like it.
I certainly won’t when I’m done with it.
At least at first. Because it will never be exactly the way I wanted it to be when I started the project. It will never be perfect.
And that’s ok. Eventually. Thankfully I’ve learned the art of being mild on myself in hindsight. By force, I suppose, because it was either that or death by my own hand. Through this process, I’ve learned that "perfect" is not an objective state.
In fact, putting aside the debate on whether things can even be objectively observed and weighed, perfection is not even desirable. If every project you undertook came out exactly in the state that you first pictured it, what fun would that be? What would you have learned?
It’s by doing that we iterate and improve. And it’s by fucking up that we understand that "perfect" might not actually be what the final form of the project needs to become.
Now I just need to learn to plan my free time better and not feel so guilty when I’m not being quote-unquote productive.