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This will be the blog post for next month's writing newsletter but I wanted it to be a landing place for people who wanted to see a little more of what will be on display at the show in November. There is much to share about the experience both personally and as a milestone as an artist, but for now I'll just share a few pictures. 

There’s a new bartender at my brewpub day job who has a similarly lengthy resume of service jobs to mine. He’s 35 and talks about going through a mid-life crisis. He exited a career path in brewing and feels himself going backwards when he pictured not having to consider fork in the road style orientation. Obviously I was just there, attempting one last service gig after telling myself I simply had to leave the industry. Doing a coding bootcamp right before the entry level coding jobs folded in on themselves. It now having been widely revealed that the greater tech industry is a monkey’s paw.

You could call me a collector. It might even fit better than any of my other hats. Sure I write, sure I art, sure I cook, but deep down I have a collection. What my collection contains is much harder to explain.

In 2018 I quit my job and decided to give Shipwreck Press a try in a full-time small business BOSS capacity and ran through my savings in about 6 months, because I didn’t know I had ADHD and running a small business is just about the hardest thing you can do in that case. But before I went back to work, I came up with an idea.

I saw a little video this week of Zach Cregger describing the dumb elf strategy of writing. Essentially it’s a motivating principle to help you get the first draft done no matter how terrible it is, because if you have any doubt or criticism, you remind yourself that you’re paying a dumb elf $10 to write you a first draft, so of course it’s bad. In the process you will hopefully find a few things that work, know what is not working, and in the balance you will have the momentum of your thing.

This past week or two has felt like a transformation. The time leapt forward, the sun came out and made the place unnaturally warm. The sheets of snow turned to blankets of rain. And my two month headache and I wonder if it’s illness put me in the most intensive cocoon of it’s gestation so far. What is it about the seasons that allows for the shifting of the interior?

Listing off my accomplishments from 2025 in my last newsletter certainly gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling, reveling in the doing I had done. But as I think about what the year to come will look like, I have some new thoughts on how to plan. Firstly, that a year is entirely too long of a time period to set a resolution( a month is more appropriate), but also that resolutions tend to come in the form of outcome. Move apartments. Take a pottery class, etc, so on. But when those outcomes are accomplished, the payoff doesn’t always feel proportional to the achievement. Dominating your resolution checklist isn’t going to feel bad, but it also may not change your life much either.

When I lived in New York I made a new friend through an old friend I outgrew, in a very synchronous passing of the baton. This new friend so effortlessly embodied what the old struggled to provide. He was present, he was honest, and he was warm. My old friend was a blast, he was someone you loved to bring to a party. He was smart, funny, charming, but also unreliable, one foot out the door, and a bit of a lighthouse. Filling whatever he looked on with light, but never able to focus on anything for very long, a beacon and a warning both.

I was at a party the other night and I was talking to someone about zoning out. How I love to do it, especially out a window—was once called a bit of a house cat, a comparison I wear proudly. I desperately need a window, some sight line to the outside, and if I don’t have one, I’ll bore through the walls now and again with my attention.