Maybe Project Endings Don't Have to Be So Intense
I have to do a presentation on my 3-month project in a few days. I had a good call with a very smart person today named Tasshin who encouraged me not to be nervous. The book is done and I can announce it as done. It just is not formatted for delivery yet ;)
In all honesty though, the whole point of the project was to try to write a book from the beginning by working on it a little bit every day without worrying too much about it. I wanted to see what would come out. I am currently very happy with what came out, and doing the final “polishing” step in a very stressed way would be antithetical to the original goals for the project, which were not quite to finish a book, but to finish a book without any unnecessary strains.
I suppose straining about the presentation would be an unnecessary strain against the spirit of the thing. And so I have to give the presentation and prepare for it without any strain! Ah!
Tasshin is the person who inspired me to think about the muses, and to ask them directly for what they want of me and what is needed. When I asked, they suggested that I not strain this final push, and that it should not be a push, and that it can be pretty chill. This was very meaningful to me.
I don’t know where the meme is about the “final sprint” or the “final polish.” I guess if there is a deadline, making sure everything is really good before the final submission is the general ethos. School and college were like this too.
But for actually long projects the “final sprint” isn’t much of a sprint and is more of a continuation of the project, and so treating it as a new kind of category doesn’t make much sense. And maybe it wants to be sprinted and maybe it wants something else to be happening.
He asked me to ask what my project wants to be happening. I said I felt a sense of large agora bunnies, and that I am just supposed to hang out with them and my project. Everything I want in it is already there. He asked what this means practically speaking, and I said that it means that whenever I feel some strain or annoyance about for example formatting some heading, instead of “pushing through the pain” or ignoring the pain to tap into a certain momentum, I should…not. This is the energy of, stopping and cleaning my screen if it’s bothering me versus…not…doing that because I’m on a roll. The energy that came to mind was one where “being on a roll” wasn’t…what was needed.
This idea that endings do not have to be done a “certain way” and there is no real reason for them not being just as flowy as the beginning is kind of mindblowing to me. I was always somebody who assumed that a middle, a beginning, and an end had different strategies and goals, like in chess. But this is probably a mindset that has held me back over the years that I would like to change.
So…now what.
After the call I sat down to work, with the contents of the call in working memory cache, and this is what came out.
I made this cover today, which is an AI visualization combining a few of my actual real-life watercolor paintings. I like that it spun them up into a world all together, and how many original elements the rendering is very faithful to.
There was no real reason for me choosing these paintings, other than I liked them and sent them to someone today for a different reason, noticing for the first time that they have similar elements, and they are colorful.
This is not at all what I had imagined my cover to look like. I’d imagined something much more basic, because I imagined I would make it myself in canva, and not with AI. I imagined it would be something like this:
But after talking to Tasshin, you know, why not. I like that crazy picture. I like how unrestrained it is. If some smart person later tells me it’s completely deranged, at least I had fun with it for a while.
The key words from our call was to allow myself to be unfiltered, because that’s how the fun will come out. The world needs more people having fun and being unfiltered.
And now the more overtly heaven and hellish version. This amuses me because these kinds of edits are the kind I would make in real life too! I often add more darker colors in the bottom to add some weight to the painting, and then some last light strokes in pencil and some random lifting of the watercolor (the new sunbeams). As in real life, I cannot tell if it is overworked or not.
