As you might know I am currently participating in a writer’s course (Draft your novel in 16 weeks), and so I am now indeed in the middle of writing the largest piece I have ever written. I hope it will end up being a novel. At this point I wouldn’t even mind if it turned out to be a bad novel, as long as it is one. I have been working on this for about six weeks now, and I am about 37k words into the story, but I have no idea yet how I will come out.
In the meantime while I am busy writing my story, preparing the course, and making homework for the course, I have little time for other things. And so my current projects somewhat came to a halt. These include foremost the finishing the model for my 346 book, and the box, and also the printing and making of the scrolls themselves. – So a whole lot to do, really.
Some of the materials needed have arrived in the meantime, so that a lack of board is no longer an excuse for not finishing the box. But beside writing I have mainly worked on small details of the model. The bed now has a kickboard, is painted and silver plated. The bed I was lying in was missing a headboard, so also the model won’t have it either.
In the picture above, if you look carefully, you can also see first studies for a new book (the paper the bed is sittingon). Really it seems too ambitious to start anything new at this point, but, well, … To touch and to cut is an artist book that I made in 2009 (or maybe as early as 2008?) and which sold out pretty much immediately. It was a rather simple little thing, really, with just one strip of parchment paper sitting in a hardcover folder. The strip had seemingly random lines on them, but held in the right way, you could see that they were all tangent (touching) a common circle.
Curves (a circle is one) and quadrics (a circle is one) in particular have always been fascinating to me, and I love the mixture of simplicity and complexity in the work. And thus I always had been thinking of making more books about these curves. And just for the fun of it, I started with a few first trials and sketches. We’ll see whether it will lead to anything.
And lastly I wanted to share with you the folder I made for myself for the writing course. It’s nothing fancy, very utilitarian. I took a piece of cardstock (with a printed wooden pattern) and added an accordion fold to one end. Then I punched holes through all layers (save the long end which would become the title page), and glued the last flap to a piece of thick cardboard:
Next I added duct tape to the folds to make them a little less vulnerable to abrasion, and I am carrying this around with me a lot. And this is it, really. The tabs on the back now hold the hand-outs for various weeks, and the back has my homework. Works well, but only for the first eight weeks, so I’ll have to make another one for the second half of the course.
