The Long Apprenticeship: On Creative Development

Here’s why: due to a family tradition of just fucking impeccable timing, I recently put a cap on two projects, both of which took an inordinately long time. One is a still-pretty-secret translation project, alluded to elsewhere, which consumed my every free hour for eighteen months, as well as much of my brain power the rest of the time. The other is ten years in the making: a novella, entitled The Horn, the Pencil, and the Ace of Diamonds, forthcoming from us. Is that tacky? Yes. But I promise I’m going somewhere this.

Personal, Written by: EdgarC.-E. BoylesMarch 18, 2020Personal, creativity, Reflection, The Horn, Translation, memoirComment

So You Can't Quit Your Day Job: Towards a New Popular Modernism

I’ve been struggling with it, myself. I have to ask: how do we keep the forward momentum on our projects when we have to rent our bodies for hours every day just to keep hot food in our bellies and a roof over our heads?

Written by: Cameron, CommentaryCameron SummersDecember 4, 2019creativity, Art, Really Existing Capitalism, Popular ModernismComment

Doing Art: Some Ways to Unshackle Creativity

These are not the steps to creativity, nor are they merely tools that you use as you proceed in your own acts of creation. They are options that I hope you can make use of as you work on your art. Anyone who purports to offer you a foolproof guide to creativity is just as suspect as someone who is offering you a foolproof guide to critical thinking. Anyone you believe on this topic is going to (unintentionally?) sabotage you.

A Wind Out of Nowhere: The Utopian Impulse

That’s a bit of a left turn, there at the end, but it’s on my mind a lot lately. Give a well-educated person not one but two jobs where their major duty is reading signs to people and you’re bound to get weird.

"This Ain't Catholic": Cassandra's Magic

In Episode 8 of Perdition’s Teeth, the characters veer from the highway and into the home of Cassandra, a mountain-dwelling fortune teller. In many ways, this episode was my baby (and, again, props to Moe A. Barria, who did a phenomenal job of bringing Cassandra to life), and not least of those was the way it finally foreground people actually doing magic, instead of finding only its remains, or worse, having it done to them.

Written by: Edgar, Analysis, Perdition's TeethMaggie BoylesFebruary 6, 2019Process, Writing, creativity, Gothic