Posted by bzedan on Aug 11, 2025
Image description: A hand holding a matte photo print that has patchy-looking ink. It is of a landscape, a rural coastal road curving up a slope to a vanishing point at the cusp, under a grey-white sky. The centre rectangle of the image has been painted over with the same scene, kind of like how Wile E. Coyote tries to trick Roadrunner. End ID.
One of my tasks this week was looking over an old story and doing some fresh-eyed editing to get it ready for submission somewhere. This one got rejected somewhere with the feedback "We enjoyed this story's thoughtful demonstration of the tech & toll of VR webcamming, but we wanted more conflict to drive the plot." Which remains so funny to me because the whole vibe or tone of the piece was to mimic the low stakes, soft energy of ASMR/POV type videos. Lol, it's a vignette, bitch?!
Anyway I'm reading it over like um, six? Years since I wrote it and I like it still. What a nice feeling. Didn't see the ending coming but it made me laugh a little. Anyway, odds are it'll be rejected and I'll share it then. The market I want it for opens September so, sorry, you'll need to be patient.
I started a new planner/tracker this week. That's a total of seven daily or weekly planners or trackers I use simultaneously. This is a normal amount. Sometimes you just need to use a project-planner approach for something even if it's more nebulous than a project is, really (the project: get over summer slump and charge with fruitful energy into the end of the year). I'm only a couple days in but I know my silly little brain and think it's going to go well.
Please enjoy July's entry for the "dude you gotta print one thing a month because it keeps the ink heads clear" challenge. No lie, if I was the kind of person who had shows I'd do a gallery show of just landscapes with some Wile E. Coyote paintings over them. I totally crunched the ink on the print with the tape I used to block out the painted bit so I... just put tape over the places that looked fine and pulled them off too. Evens!
Speaking of gallery shows, Chase's prints are up at Helen's Costume in Portland, there are some good pics of the installation and pieces up!
Thank you for your support! I hope the summer heat has been, or will be, kind to you!
Crossposted to Patreon.