This weekend I am going to a friend’s place to play in his wife’s studio. I’ve been making twisted and malformed masks that I then torture with bolts and nails and such. I am up to nine masks created so far, but have only shot images of the first three (I’m including those in this post). I haven’t seen the ones I did last time, so am anxious to see how they survived the firing. Long term I want a dozen ones I am happy with (at least one of the ones so far isn’t that exciting to me, but I don’t hate any of them). I’ll probably end up making two or three more this weekend. I have more ideas than I can do in a day.

I want to turn around and take these masks, shoot pictures of them, and then make another image/poetry/photo gallery like I did with my “A Bloody Dark Pastryman” project. Then I want to embellish the masks and put them into wooden boxes and sell them. I’ll probably finish this project in 2010.

Originally, the idea for these masks came to me when I was staying at a monastery and wrote the poem “Making Baby.” My intent was to create a few masks, then take one and smash it, so I had mask pieces. These I was going to to put in a shadowbox with the poem and other found items, but I wasn’t unhappy enough with any of the masks to actually smash one.

I’d really like to get more images posted on one of my sites. Maybe this weekend I will make a concerted effort to get all 9 of them photographed. If I am on the ball, will even try to get “before” shots of the ones I make on Saturday.

[Update:] I found images of my second set of three masks. The can be seen after the jump.

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I sometimes wonder if it’s wrong that I actually like the things I write. All the time I used to hear, “You are your own worst critic.” I don’t really believe this. There are plenty of people out there willing to piss all over anything creative anyone does. So I write what I would like to read. Enough authors I have met have said this to me, but the first was Steven Brust. “I write what I would want to read and hope others dig it as well,” he said. I believe this is a fair enough paraphrase.

Anyway, yesterday I wrote about how it had been over a decade since I’d written a poem. Follow the jump if you want to read the first poem I wrote when I took back up my pen. I still like it. Let me know what you think.

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All the time I get mail addressed to “Dear Christ…” I guess this just means my full name is too long. Every time I see this on Amazon though, it makes me want to log out thinking, No. No I’m not.

I started writing poetry again (after over a decade long break) a little over three years ago. To me the writing has always been the beginning. Once I have a piece done I want to see how far I can take it. Produce spoken word audio. Throw it on a website. Put it together into a chapbook. Hell, even illustrate it (or have it illustrated). But the poem has always just been the start.

It’s also the easiest part of the process for me. I’ve got a backlog of poems with ideas of what to do with them. Getting to this is the rub. I decided to quit writing again partly to make things fresh once again, but mostly to force myself to approach these other projects. All I’ve managed to do, for the most part, is quit writing. Hey, it’s a step, right? Not really. I’ve been bouncing certain ideas around in my head for almost six months now with very little progress.

I guess updating my sites is a start, but not what I really want to get done! I want to put together another collection of my poems. Want to do audio for everything I have done in the last year or so (I eventually want a CD of my spoken word stuff). maybe bitching about it here will make me get off my ass and get some of them finished. I’d be happy to get just one done!

I will be coming back to this site, but I am slightly burned out here. It’s close enough to how I want it that I can see the end. Everything I have left to do will be kinda on the boring side, so I am losing excitement. I’m far from a perfectionist, but I do want this site to be as close to as possible. But I also want to work smarter and not harder. Now I have to figure out a few things and get them set up on this page before I turn around and use this template on multiple pages. Any changes I make here after I call it done will have to be made at least 5 more times. I’d rather not have to do that.

So I am taking a functionality break and won’t be doing anything more here until I get my other site rolling a bit. I’ll still make updates to the journal part, but anything else will probably have to wait.