The Weight of Invisible Work
“Sometimes magic is just spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” - Teller
Now watch as I exploit months of work on a silly project for a single Substack essay! 🕊️
Tears of Inti started as a need. My plan for making a living from writing boils down to five novellas and twelve zines a year. When I started thinking of ideas, however, my brain had to make things complicated.
I’d grown a bit tired of the tried and true tri-fold. It’d done well for me, but if I planned to do this indefinitely, I needed more variation than art style, author, and prose. This process is thanks to Adam, who drafts his projects in InDesign. Well, after he takes them out of his notes app. That’s what makes Adam a real artist, in my opinions, whil I shivered just thinking about the lack of backups.
I bought some legal paper and began playing around with forms, landing on a “flip-top” style
Now that I had a design, I had to come up with the content. I can’t believe I drafted it this way. Looking back, it’s insane. Usually, I write in a different universe. With infinite possibilities now set before me, I had to narrow it down. For the first time ever, I leaned on the advice “write what you know.”
I have a fermented carrots recipe that I swear by. It also helped me with my gurd. That’s silly enough for me to jump off from.
This is where inspiration finally struck. It wasn’t the loud kind that makes you jump to your feet (or dive into the narrative for hours), it was the quiet kind that can only be seen in hindsight. I came up with the first sentence, one of my favorite starting points for any story.
“I was born to a couple US ex-pats in Argentina in 1977.”
Great! I can work with that. Now I just need to learn about Argentina, I guess…
This is the whipsaw of drafting something in the real world, or at least how I experience it. You say something that feels good, then realize the repercussions. The responsibility sits on your shoulder until you start to research.
Then you remember you love that part too.
I told you, I’m an amateur. Don’t worry, Adam juiced it for me.
I collected information, inspiration, and questions to answer. I spent an ungodly amount of time on google maps tracking roads, mountain ranges, and towns. Bless Wikipedia. I’d devour pages of information looking for the next slice of reality to leverage.
A narrative began to slowly, painfully form. I found designing and illustrating the artwork to be a pleasant reprieve from the task. Still, sometimes I need to write when and what I don’t want to. That’s one of the lessons I was teaching myself.
I pushed through the first draft and breathed relief, then shelved it for a month. This is what I like to do in general, but I was happy to do it this time.
When I picked it back up, it was a mess. It looked and felt alright, and Adam could help me tune that, but the story. Yikes. No wonder it’d been a pain; I’d stacked 15 plot points in half as many pages! The narrative was bloated and chaotic, and not in a fun way. This is the other half of writing in the real world. There’s so much great stuff to steal, it’s hard to draw the line!
For me, it was at twenty pages.
After a month of redrafting, I handed it off to Adam, who had some great ideas for ways to style it up, the largest of which is the revised cover.
See? I told you Adam would juice it up.
Adam went through the piece, updating font and illustrations, taking it over the finish line.
This whole process took about four months. That wasn’t constant work, obviously. Even if you count the sleeping (which included many naps), I worked on other projects, grew tomatoes, and even earned some money, believe it or not. But it takes that time, one way or the other. I couldn’t even tell you specifically how much of that time was drafting versus illustrating. I can tell you that several illustrations got made but won’t be used. There was an illustration of miso that took be the better part of a day, only to realize it belonged in an older draft; and I already told you about the ten or so plot points I had to ditch. That one’s on me.
The cutting room floor is piled with scraps up to my knees. But I’m pretty damn happy with the zine. Even though it was tough, I’m happy with the process, too. I learned so much about Argentina, saw some beautiful locations that might just inform some future travel if I’m lucky, and got to write something completely different than anything I’ve written before. It was a great experience.
I may have an ego, but it’s hard to call something I made “magic.” Still, I can attest that I (we) spent way more time on this than any person would think reasonable. Let’s get real, this is a recipe for carrots that could be stated as carrots + salt + time (it’s better than that). I could have written it as a blog post, or just taken some pictures, put them in line with text, printed the whole thing on 8.5x11 and folded it in half.
Instead, I made it harder.
I believe that the weight of the invisible work is between the lines. I’m growing more comfortable with calling myself an artist. I might be silly, but I’m intentional. That’s why all this time spent feels valuable.
But hey, a few bucks wouldn’t hurt.
Tears of Inti
Alfred Buttress documents a simple hike north that turns into an almost sacred journey. Searching for a cure to the pain in his gut, or perhaps running from painful memories, Alfred carries no comforts of his past life, save for a small journal in which he draws images that always seem to curve like a lost love’s locks.
From the Rift,
Thanks for Reading
Prefer to listen? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or using the RSS feed
