Stumbling into a "life project"
(A quick note to subscribers: Yes, I know, it’s been a while! I have several articles that are just about ready to post; I promise you they’ll be worth the wait, and then some. Meanwhile, my apologies for the delay, which is partly explained by life events, and partly by my focus on completing a project like no other. Read on for more about that project, and note that all paid subscribers will get a free copy of this work as soon as it’s published. See the end of the post for how to get a free preview version. Meanwhile, and I don’t want to give too much away about this post, but there will be talk of obscure print technologies, shivering in dirt holes, duct-taped fans, mobile app madness, and Segway scooters.)
It’s a winter night in late 1992, or maybe it’s early 1993. I’m out walking in one of those extra thick fogs that occur when a sunny winter day of snow evaporation turns into a frigidly cold night, and all that liberated water sublimates back into a dense icy mist. I’m alone in a wooded park, wide awake and restless, and I’m not happy. I climb down a steep embankment towards a narrow creek that winds through the park. I strip naked, noting how the thick air feels no colder against my skin than it did against my clothes. I slide down the muddy shore and dunk my body and head completely under. The water is much colder than the air, as I knew it would be, but at that age I could never back away from a physical dare I’d given myself, unless I thought it might actually kill me.
Scrambling back up the muddy embankment and into the foggy night, I feel calmer, less restless. Ready to walk back home and go to bed. Before leaving the park, I hear voices. Or at least I think I hear voices. Or maybe I do hear voices, but it’s really just some other sound that gets misinterpreted in my head. But what I think I hear is young children playing, screaming in a way that could be joyous or terrified, which either way makes no sense given when and where I am. I look around, but all I can see through the dense fog is empty park. I move in the direction of the sounds, but as soon as I do they seem to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. Dazed, uncertain, and for reasons that to this day baffle me, at that very moment my mind comes up with the key pieces of the puzzle to turn what had been little more than an occasional daydreamed story idea I’d been kicking around, into a narrative compelling enough to turn into a fully formed work of fiction, one so compelling to me that I just could not let go of it, no matter how many times the universe demanded I put it on hold, for the next three decades.
This story of my late-night walk in the park is true, so far as I remember, but I’ve now recalled it and retold it so many times that the only thing I’m sure about is that I dipped into the ice-cold creek, and that I told others about the weird experience with the voices. Also, and this may be worth keeping in mind as you read the rest of this article, I’m really bad with timelines, always have been. My phone has a text file with major life events and when they took place, because I’m constantly forgetting things like the year I married my first wife or when I finally graduated from college or how long it’s been since I had to rescue my daughter from a smoke-filled room — all dates I’m certain I should be able recall quickly, even if they have to be stored in my external brain.
From manilla folders to mobile apps
Regardless of exactly how that night in the park played out, I had a very crude outline of the story by the time I moved to Chicago, which my phone tells me was during the summer of 1993. At that point the outline for what I could come to call “Lyca” existed on loose pieces of paper torn out of a spiral notebook and stuffed into a manilla folder. In Chicago this collection of papers was transcribed and then tweaked in a WordPerfect file, way back when that text editor had a lovely blue background and whiteish text (see below), and somehow managed to load faster than most applications do today on my late-model MacBook Pro.
Over the years, usually triggered by another round of work on the project, I moved what I had into some other digital or physical format. As far as I can recall, the complete list of other formats used includes Claris Works, typed notecards, Aldus and then Adobe Pagemaker, Ready Set Go! (the layout program of choice at Liberty Magazine, where I worked briefly), Excel (yes, the spreadsheet), and then finally Adobe InDesign, where it now exists only to be exported to a custom rendering engine I built in HTML and JavaScript. Got all that?
Most of the illustrations, and there are about three dozen of them, were drawn with pencil onto thick paper, and then traced onto vellum with technical pens, the messy kind your grandfather might have used to do drafting work. These illustrations where then digitized with a flatbed scanner back when the good ones weighed more than a golden retriever. Oh, and did I mention the failed attempt at making Lyca a mobile app? There were actually two of those. As it happens, very long pages cause just as many problems for mobile apps as they do for traditional printers, and I should mention at this point that Lyca was intended from the very beginning to be published as a scroll. That is, one long page, rolled up into an easy-to-read package.
The medium is the headache
Over the course of creating Lyca, I’ve faced 99 problems. At least 90 of those have had to do with the format, which as I just mentioned is a scroll. Although reading a scroll might seem like a user-unfriendly package, it actually works quite well, so long as you don’t need to quickly thumb back through the document to look something up, but that bug becomes a feature as the format encourages your full attention even more than reading a traditional paperback. Reading Lyca is as easy as this:
Printing Lyca, on the other hand, has been about a thousand times harder than I anticipated. In theory, all that’s needed is a roll-feed printer, or a print shop that has one. In practice, every aspect of the process, from hardware to paper to rasterization (turning pixels into ink dots), is designed around documents that top out at 3 feet long, unless it’s a full-color banner that’s printed slowly on an enormous machine for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per copy. Not at all what I want for my black-and-white document that needs to be mass produced for no more dollars than you can count on your hands, or preferably hand.
Just getting the file to the point where it’s ready to print is no mean feat. There are no page layout programs I know of that support page lengths beyond 20-feet, let alone the hundred-plus feet needed for Lyca. Among other workarounds, I’ve tried minimizing page margins and making sure that page breaks occurred between text lines (and not in the middle of an image!), and I’ve tried reducing font size way down then printing at 8x scale. Neither of these worked particularly well, which is why I eventually decided to export from InDesign to a rich-text format which I then convert into a web page using a custom rendering engine (more on that insanity later), and then I try to print, and even then my web browser sometimes gets upset at the length of the page and crashes before delivering all the information to my printer.
I could go on an on about the efforts made to get Lyca printed in a reasonable way, but to make that long story short let’s just say I’ve dug deep into every technology humans have used for reproduction from sunlight developed Anthotypes made with turmeric (yes, the spice, see photo below) to the Well Log printers preferred by oil field engineers. And just about every year for the past two decades I’ve been to whatever big print show happens to be my city, where I wander around looking for some new line of printers that can handle what I want to do at the speed and per-copy cost I need, and I have conversations with booth jockeys who give me confused stares, or tell me they’ll get back to me with answers to my questions but never do.
The medium is the story
At this point you may be wondering, as most people do when I mention my printing saga, Why not just ditch the format? Just make it a regular book, dude!
If only I could. For better, and definitely for worse, one of those key pieces I came up with on that enchanted winter evening so many years ago had to do with the format, which is thoroughly integrated with the story. It’s way, way more than skin deep. Everything about reading Lyca is experiential, and the format is the primary gateway to that experience.
I have been convinced, twice, to try Lyca as a mobile app, since the format would seem to map cleanly to one very long web page, and all smart phones have a web browser as a core part of their development toolkit. The first attempt failed because the developers, recommended to me by someone I trusted, turned out to be so incompetent and unreliable that it destroyed my relationship with the person who recommended them. For the second attempt I partnered directly with a much better firm and planted myself next to the developer while he worked. That mobile app was always buggy, and eventually we figured out that the iPhone chokes on very long pages as obnoxiously as Steve Jobs being told to deep throat Adobe Flash.
So no mobile app for Lyca.
The life project that crept up on me
It was certainly not my intention, that misty evening so many winters ago, for Lyca to be multi-decade journey that I now call a “life project”. That term itself only came to me sometime in the last ten years (no date for that, as I didn’t add it to my timeline file). I came up with the idea of life projects while daydreaming about something completely different, a vision of the marriage of Spartan and Amish societies, a union that isn’t nearly as mismatched as you might think at first.
The kinds of life projects in my imagined society were mostly crafts, similar to the multi-decade creations you do occasionally see regular people working on, like the elaborate toothpick model above that took 35 years to build, or weavings that tell some epic story. We used to have a tradition in the US of working on these kinds of intricate projects, but those tended to be more about science than art. Back when Americans still had a level of optimism about meat-space technology, our bourgeois tinkerers built high-flying rockets and even working nuclear reactors in their suburban garages. These were no short-term projects — many exceeded even the ambitious backyard bunker-builds by modern DIY autist and British YouTube phenom Colin Furze.
In my daydreamed society, working on a life project was an expected part of every adult’s life, and there existed a museum specifically to show off these works. The delivery of your life project to the museum would be celebrated as a personal milestone as big as any other that existed.
For my own life project, I don’t know if there will every be a singular moment of completion. Part of this has to do with the lack of a firm deadline, and part of it is because any life project you want to sell to a large audience, and not just donate to sit on dusty shelves, can be both completed, and in need of attention, for a very long time.
The problem with the life project
The problem with the life project, as attempted outside of my imagined society where it’s a normal part of adult life and therefore all kinds of social scaffolding exists to help move it forward, is that those structures don’t exist. And, perhaps paradoxically and perhaps not, even as the modern world seems open to more kinds of creative success than ever before, including the chance to make a living posting short videos about any number of things, the paved roads to success are just as narrow as ever, and the price to be paid for going “off road” is still almost certain obscurity.
To make this concrete, if you are a writer who wants to publish a self-help book or a detective novel or a cook book or teenage vampire fiction, there are well established routes to success. You many not get there, but your path is clear, and no one in the publishing industry who hears about your project will give you a confused look and say, “Huh, that’s different. Anyway…”
Perhaps relatedly, I also wonder if we have, collectively, lost the will to solve hard problems. When I first published something as a scroll, I was able, with a modest amount of calling around, to find a print shop willing to run off copies on their blueprint machines, so long as I paid for the custom cut paper rolls in advance. Yet in the last decade, I’ve sent hundreds of emails and made dozens of calls to print shops and made all those visits to print expos, only to realize that I have to solve the production problem myself, which I now (mostly) have, using a wide-format printer and the same basic rolling solution that I developed 25 years ago and still like to call the scroll-o-matic (old and current versions shown below).
It may just be my experience with my particular “off road” issue, but I think it’s telling that in the 50 years since Americans solved the extraordinarily hard (and definitely off-road!) problem of visiting the moon, neither governments nor companies have managed to re-crack that same nut. Not to get too far off the track of this very article, but some years back when the complexity of the Lyca project overwhelmed me, I researched how the Apollo team managed to bring together their complex web of suppliers and components and infrastructure, at scale and in such a short timeframe. I wondered if they had some kind of magical Gantt-chart varietal that could kick the ass of what I was using at that particular moment to organize the Lyca project, which was Trello, which is basically a just a digital version of 3x5 cards that can be sorted into lists. As it turns out, the fine folks at NASA used memos. Lots and lots of memos, including hundreds of “Tindallgrams” by engineer Bill Tindall, which, incidentally, make for a fascinating read. Good to know, I suppose, but not so useful for what was starting to feel like my own personal moonshot.
The problem with time
Whether or not society has made it harder to go off road (even as we have more total roads), and regardless of our collective appetite for solving difficult problems, any life project is bound to encounter significant challenges related to the passage of time itself.
First and foremost, of course, there’s the challenge of maintaining focus over so many years. For me this was achieved not so much by staying focused, as by a stubborn refusal to let Lyca die. Years went by with zero work on the project, but not a single month passed without me spending some amount of time thinking about it. And, on at least four occasions including right now, I’ve blocked out multi-month periods to dedicate to Lyca as my main work focus. One of those periods was spent doing research so intense it nearly cost me my life as I shivered through a frigid night lost and without a tent in the deep forest. During another period, I hired an editor to sit across from me at a cafe to proofread my copy as I worked to keep ahead of her progress with my own editing. There was also the summer I spent in sweltering workshed trying to replicate what the narrator of Lyca built, which brings me to another risk that comes with the passage of time.
A key part of my story, and this is something that occurs early on so it’s not much of a spoiler, is that the protagonist decides to build motorized scooters. In the illustrations I did for these, including the stick-figure schematic one above, the scooter looks a lot like the stand-up ones you now see zooming around in cities throughout the world, but with a visible gas engine instead of a hidden electric one. When I came up with that idea for the story and penned those diagrams, I was way ahead of the curve. Now, three decades later, my foresight into the future seems completely unimaginative. I remember being tempted to abandon Lyca completely in the run-up to the launch of the Segway, which turned out to be nothing at all like what I’d envisioned, even if it was intended to serve the same purpose. A few years later, I again considered ditching Lyca as I watched scooters that looked very much like mine take over San Fransisco, causing exactly the kinds of tensions I predicted in Lyca.
This is a risk inherent to any multi-decade project; by the time you reach the end, your once-visionary ideas might be old news. In the case of Lyca, I decided that there was so much other goodness and originality in the work that it didn’t matter, and indeed the ways in which the actual rise of scooters as urban transport differs from the narrator’s experience makes it all the more interesting. Or maybe I’m just good at cope.
Regardless, multi-decade projects are a huge challenge. A lot can change over the years, and even the things you thought might get easier over time (like my belief that printing an extra-long document would get easier as printer technology improved), might end up remaining just as hard as you first started, or even become more complicated as the specific infrastructure you were counting on is replaced by new and better alternatives that aren’t actually better for you.
The case for a life project
Would I do it all over again? I don’t know, and even though I’m done, I’m still not done. Would I recommend others attempt a life project? Maybe. Beyond the issues with the passage of time already mentioned, life projects have other risks, including the possibility that that the idea you came up with in your teens or twenties doesn’t seem so amazing after another couple decades of life experience. I got beyond that risk by building a much richer, multi-layered narrative to fill out a story outline that was about as interesting as it could be coming from my 20-year-old self as inspired by whatever magic that winter night held. Others may find their original project idea can’t be salvaged, and has to be complete rebooted, or abandoned altogether.
That said, a life project can have benefits, even before it grants you the fame and fortune that no doubt awaits me as soon as Lyca becomes the most talked about new work of fiction since Twilight. For one, it can add a certain level of consistency to your life. If, like me, you’ve been subject to large amount of flux over the years, a life project can serve as a kind of ever-present north star. Lyca the project has outlived several pets (including a cat named Lyca) and much, much more. In the three decades since coming up with the key ideas, I’ve had three long term relationships, lived in a dozen cities in several different countries, seen wide swings in my financial situation, bought and sold and bought houses and boats and cars, seen my life upended by the pandemic response, and recently began what will be my second full round of parenting. I sometimes resent Lyca as a zombie project that follows me around, occasionally moaning at me to be properly reanimated or put out of its misery with a clean blow to the head. But once I accepted Lyca as a permanent companion, I’ve been happy she’s always there.
What happens to my companion when my life project is not just done, but done done? I’m not sure. If it succeeds as a work for sale, it could spin off a variety of other projects. I already know exactly how the movie version should begin, and I’d be happy to sponsor fan-fiction contests based on the world and characters I’ve built for it. Along the way to developing Lyca, I’ve created not just words and illustrations, but also a new numbering scheme, a way to generate a handwritten-style font where every character is unique, and I’m using a new (and much needed) punctuation mark. These are the kinds of things that would have been impossible to come up with in a single-year, or even three-year, project, and for sure the scroll format would have to be scrapped.
In the end, so much of our work and personal life is about compromise. That’s neither bad nor good, it simply is. A life project, if you can stick with it, offers the chance to build something free from these constraints, an artifact that might be good enough to live on well beyond your time. Gian Lorenzo Bernini was able to carve masterpieces out of marble in his twenties. For the rest of us normies, artistic immortality may rest on the ability to create something magical over the course of decades. Hopefully that’s what I’ve done.
Postscript
As mentioned at the very beginning of this post, Lyca is done and ready for distribution. I’m looking for a publisher, but if I can’t find one to take the chance on such an experimental work, I’ll syndicate it myself in monthly installments. Right now, though, paid subscribers to The Filter can get a free copy of the teaser-trailer, which is most certainly in scroll format. Go to lyca.com/story/#request and fill out the the request form. Make sure to provide your mailing address and mention you are a Filter subscriber to get your free physical copy.