Listen to this story: If you’re in the car, or cooking, or just lazy… you can listen to me read this story for you, in the audio file below.
Currently I’m writing a much longer piece of work than usual. A book, I hope.
It’s a tricky endeavor. One I must chip away at, between other responsibilities. A page here, an edit there. Rolling over in bed to scratch down a thought in the dark, hoping it’s legible, let alone useful. Making weird google searches to answer a question or spur a memory. Thinking you’ve nailed it. Feeling you’ve blown it. Pride. Shame. Joy. Embarrassment. And so forth, in an endless loop.
It’s a lot of work. I’m on my third different approach to the material after countless drafts, stretching back over three years. I won’t dare go into detail, partly for fear of making a liar of myself if some other new form of it ever meets the light of day.
Friends and professionals have been generous and helpful in their feedback during this time, but ultimately only one person’s opinion matters. Only one person can decide, Yes, this is ready for the world. Yes, this I can stand behind with everything I am. Yes, this I expect people to give up precious hours of their time reading (instead of millions of other books). That person is the one who puts their name to it: Me.
Until those things feel true, I keep working.
I tell you all this so as to explain a little bit of what’s going on at the desk when I’m not making these TBH stories and drawings for you. There are some other things I’m working on, including another self-published project which I’ve been trying to perfect for a long time and will share more about soon.
But the TBH work takes up a lot of time, too. I want the stories here to be as good as they can be, given their frequency and the fact that I edit them myself.
Please know that TBH plays an important role in all my work, even the longer projects. Ever since I first plugged in a guitar at a Melbourne pub and warbled an original composition out into a distracted horde of drunks, I have been a believer in sharing your art. When I packed up that guitar and moved to Los Angeles in 1999, I was shocked to meet musicians who bought all the best gear, rented rehearsal spaces, practiced regularly, but never seemed ready to play a live gig. Not yet, they would always say. What’s the point? I wondered. How will they ever know what works?
So I played. Open mikes, coffee shops, fifth on the bill… whatever. Sometimes with no more than my brother (bless him) and a supportive friend or two in the audience. I was young enough not to care. The first time my future wife saw me and my friend Clint play live (in the tiny basement of The Coconut Teaszer on Sunset Boulevard, RIP), the one song she complimented was the set’s only cover. We still laugh about that. Well, she does mostly.
It was never perfect, but bit by bit the band grew, then the crowd. Eventually something resembling a career slowly emerged, for a time. I admit, such resiliency is in shorter supply the older I get. The more I am responsible for people other than myself. Time doesn’t feel quite as on my side, as the years slip away faster and faster. But I’m more patient, too. Or at least, I try to be.
I’m also more appreciative of an “audience”. That is to say, You. I can’t create art in a vacuum. Isolation is unavoidable when writing, but I need to take the work out from time to time and see how it holds up in the sunlight and the wind and the rain. You provide me those elements, even when in the smallest doses.
So thank you for that. I hope that in return I offer you a little window into another world. My world. However mundane. And in the way that I do so, also a glimpse of bigger things that may be ahead. I sincerely hope I can pull them off. For both of us.
Do keep battling on Toby. I very much enjoy getting and reading your weekly posts, so a book is really something to look forward to.