tl;dr
I finished Budapastiche.
I continue to publish my silly audio journal.
The Bullet documentary is taking shape.
It's a sunny morning and warm enough that I can crack my windows. 42 on the Fahrenheit scale. One of my favorite annual events is forthcoming: the budding out of the trees.
People ask, "What's your favorite season?"
My favorite is the in-betweens.
I grew up with the seasons and it's been a long time since I lived with all four of them, and these transitions are such a joy. Soon the restaurants and bars along the Duna will open up, and the ones I'm talking about are the kind that have a small cottage for prepping food, surrounded by picnic tables and mismatched seating, string lights, umbrellas and awnings, places where if you drop a french fry it lands in dirt.
I can remember the time when you hardly ever reached for a jacket, and it won't be long before the knit caps are relegated to the cold clothing bin. Usually this is the time of year I pinch my winter pudge and start running again, but thank goodness my gym ritual has stuck. The pinch of pudge persists, alliteratively so, but I'm feeling mostly fit regardless.
A barge on the Duna
A few endeavor updates:
Budapastiche
In the realm of milestones, I just finished my third pass of the novel, bringing it to the phase where I have invited a few "beta readers" onto the porch.
beta reader (noun)
/ˈbeɪ.tə ˈriː.dɚ/
A non-professional reader who reviews a manuscript before publication, providing feedback on aspects such as plot coherence, character development, pacing, and overall readability.
More on that below, but let me reflect for a moment, because sharing this news reminds me that it's meaningful. I started Budapastiche in the form of character sketches a long time ago. I wrote enough to know the broad strokes of the story, and then I set it aside. For over a decade. One could call that an epic bout of procrastination, but I think it was something else. I think that was the equivalent of painting a wall mural of Mount Everest in the makeshift gym in my garage, a reminder of what I was training for.
In 2008, springtime, I was living in Muncie, Indiana, and I was not the writer I am today. I believe that if I tried to write the novel then, it would have been a hell of an experience, but at some point I would have turned back to base camp.
I know I would have kept trying, but I honestly don't think I was ready until,
October of 2022, a little voice from the ether told me that I was not just ready, but maybe a little overdue. I had to change some things about my life to make way for the discipline, so I did. It took 14 months to write and rewrite the first two thirds of the story. And then I got to a challenge that I didn't see coming,
January of 2024, I started the final 1/3rd of the story, and looking back I realize this was the terra incognita where all those hours in the garage gym paid off. I had laid out the substance of the story and now I had to bring it home, tie it all together.
Sometime in the fall of 2024, the date escapes me, I dove into a deep pass of the full novel, a Frankenstein of drafts at this point. Some chapters had been written four times, others only once. I slashed the ones that weren't holding the story together and polished the rest.
Now I'm here. I feel good about it. It's crafted and it's honest. And it's substantially done. More polish awaits, no doubt, but mostly rearranging deck chairs on the Queen Mary. (No icebergs in my path, thank you very much.)
If you're interested in signing on as a beta reader, I have a few more slots, so email me and we can chat about it.
The Audio Journal
I've continued to work on my audio journal, which is a random wandering account of my life overseas. Almost like phone calls where I do all of the talking. Topics range from creative pursuits, to my anxieties, to just slice of life wandering through the city, to the mall, all observing. The audio is often live, and dirty and stepped on by traffic and planes going overhead. I cut out the heavy breathing.
In some respects, it superficially chronicles what it's like to be an expat. But for me, the whole thing functions as sort of a time capsule. I don't think of it as something people would want to listen to all the way through, It's odd and mundane–listening to me doing my Hungarian homework, for instance–but there are enough little gems that it brings me joy. (And really, when I go back and listen to old recordings, it's the slice of life ones that I appreciate the most. What was I thinking on that walk that I would otherwise forget.)
There are 16 episodes up and I have 37 m0re recorded, with more piling up every day. Some sample episodes:
If you're on Apple Podcasts, it's here:
Not sure where you Android peeps get your podcasts now that Google Podcasts shut down, but it's on Spotify.
BULLET
The documentary project currently titled "Bullet" is going well. I'm working on finding the story, searching through archival materials, spending time with family and friends of Bullet. Filming bits here and there, but mainly exploring. I'll be going to Sweden at the end of the month to a town on the west coast called Halmstad, where Bullet's partner and his son live.
The story will be about Bullet's life, but it will also be about what happens when an artist dies in his prime on the brink of a new chapter. What treasures does he leave behind and what burdens? Both are difficult to measure.
Bullet was aware of the life he led, and he expressed the fear that his art would not be central to his story after he was gone. He feared obscurity.
His work had scattered all over the globe by the time he died. Paintings hang across Europe, in the United States, and Asia, and in places as yet unknown. When he passed, a massive cache of it was stored in an attic in Budapest. Now it has its own room in a flat in the Eight District of Budapest, around the corner from where he held his first significant exhibition in the city. What will it all become? Every piece tells a story, not just of some corner of his soul, but also of the lives that his life touched. Lifelong friends or people he met on a bus.
This chaotic distribution and haphazard accumulation was a reflection of how Bullet lived. Impulsively at times, and highly intentional at others. But he was always moving in the service of art. For better or worse. The scope of a single life is immense and it's no small task to reduce it to 90 minutes. But that's the task at hand. So more to follow on that project.
That all for now, much love,
Chip
