The short version is that hopefully I can finally publish the two missing chapters for my video essay series Journey Through Twin Peaks in September (I would love to have chapter 34 up by September 3, the third anniversary of Twin Peaks' third season finale, but that seems unlikely). After that, I am going to make a new "Path through Journey Through Twin Peaks" schedule which will be tighter and stricter and the Part 6 videos will probably premiere throughout the winter and maybe even next spring.
In other words, I'll finally focus on finishing Part 5 (the lead-up to season 3) as soon as my August Patreon posts are up, followed by a few months building a backlog of non-Journey content to keep this site active through the fall and winter, followed by an exclusive focus on Part 6 (different story areas of season 3) with plenty of breathing room to build up some momentum and a regular pace of publication.
Meanwhile, I want to let readers know that I've just updated a couple key pages on this site for the first time in a year and a half. Both are enjoyable ways to explore my work and, in the gallery's case, to linger over many striking images:
Here's the longer version what's been going on and where I'm headed...
From March through May, I remained pretty tightly focused on long-planned video essays, particularly Journey Through Twin Peaks, after years of buildup. I fell behind on a couple videos (the ones surveying the work of Mark Frost and the original series collaborators) and had to skip ahead to get my half-hour season 3 chapter up around the third anniversary of the Showtime premiere, but for the most part I stayed on schedule - resulting in twelve video essays during that three-month period. Since then? Well, I've described it on Twitter as falling into a pit of quicksand inside a pit of quicksand inside a pit of quicksand. A perfect storm of distractions and obligations intervened, so that not only was I unable to finish the entire video series over the summer as originally planned - I couldn't even get to those two postponed chapters.
A copyright dispute on my big season three video (resolved in mid-July), the removal of Mad Men from Netflix the very day before I was to begin my new viewing diary (forcing me to wait on DVDs instead), and especially the end of my quarantine period and a return to regular work all bogged me down much longer than the one-month focus on other projects I'd initially planned in June. However, even the projects which didn't have unforeseen snags took much longer than expected. And the biggest roadblocks were kind of unavoidable: my monthly Patreon rewards also eat up a week or so of any given month so as work on other stuff slowed down and the clock kept ticking, I'd keep finding myself having to turn to podcasts as well (including my public ones, which launched in July, but those are usually quicker to put together as they focus on pre-recorded material). I also admittedly allowed myself to invent new distractions, like finally updating my Top Posts page and picture gallery. I'm certainly glad I did - to my surprise, neither had been touched since long before my big site makeover in 2019 - but both efforts consumed way more time than expected.
So here we are...it's nearly the last week of August and my monthly Patreon podcasts require my attention again. I still haven't finished the Mark Frost books I planned to conclude weeks ago, the last bits of research before I can dig into chapter 35 (on Frost's work) but that will wait until I release chapter 34 on Peyton, Engels, the episode directors and others. The good news is that I haven't entirely avoided Journey this summer: right in the middle of it, I actually wrote and recorded narration for that chapter, but it's going to draw on dozens of clips from multiple films which I'll have to transfer back and forth between several devices - another reason I kept putting it off until I finished other material.
My main lesson learned from this period is that to move forward on Journey Through Twin Peaks, as I managed to do last fall and winter (finally reaching a point where I could focus on the videos almost exclusively for weeks on end), I need to focus on one step at a time. This means setting aside the time this fall - after my delayed chapters are finally complete - to outline, record, and edit many months of Patreon and public podcasts ahead of time, giving me the space from, say, November to March or even May, to just focus on making and releasing Journey videos. I'll flesh that out in greater detail around mid-September, when I create a new "Path" post and tweets. Thank you for your patience as I work my way through the labyrinth I've constructed for myself! I hope you've been enjoying my other work - both new and archived - in the meantime, and that you find the Journey videos to be worth the wait.
Postscript: just as I finished this post, my screen went white and then black as my laptop screen of four years died without warning. Fortunately I was able to plug it into a TV monitor and still use it but it's a foreboding development to say the least which will need to be addressed soon (hundreds of files necessary for my videos and character series are stored on here so I'll need to back them up right away, which I should have done long ago - let this serve as a warning for anyone in a similar situation who is reading this).
The quicksand deepens...
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