Journey Through Twin Peaks will conclude in 2023 with the Part 6 video essays.
The TWIN PEAKS Character Series will finally resume next week (but may not conclude).
As for the season two episodes of the Lost in Twin Peaks podcast, well...
I'm approaching a crescendo for my online work after nine years of Twin Peaks and fifteen years more broadly. Where do things stand at the end of this year?
LOST IN TWIN PEAKS
I hoped to wrap up most of my projects in 2022, leaving only perhaps the last stretch of Journey Through Twin Peaks to complete. Instead, as always seems to be the case lately, I fell woefully behind schedule with most of my online work despite maintaining a pretty rigorous approach behind the scenes. The main culprit, as in 2021, was Lost in Twin Peaks - the repackaging of my already-recorded episode-by-episode coverage of Twin Peaks into a public format with extensive reworking of the audio, division into daily chapters, and illustrated companions accompanying each week's episode. This year I skipped over the second season to release my coverage of Fire Walk With Me and The Return in time for thirtieth and fifth anniversaries, respectively, but only made it halfway through the summer. I paused, came back in the late fall to wrap up the rest of season three and still couldn't quite make it to the finale. Stay tuned for that some time this winter, hopefully around late February.
However, in order to get other projects past the finish line, I can no longer allow Lost in Twin Peaks to be the main priority. Without getting too far into the weeds, I allot a certain amount of time each day for online and offline work and from now on I'll use that exclusively for Journey and maybe the character series - depending how the next couple days go. I'll only work on Lost in Twin Peaks when it eats into leisure time (if you want more details on that process, check out my recent patron podcast). I don't really want to work on that project past next year, so it's quite possible I'll never publish the second season the way I have the other two - either that material will remain exclusive to patrons or I'll just make the original episodes available to the public without many changes - no re-formatting or illustrated companions. Which would be unfortunate, but the time has come to finally wrap these things up. If season two turns out to be less time-consuming than seasons one and three - which is possible since it was recorded later than them and tends to be a bit more polished - maybe I'll make it after all. But it's the third priority.
THE TWIN PEAKS CHARACTER SERIES
The second priority is the long-announced, perpetually delayed TWIN PEAKS Character Series. I hoped I'd have the entire backlog completed (I don't) before re-launching it on January 2 (I am anyway). I promised myself and my audience that if I wasn't at least 75% done by New Year's Eve - i.e. up to the top thirty characters - I'd shift gears and focus on Journey Through Twin Peaks full-time. The deadline is tomorrow and the time of writing this I'm only up to #55 so this seems extremely unlikely. That said, many of the #55 - 31 entries don't require much revision, some don't need any revisions at all, and even the writing of the new pieces - on characters who only appeared in The Return - actually tends to go pretty quickly. I wouldn't entirely rule out the possibility of hitting my goal but I'm prepared for the likelihood that come January 1, Journey Through Twin Peaks takes over the entirety of my allotted online work focus, with the character entries rubbing shoulders with the Lost in Twin Peaks season two podcast as projects that I can only tackle off my main work schedule.
Nonetheless, I'm nearly three months ahead of my publication schedule for the character series - meaning I'm already 100% finished with everything that will be published through March 27 - so I still plan to start sharing the entries I have written at long last. (Advance entries will continue to be made available to patrons on a monthly, eventually a weekly, basis - always thirty or more days ahead of the public schedule). An introduction to the revised series is scheduled for Monday and the series will continue on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule after that, with minor character round-ups over the next couple weeks before the official entries launch with #86 in mid-January. If I eventually catch up with my backlog and have to pause the series yet again, so be it - for now, I'm not going to wait any longer to get on with it.
JOURNEY THROUGH TWIN PEAKS
Finally, there's Journey Through Twin Peaks. Unless I've miraculously reached my top thirty characters before tomorrow night (in which case I'll continue to work on the Character Series until it's done), I'll be outlining, writing narration, and beginning to assemble the material for these last videos right away. Part 6 is focused exclusively on the third season, so while I'll probably bring in some film clips and extra material here and there it will be much easier to put together than the wildly eclectic Part 5 and presumably take much less time. My ideal is to wait until all the videos are done to begin posting new chapters on a weekly basis, maybe around the sixth anniversary of Part 8, concluding around the sixth anniversary of the finale. You can see my Journey chapter breakdown where it's long been housed, near the bottom of my Plan for Journey Through Twin Peaks & more page, where I'll continue to track daily progress on this and other projects.
...AND EVERYTHING ELSE?
Meanwhile, my main Patreon podcast is scheduled to conclude in February with the 100th episode in which I plan to offer full reviews of many different films; after that, advance character entries will become the primary reward for that tier. I am going to offer up one more season each of the monthly public Lost in the Movies and Twin Peaks Cinema feeds before putting those on indefinite hiatus after June. Twin Peaks Conversations will continue through much of the year, probably until September (marking two years for that YouTube/Patreon hybrid) before it to goes on hiatus too. The perpetually backburnered Mirrors of Kane video series, the overly ambitious "Unseen" reviews, and the never-pursued-beyond-the-first-season myriad of TV viewing diaries are all pretty much fated for abandonment, at least for the time being.
My goal is to be done with all of my ongoing projects - either because I finished them (a hard goal with Journey Through Twin Peaks) or because I gave up on them - by October. From there, I will have a few options available to me.
What comes after 2023?
CONTINUING THE PATH? Maybe I can resume this same work - the unfinished projects, the viewing diaries, the seasonal podcasts - at a more leisurely pace after a break of several months or longer (as I have every other time I tried to put a bow on this site). Perhaps this more scaled-back "business as usual" can overlap with other pursuits or even facilitate them by continuing to build an audience and maintaining an active presence online - a poker raking the coals so to speak. That said, past experience has made me skeptical of this approach as anything other than an end in itself. So often, it's an excuse for distracting and procrastinating bigger plans.
THE NEXT STEP? Maybe I can shift gears into other types of projects, continuing to use Patreon and to a lesser extent this site as a platform to promote this new work: less film-centric video essays (the "Generations" concept continues to intrigue) or, ideally, the never-ending dream of feature filmmaking - or, at least to start with, writing a full screenplay. Or maybe I'll find something else entirely to pursue, away from the world of cinema in any capacity.
A LIVING ARCHIVE? Meanwhile, I can continue presenting the thousands of entries on this site - via updates, highlights, and cross-posts - as a stealth archive (meaning that for the majority who aren't reading announcements like this, it may not even be evident that I've stopped posting new material). I could share various pieces on a regular basis, maybe even expand my social media presence, but in terms of actual creation, this film and TV commentary would be marked off as something that belongs definitively to my twenties and thirties - and not a moment beyond.
All are possibilities but what I don't want to do is commit myself to ongoing work that extends for yet another year after this one. I'm proud of what I achieved but this has gone on long enough.
So the one thing I can promise seeing through to the end next year is Journey Through Twin Peaks.
Beyond that? Stay tuned.
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