Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Abandoned Coast, Abandoned Project?

I have quit the east coast in favor of the west, and in doing so, have left my serial post-it story, which I'd been placing on post-its in books from the Brooklyn Public Library, hanging in the middle of its grandmother/granddaughter cross-country road trip.  I decided to move so quickly, that I did not even get a chance to do the installment in Specimen Days, the next book that I had planned to use as a base, leaving this note a lie:
So now my "To be continued" is left hanging, presumably forever.  I could pick up the story in a new library book, here on the west coast, and keep adding the installments to my blog until its finished, which would give the piece a sort of completion.  After all, the likelihood that anyone ever actually found a segment of the story and followed it from one book to another, much less that anyone found the first segment of the story and succeeded in following each "chapter" from one book to the next, through four books, seems incredibly unlikely.  But somehow, even though any real audience for the piece was always likeliest to be found online, now that I know that no one with be able to follow the story through the actual physical books, the impetus to finish it is gone.  I'm not sure why my interest is so bound up with whether someone will experience the piece as it was "meant" to be experienced, rather than viewing the the documentation of that piece.  And isn't it rather strange to be caught up in the loss of an audience of one?

Or maybe I'm just making excuses for writers block?

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