#013 - labors of love
long running creative projects and the compulsion to (not) do them
It’s Inktober/Drawtober/Peachtober + Hacktoberfest season! Hopefully it is still 10/10 10:10AM — I’ve scheduled this letter to arrive at your inbox at this very auspicious time. This newsletter might as well be called “Weekday Procrastination Time” instead of “Weekend Coffee Time”. October has traditionally been a busy and creative month for me in the past, and because of that I’ve been thinking about long running creative projects and labors of love, and the compulsion to do/not do them.
Hand-drawn comic
This year I’ve decided not to do any creative October challenges — I feel like I’m busy enough as is. I think I burnt myself out the year I tried to draw a comic page a day for Drawtober, and also because Hacktoberfest stopped giving free shirts this year.
The comic I made was truly a labor of love because it chronicles a real-life play through of the pivotal druid class quest in World of Warcraft, where you go through a spiritual shamanic(?) journey to unlock your bear form. I did this quest with my partner Diziet, and this comic covers the in-game lore, as well as emergent funny moments we experienced together such as how I kept falling off this elevator thing and dying, and how there was SO MUCH walking back and forth.
And You’ll Miss It
But also speaking of video games and how it slips into real life, I re-read the essay “And You’ll Miss It” recently, and it fits well into the theme of long running, creative projects. The essay talks about the recurring desire to make video games with a friend, and perhaps a sense of regret that they lost their chance to fulfill this project.
Homemade mooncakes
It was the Mid-Autumn Festival recently, and I had two friend/acquaintances share homemade mooncakes with me! Mooncakes are so much effort to make and homemade ones are so much yummier than store bought ones - they're richer and melt in your mouth and make me want to eat the whole thing. They're also a million calories across the dense sweet insides, whole salted duck yolks and oily crust.
Some new things I learned about mooncakes this year:
1. Mooncake making is a multi-day affair. This is why I was so honored to be gifted such delicious labors of love.
2. They are usually made with lard, not butter. One homemade mooncake slice I had was made with butter, and it tasted so different from normal mooncakes! A lot richer and meltier.
3. After baking, you need to wait a couple days for the oils to distribute evenly across the cake before eating it.
4. Lye water, an ingredient in bagels, is also used in mooncakes. This in itself makes me not want to make mooncakes because it’s yet another rare ingredient to source on top of salted duck eggs and the optional but very classic lotus paste.
5. The "normal" mooncake I had in mind, and also the mooncakes mentioned in the points above are specifically Cantonese style mooncakes, with a baked dense cookie-like crust. There are also Suzhou style ones with flaky crusts, and more.
Mooncake (the short story)
Also also, to continue on the mooncake vibes, Translunar Travelers Lounge’s Issue 9 has a short story by Sherry revolving around this treat. It has, IMO, a very “I can’t believe no one has thought of this!!” interplay between 2 lunar concepts. It also struck me as a kinda surreal + teenage super hero vibe, where they have a secret identity and learn to use their powers for good. It’s a nod to poignant modern Chinese Canadian techy IYKYK moments and a snow skin mooncake that symbolizes honoring your background while honoring your values, and acknowledging that many “new strange things” have always existed and have always belonged.
Gorgeous luscious indulgent cake
In fact, this was a goat cheesecake with Biscoff cookie crust, torched Swiss meringue , fresh passionfruit curd with fruits from a local farm, and figs from eatwithjurie ‘s family’s yard. I felt very lucky that she invited me to drop by her apartment on the day-of and got to taste this “marathon of a project” that took 12 hours over 2 days, with such luscious ingredients.
We chatted about how she always gets inspired at 9pm to begin a project, and by 2am, she’s sitting and regretting her decisions, while her SO gets inevitably pulled into the project to help her finish up. That’s how I felt with these October creative challenges, every year I get all these hopes and ambitions, and every year I feel like I’m eking out the lowest effort thing to count as completion — finger painted doodles on a pixel drawing app, readme typo correction PRs…
The Half of It
I watched this romantic Netflix coming-of-age movie about a girl who helps a guy write love letters to his crush. It has a plot twist a la "“XO Kitty”, but at the core of it, it is an exploration of what love is, and its many forms.
Perhaps the urge to draw a comic page a day, to make video games, mooncakes and multi-layered cakes, despite knowing that it will become painful and a drag to finish, all come down to this quote from the movie:
Love is messy and horrible and selfish and bold. It's not finding your perfect half. It's the trying and the reaching and failing. For the chance at a great one.
It’s for a chance to channel the connection to beauty and divinity and tradition and each other. Love is the compulsion to keep going in hopes of becoming the light that you saw in the sparks of inspiration (even though the spoiler here is: you’ll never become the light, not for long anyways, because you are a human made of protons and neutrons etc).
“you need to be main character-maxing. you need to live your heart out and pour love in everyone's cup. live in your delusion of how amazing the world is and be deeply touched by it. you need to be extremely alive and resurrect everyone within the perimeters of your attention.
you need to believe you're living in a movie and will succeed in ways you can and cannot imagine. you need to learn from your past mistakes and keep the twinkle of delight in your eyes alive, regardless of how difficult things may have been. you need to see the light and be it.”
Despite not committing to any October creative challenges this year, the compulsion to start ambitious creative projects is still there. I feel the urge to make another comic after seeing all the beautiful ones on Shortbox Comics Fair — I’m charging my iPad as I type. I’m eying the wheel of Humboldt Fog goat cheese and citron honey jam in the fridge and toying with the idea of resurrecting the luscious goat cheese cake in a hopefully less time consuming form.