Revision/Rewritten image

Here's a scan of a draft work on paper, where I was testing the materials and playing with my handwriting. There is only a small amount of wax on this. Mostly it is chalk and oil-based pencil, written, erased, rewritten and erased. The paint is black board paint. It has a velvety texture and very quickly isn't black anymore if you use chalk on it.

The text itself is a section from a short story called Lucky .003. During the course of the project, I tried all kinds of text. E-mails from friends and my replies, pieces of the current novel. Casual writing wasn't nearly as interesting as it was when I first opened the e-mail. The novel was way too stressful to play with. But the short stories had very condensed sentences with many nouns, and that worked best. This piece, for instance, is a list of stuff the story's protagonist finds in the desert sand. The word cat jumps out at me right now, which is much too specific.

I couldn't use dialogue, especially dialogue that was supposed to be funny. It all became a sad jumble of botched intentions. My favorite text was something I found on the last day, an unfinished description of my grandmother's house and neighborhood. I only did one piece with that text but I learned that using what I had visually rather than textually may solve some of the problems I had with the story idea.

This scan probably looks like a hot mess to most people. To me, it's a process piece and looks okay.