Year 3: Quarter 1

Branden Singletary
Jul 15, 2020
9 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

These massive blocks of time will continue to make me think I've missed a post or two. I wouldn't have been surprised if I lost a year's worth of time after all that's transpired. Though, I probably would be livid if that actually happened!

Regardless, many things have occurred this year, both important and unimportant and thus, both instances must be reviewed!

So, without further ado, let us begin!

Goals of the Previous Quarter

[✓✓✓] Work on the Astral Triptych!

This is definitely a step in the right direction. Actually, no, not a step. A massive leap. Not only did I manage to push out a lot of concrete information regarding The Astral Triptych, but the visual concepts of the different astra have matured dramatically. Several months of not doing anything with them certainly did wonders. Their evolution is likely to be far from complete, still, but words can't express how glad I am to see what became of them. I will admit that I did get a little lazy towards the end, though.

The lore, worldbuilding, thematic concepts and philosophy of Desire has been completely finalized (as seen here; look upon it in all its glory - organization is a beautiful thing), which allows me to generate an obscene amount of visual content without having to stop for extended periods of time to plot out my next move.

A massive success, in more ways than one. More on that, later. Overall, we're just getting started. There's a looot more on the way and I don't feel like I'm wasting my time with something that just wouldn't make sense considering the scale of this entire project (*cough* a comic *cough*).

[???] Create and explore!

Thinking back, I believe I created this goal because of what I thought I was going to be doing during this quarter. After casting those plans into the abyss, any and all connection to this goal got scrapped, too. What was I planning on doing? Weeeeell, I'm going to address that in the 'Revelations' section.

To be honest, without that context, I wouldn't even know what this means! It's otherwise extremely vague and unhelpful in terms of progress. I mean, we're going to be creating no matter what and exploration, by virtue of creating, is an automatic process... Especially if you're going to be switching up styles with every iteration of a select few concepts. This goal isn't going to be making a reappearance. Good riddance, I say!

An Overview

This year was certainly more numerically successful than the previous one. I predicted I would arrive at this point last year and it's good to see it actually manifest in reality. It was also a massive period of personal growth and self-understanding, which holds a significant degree of importance and certainly shouldn't be understated. This year sparked a deep interest in philosophy and has bolstered my resolve in trying to achieve what I want to achieve out of all of this. Unfortunately, almost to a maddening degree, but by the end of it, we regained focus and we're now moving in a straight line. Laser focus. It's been a long time since I've felt like I've had that, believe it or not.

But now, we're going to keep that momentum going. The end result and the path to get there is sharper than ever. All we have to do is walk forward.

Revelations

During this period of temporal stasis, I've come to even more conclusions and have had many other stark revelations about myself. No doubt this is going to continue for the foreseeable future, as it is all very much an ongoing process, but I'm going to record what I currently have, as it may prove beneficial to you.

Buckle up. This is going to be a long one, but I'll try to keep it brief.

Nearsightedness

It's funny. In the middle of all of this (really, the start of my shift towards a different goal), I told a friend of mine (at great length) to "stop dividing up his attention," to "focus on what would actually get him results" and to "figure out what he actually wants" in order to become successful... while I was doing the exact same thing he was doing during that same period of time. What do I mean? Well, the Astral Triptych was the original idea that got me started, right? Well, one year later of consistent effort, I decided "hey, let's work on something else just for a little while - why not explore a little bit?"

I thought back to my days in high school and brief time in college, recalling how much fun I had producing bunch of non-related, philosophical works that also examined the underpinnings of modern society and thought "yeah, it would be nice to pull that off again - let's do it."

Yes, how very pretentious of me.

Regardless, I dived in, not seeing what could've gone wrong. And boy, did it go wrong.

Distraction

It started with black and white drawings that I used to fill what would've been a massive block of time in between posts as I was also working on the now abandoned comic for Desire, Part One of the Astral Triptych. Those did well and I had a little bit of fun while doing it, but by the end of it, I was out of interesting ideas and I didn't want to really go full focus on the comic (because I didn't want to admit that I hated working on it), so I dived even deeper into the realm of philosophy, exploring the realm of color again. The illustrations were of middling quality, but I was at the height of my philosophical (and political) exploration. It wasn't long before I went through a moderate amount of stress by all that I had uncovered, too, which created a strong emotional attachment - a second one, to be exact. A strong desire to see humanity become better.

By January 2020, I was at a bit of a crossroads. Two different emotional bonds. The Astral Triptych vs. this newly formed idea - "philosophical visual content that could help better humanity." Naturally, I picked the latter and the Astral Triptych fell by the wayside. Sure, I mentioned it every now and again, but I wasn't working on it. I was still hung up on not wanting to drop the comic that I sunk about 100+ pages worth of work into, even though I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. Looking back, it's a silly circumstance to even consider, but that was my reality at the time.

Dissonance

When March rolled around, the current pandemic affected my workplace. We all had to be sent home and I was determined to really start pushing this idea forward. To become hyper-focused and be super productive, but... I didn't do anything for about a month. Just kind of puttered around, unsure of where that spark of mine went. This was certainly the most lost I felt in a long while. I slowly dropped everything, even the plans I had to restructure and streamline this "philosophical visual content" idea by, hypothetically, releasing a "content pack" once a month of miscellaneous ramblings, ideas and drawings. I was super excited by the prospect, but I couldn't bring myself to work on it.

I finally dropped the comic, because I finally realized how little I cared about it. I also removed myself from a co-writing activity with a friend because that was also not something I had a strong interest in (despite getting some useful things out of it). Eventually, I didn't have much of anything that demanded my attention and other means of entertainment stopped doing anything for me, too. And really, that was just one or two video games that I can't say I enjoy all that much because I've already played them to death. All other media don't really do anything for me, either, because all of it is the same. In my eyes, at least.

Enter, a long period of boredom.

Rediscovery

After another month or so of not really doing much of anything, I started thinking about the original project at hand again and looked back at all of the progress I've made up until this point, seeing the clear division in mindset in regards to my work. I thought about the entire timeline of my life up to this point and much further into the future. Only one year was spent being distracted. In the grand scheme of things, that wasn't a lot of time. This could still be fixed. And I got an inkling of an idea that would probably put me right back on course. I felt compelled to work on it again - not from some external pressure, but because I wanted to work on it. I didn't want to draw, though. Not yet. Couldn't bring myself to do that. So, I decided to write.

What followed next was magical.

Purpose

I completed all of the writing that needed to be done, taking my time as needed and upon completion, I felt whole again. Afterwards, I remembered why I started the Astral Triptych. This is an extension of myself - purest extension of myself. A representation of my inner truth and of what I've observed of the world around me, expressed in a mythology of cosmic proportions that I can use to connect to and inspire others.

The sudden surge of madness in the world (specifically in America; no thanks the corporate media's purposefully warped representation of current events) was another reminder of why I want do what I do. For the expression and exploration of my inner world and my love for the goodness and sublimity found within humanity. My two emotional attachments, now both unified, march forward through time, carrying me alongside them.

I slowly disconnected from the vast majority of the Internet. No social media (unless I'm sharing art). No news feeds. No politics. No garbage. No noise. Just me and my one creation that I should've been focusing on from the very start.

Life isn't perfect. I'm still relentlessly bored whenever I'm not working on this project and I have absolutely no way of actually fixing that at the moment. Just have to suck it up and deal with it. But whenever I am working on it, I can say with out a shadow of a doubt, that this is what I was born to do. It doesn't matter how much time I'm going to have to sink into this to make it grow into what I want it to be - it take five years, ten years, hell, it could even take the rest of my life - I'm going to finish it.

I can see it now. And it's going to be beautiful.

Looking Forward

In Year 2: Quarter 1, I refined my list, but little did I know that the comic was something I would've ended up hating. I was just about finished writing the script for it and was having a great deal of fun playing with the idea of having a highly abstract comic on the market, but when it came to the act of illustrating all of it... that's where I felt trapped and frustrated. Sunken cost fallacy and all that.

So, we're going to refine our long term goals again and we'll see what future me has to say about it.

[✓] Create the concept of world setting and identify its various underlying themes.

[✓] Illustrate (through writing and visual art) the different castes represented within the world, cementing its foundation.

[~] Make all information regarding the material digestible and more widely accessible across a myriad of platforms (writing, illustration, video presentations, physical (art)books, merchandise, etc).

[ ] Repeat this process until all three parts of the Astral Triptych are fully actualized.

[ ] ???

[ ] VR experience that will unify all three parts into a single, comprehensive journey from the beginning of the Astral Triptych to the hypothetical end. A work of absolute beauty.

We will see what changes occur to this list one year from now. This feels like the correct path to take, but of course, I could be wrong and it is very much subject to change.

Goals of the New Quarter

Complete "The Axis" series.
Complete "The Topology" series.
Complete "The True Aspects" series.
Generate additional, miscellaneous scenes from the Cosmos.

Oh, my naivete from last year... "I’ve run out of things to draw that pertains to the world." There's plenty. The three 'series' are going to be illustrations and designs for merchandise, specifically.

- "The Axis," portrait illustrations of the nine castes.

- "The Topology," illustrations of the three realms, as well as an illustration of the entire world setting in perfect harmony.

- "The True Aspects," illustrations of how the astra would look if they manifested in reality.

- And finally, the miscellaneous scenes will be used in video presentations. I don't imagine these specific drawings being particularly high in detail, but I do think that they're going to be fun to create, since some of them will feature different astra in the same environment. Going to be blending different illustration styles together and I'm sure that will be exciting.

So, yep! That's all I have for you this time around. Big things are on the horizon now and we're going to be marching toward them with a redefined sense of purpose.

Let us recount our progress in the next quarter and let us hope for a good year, one that's better than the last.

Until the next one,

October 15!