I've been a very bad blogger.
And a bad writer.
And musician.
And artist.
If you haven't yet, go take a look around the site: it isn't the quillandfilmproductions.com you knew before. I wiped all the content from every page and repopulated them all from the ground up. Some things are gone forever. There are lots of new things to look at, watch, and listen to, and from here on out, there'll be lots more to see each week.
Since we moved to Maine, I've been in a sort of long, liminal midnight. I went through a period of fervent creativity, and then I fell off the edge of the earth into a place where I could barely get out of bed some mornings, let alone make up stories or sing silly songs. The most I could manage most days was Longmire on Netflix and a pan full of eggs. I worked mindlessly. I stopped working out. For the first time in my life, I didn't even want to make any art. I've gone through creative lulls before, but I always feel guilty about not working on things in the midst of them, and am always soon back at the desk and the keyboard, recording something or making up people and places and things again. This was different. This was worse.
Right now, I'm sitting on the couch in me and Bird's little green studio nest in Southern Maine. This morning's coffee is steaming softly on the stove to my right, and Trinity is curled against me to my left. I'm listening to Cults' first album, and watching the mystic, mysterious patterns iced onto the windows in the night melt away with the coming of the cold, clear, sunny Sunday this is shaping up to be. The coffee smells like acorns and warm wood, hot and strong.
There are really two people who pulled me back into the world: my real wife, Bird, and my movie wife, Mariah Rosado. (They took to calling themselves "Sister Wives" during principal photography on Marlon, and it stuck.)
Mariah has, from the very beginning of all this--from the days of Chat-Man and Blabbermouth (the first podcast I ever did, a hybrid movie news/weekly talk show I did with Mariah), when I was in pre-production on Marlon and didn't even have a website--has pushed me to generate content, engage on social media, blog, vlog, and build a brand. She's been (gently, kindly, insistently) telling me that "the webiste could use some work" for nearly a year now. Mariah is wonderfully polite. The website was in a smoking shambles before I sat down and started working on it. Dead links, stale content, no updates...it was a glorified shed for new episodes of Chat-Man and Robin, and even those were months in between.
In fact, when the website came up for renewal this past October, and I was looking at the bill to renew it, I considered letting it lapse and go quietly away. I was a writer, I reasoned. Not having the website to distract me, I would get so much more writing done. And we could save that money for stuff we really needed, like Ben & Jerry's and our Netflix subscription and new seasons of Game of Thrones.
Bird had just started her own website (link above), and was loading it up with her art. She was making connections with local galleries. She just recently got into an art show. Her plan is to pay for the web fee by selling prints and originals and...
...and her plan was a lot like what mine was when I first built this website. Back when I was an artist.
I don't know exactly which direction to look at it: maybe, nettled and jealous of Bird's success and artistic energy as I withered away into a slovenly, chocolate-stained blob in bed, hollow eyes red-rimmed with the weight of Netflix Originals, my pilot light kicked back on and I crawled over to my dusty guitar and dried-up pens to try and reclaim my life. Maybe, with Bird's unflagging support and encouragement, I started feeling like an artist again, thinking, and acting like an artist again. Maybe I was dragged back into Art (capital A) in her meteoric jetstream.
I guess whichever way I look at it, Bird inspired me, as she has so many times over the years.
Right now, our kitchen table is littered with sponges, brushes, and stained palettes of watercolor paint. There's a pickle jar full of oddly-colored water, a plant, and an out-of-place lamp. And there's a haunting, sexy, witchy painting in the middle of it all, which will be the album cover to my debut album, an EP called "Lo-Fi Lullabies," which is all recorded, and which I'm mixing right now.
Right now, there's a novella ready for editing on my hard drive.
Right now, I feel reborn. I feel happy, and productive, and artistic, and I haven't felt any of those things for a little while now.
But I'll tell you more about what I'm working on tomorrow. For those of you who found me through Marlon, there are some things about "Lo-Fi Lullabies" that I think you'll find particularly relevant, cool, and exciting. Tomorrow, tomorrow. Baby steps. I only just got out of bed and back on my feet. In the meantime, go check out the new site. It isn't quite finished yet, but it will be soon. I'm debating whether or not to really change things up and go white background with black text. A true fresh start. I don't know. What do you think?
Anyway. The coffee's done. Thanks for sticking with me. I have so much to write and shoot and show you these days, I can't wait to get out of bed in the morning.
--Max
From the Ice Nest in Maine