For the past year I’ve been working on the second issue of Runicfire, a supposedly monthly literary zine. I’ve not been happy with the time scale, and there are a number of reasons for the lateness.
The first is that a lot’s been happening in my personal life. I released the first issue of Runicfire while I was still homeless, and that condition did not end, technically, until January of this year. Since then, in addition to dealing with the logistics and psychological fallout of nearly two years of itinerancy—well, just look to the news, and I think you’ll see what’s been disturbing my calm.
However, the other major component is that I’ve subtly resisted the idea of releasing a monthly periodical. Were I simply aggregating work that had already been written, then there’d be no problem: so long as I found a story on time I could keep pace. But Runicfire is, for the time being, a showcase for my own work. Some of it has already written, but some of it I am only beginning and completing for the zine. And therein lies the rub: you cannot rush art.
While I suspect that a monthly or bimonthly release schedule should be feasible in the medium to long run, it’s hard to say what is feasible right now because placing a hard deadline on creativity just isn’t working for me. Setting a monthly scheduling and release date is a wonderful idea, but the capitalistic notion that you can just pump out art on a predefined schedule, like clockwork, is precisely what I’ve been trying avoid by going indie.
So what am I to do? Embrace bohemian ephemerality, and live in a world in which each issue might come out now or in an eternity? I have neither the time nor the money to make my release dates wholly arbitrary, so I have concocted a compromise—or, I should say, a synthesis.
I’ve been playing with scrum production methods ever since animation school. Scrum is distinct from your standard production process in that the production team takes vertical slices of a project and tries to complete it within a set period of time, known as a sprint. The team takes on a certain number of tasks each sprint. If they get them all done, they maintain or increase pace. If they get fewer done, they decrease pace until they can work at a sustainable rate. Deadlines are not set externally by bosses, ideally, but by looking at burndown charts which, empirically, give an accurate idea of when the whole product will be done.
This is a gross oversimplification, of course, and I’m not implementing true scrum, since I am a team of one and my needs don’t wholly correlate with full scrum. But I have been treating each issue release somewhat like a scrum—or trying to—already. However, in practice this has resulted not in the organic production process that scrum is supposed to produce, but a kind of cyclical waterfall production cycle that I instinctively rebel against. So I’m leaning more into the scrum principles in putting out the zine, and I’m going to adjust my release schedule into something more flexible but, ultimately, more accountable.
I’d been working on one-week to one-month sprints before, but I shall reduce them to two days for the sake of focus, tackling only one or two significant tasks each sprint. I’ll do two to three of these per week, with the middle sprint focusing on business tasks as needed. The release date for the zine will follow the burndown chart, not a predetermined point on the calendar. However, I will share my progress on a regular basis, with at least a nominal update after every sprint, so that readers might see how things are coming along. I would like to encode this into a visual interface so that people can see exactly where an issue is and when they might reasonably expect it, but blog updates will have to do at the start.
I still would like to pare the timeline down to a monthly or bimonthly release. I would like Runicfire to be a true periodical, and I sympathize with audiences’ desires to see work come out in a reasonable and predictable timeframe. After all, I hate it myself when businesses fail to be open or to deliver when promised. I’m often willing to forgive when alterations are announced ahead of time, but outright refusing to, say, stick to posted hours comes across as a slap in the face. And that’s why I am deliberately shifting the schedule of Runicfire: if I were to pretend that I can keep a monthly schedule when that is very much in question at this time, I’d be lying to you. It might be possible in the future, but I simply haven’t had the stability and focus to calibrate Runicfire’s production cycle. The best option is to make the process transparent, and while I expect readers might view this decision with skepticism, I believe it is for the best.
After all, the business of art isn’t making art for business: it’s a matter of making business serve art. And you cannot rush art.