I started a new project which is a collaboration with a long-time friend. At the moment I'm not sure how public any of it is, so for now I'll just refer to the project as "K".
It's primarily a writing project, in a human language, which is something fairly new for me.
I'm very excited about it. I care a lot about the subject and there's something liberating in writing about a technical subject without also being responsible for the subject itself. I can really focus on what it's like to work with the thing without having knowledge in advance of how it works and more importantly, the complete history of how it came to be.
I don't get to do this very often.
It's not unlike editing someone else's film. When you edit your own film, you know and feel everything that went into every frame of the original footage. You know how hard it was to get each shot, how perfect the timing with the daylight was, or how much it hurt when you smashed your hand protecting the camera when you tripped over a cord. All of that history influences the razor when you're in the editor's seat, and it's impossible to see the footage for what it is, not what it represents. When you edit someone else's film you have none of this context or baggage. You don't know anything other than the photons that entered the lens, and you can cut, splice, arrange and sequence the footage until anyone seeing the light through the frames can see the light of the film.
My work on this project won't change the subject in the same way that a film editor changes the final version of a film (although there may be some influence), but it will define how someone new to the project first experiences it, so I think the naivete I bring to the work will help me compose it in such a way that it will connect with other fresh minds and avoid the pitfalls that can occur when one is afraid to "kill their darlings".
I'm planning to try and spend an hour a day for the rest of August on this work. I don't know if that will result in a finished project, but the commitment will keep me engaged and hopefully build-up enough inertia to keep it rolling. September and October are always stacked with Halloween work so there may be a lull, but then comes winter and winter in Wisconsin is a wonderful time for writing in both human and machine languages.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026