The main thing I want to talk about is A Light in the Woods, but before I do, there will be a bit of my typical rambling about life, technology and balance. If that is of no interest to you, feel free to skip this next section.
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I haven’t been online very much lately, and that’s been deliberate. It’s one of the better changes I’ve made in a while. I have been searching for the right balance between the digital and physical worlds we all straddle these days. And the key word there is balance. I think digital methods work well for some things and fail miserably at others. But as the world has tumbled further and further into the digital side of things, quality of life be damned, I found myself feeling increasingly disenchanted with nearly everything I used to love. But I am not helpless. I have a say here. I don’t have to go along if it doesn’t suit me.

I was having trouble deciding how to address this at first. But it turns out that I already had a good model. My recording setup.

Six years ago, in the midst of the pandemic, I decided to rethink how I was making music. It had all become too digital for me. Something about just throwing plugins on everything was unsatisfying. In hindsight, I think it’s because my creative solutions were less and less in the actual room, in real space, and they all required no real commitment from me artistically. It was all starting to feel simultaneously ephemeral and monotonous – just endlessly shaping raw materials instead of capturing moments and collaging them into something larger than the sum of its parts. And that lack of commitment made everything always feel somehow unfinished. An eternal work in progress. Perhaps because, in the back of my mind, I knew that I could always go back and tweak it some more.

After a lot of experimentation, I decided what I liked about the digital side of recording (organizing files, cleaning up sound quality problems, editing … technical things, more or less) and what I enjoyed about working with analog equipment (sound quality, workflow, creative decisions, limitations, not using a mouse, etc.). Once I struck a good balance between the two, everything started flowing again. That agitated feeling was gone. And I’m happy to say it hasn’t returned. I doubt I will ever go back to mixing entirely on a computer again.

With this concept in mind, I decided to look at all the things I do on a regular basis. After writing down that list, I pinpointed where I enjoyed them and where I didn’t. This resulted in decisions like removing the few remaining apps, including the browser, from my phone. I don’t like “everything boxes”, especially when they have such a compulsive nature and typically unsatisfying results. So the only non-phone things I kept were the camera (I take a lot of reference photos for art), a map (though I largely avoid it unless I leave town) and the ability to check my work email. I only have to charge my phone once or twice a week now, and I no longer resent the thing. It has very little feeling at all, actually, and I prefer that. In a similar fashion, I decided that I’d only watch YouTube on my TV now. My ipad I use exclusively for visual art. I prefer my recipes for food to be handwritten, or in an actual book. I could list all these things out, but I think you get the idea.

But one interesting change I made that I wanted to share, pertaining to music, really surprised me.

I stopped listening to playlists, including my own. This has done more for me as a listener than anything I can think of in over 10 years. No shuffling. No fussing. I just pick a record when I want to hear music, and that’s what I listen to. It’s a very simple thing, but my appreciation for music has really blossomed again. Something about hearing complete works – just sitting with the minds of a few specific people for a while – really makes music a lot more interesting to me. Playlists had largely turned into a way to kill silence, and something about them just wears my favorite songs down into something mundane and forgettable. It happens no matter how big I make a playlist. I may eventually bring back some of my substantial instrumental collections (it’s what I listen to the most), but for now I’m even avoiding those. Because it’s working.

A similar shift happened with movies, too.

A few months ago I was watching a movie with my partner, both of us getting over an illness, and the movie had a really good ending. One where you just want to sit with the credits for a while and let the implications swirl around within you. Nope. Not five seconds into the credits, random suggestions and videos started playing, totally shattering a well-earned mood. I was frustrated enough that a few days later we drove to a Barnes and Noble and bought some movies. To my surprise, lots of movies were far cheaper than buying the digital version. And in some cases, cheaper than renting them digitally. Our collection is already over 60 films again. I might use streaming to try out a film I’m not sure I’ll like, but for any movie I would watch more than once, I will hunt down a copy and watch it that way. And yet again, my relationship with movies changed from an agitated feeling to renewed appreciation.

The net result of these changes has been lovely. There are still plenty of problems in the world (understatement of the year), but the texture of my average day is so much better that I have a lot more resilience in dealing with what comes my way. I feel a lot less overwhelmed and exhausted by everything.

But I want to be clear about why I’m even sharing this. My goal is not to convert others to my way of thinking, and I am not trying to shame people about the things they enjoy, or the methods in which they enjoy them. I am sharing for those who might find themselves in a similar situation. I’m well aware that I am quite  sensitive to this stuff. I do creative work for a living, often in the very spaces I’m so frustrated by. But I see these frustrations even in those who don’t make their living the way I do, and if you find yourself in a similar spot, I hope maybe some of these essays might give you some ideas towards finding your own sense of balance. That’s all.

But that’s enough blabbing about modern life for today. I’ll move on to the main reason I am writing.
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I have been busy, despite not sharing anything online. Since putting out Mixtape #2 back in October, I’ve been entirely focused on A Light in the Woods again. But all this thinking of balance in my life has shown up in my work. So much so that I have decided to change the format of this project altogether.

For the quick and simple explanation -- I am no longer making videos, the way I did with part one. I am making books. Physical ones, with an accompanying soundtrack. I’ll break down all the reasons why below, for those who are curious.

The first reason is the big one. I have been working in a format that I am not currently a fan of.

When I think of videos at this point in time, January of 2026, these are the kind of words that come to mind: ubiquitous, relentless, suspicious, tiresome, mundane. Now that we see video all the time, for damn near everything, they are hard to get excited about. Even when they are really well done. My internal walls of mistrust are very high now, especially with anything online, and even really well made videos take me a while to warm up to. A Light in the Woods is both the largest undertaking I’ve ever committed to, while simultaneously being the most difficult. When all of that effort is aimed at a medium I don’t even enjoy very much as a viewer, it’s a real assault on my motivation. To go through all of the thousands of hours of work, then I just upload it to YouTube? It’s hard to describe how much of a let down that is.

When I said all of this out loud, to both myself and my sounding-boards for the project, some really good discussions about the pros and cons of various formats followed. When the idea of doing this project as a book came up, a lightning rod within me was struck.

I love books. I always have. I have entire walls of my home dedicated to them. Everything from large-scale art books to little novellas. When I imagined creating something that would live on those walls, beside all those volumes I’ve collected over the years, I just sat there and smiled. It felt right. So right that I immediately started a rewrite of part one.

When I began sketching out this project in 2018, we were in a different world in terms of media. Between a pandemic, the avalanche of AI slop, and lots of other factors I don’t really think I need to list here, that landscape has really changed. And not for the better. I was originally trying to work out how to incorporate writing and painting into my music, and video made the most sense. But when I sit back and really picture what I’m trying to do, it’s simple. I have a story I want to tell, and I want to use writing, painting and music to do it. But the key part of that sentence is in the first half. I want to tell this story.

Which leads me to my second reason for the change.

When I conceived this idea, I had no idea how much artwork and animation I was signing up for. But having completed part one, and made quite a bit more beyond it, I can now map out just how much labor each section will be. It’s enormous. It’s an amount that is pretty discouraging at times. I am only one person, and with some of my recent health issues, I have less energy than I did when I started, not more. This combined had an unfortunate side-effect on my work – I began to fear my own ideas.

I started writing out sections of the back story, or details of events that aren’t part of the main plot but certainly affect it. In writing these parts, I’d perk up. I stumbled onto some really cool concepts, ones that would really enrich the world and the characters within. And then I’d freeze. I caught myself thinking, quite often … Don’t dig into this too much. To paint and animate these ideas would add another 10 months to the project, maybe more. Just leave it alone.

I had come to fear my own creativity for the workload it was adding. As someone who loves to make things, this was an awful form of whiplash. It was this internal tug-of-war between what I thought would make the project the best it could be, versus what I felt I could physically handle. The more I developed certain ideas, the more the feeling of dread grew. I’ve never had this happen before.

But now that I have switched over from making videos to making books, the project is wide open again. I wake up thinking about it, with excitement. In just three months, the writing feels so much more alive than the video treatments I’d made. And for some concrete numbers here – what might take 200 paintings in video form only takes about 40 to 50 paintings in book form. I don’t have to worry about tempo, or painting lots of b-roll just to have something else to cut to during the music sections, etc. And on top of that, I can be far more creative with the images themselves.

One thing I didn’t anticipate when I set out to make everything as a video is how limiting the ratios would be. Always working in a 16x9 ratio was feeling more and more like a vice. I had ideas for images I would have loved to make quite tall, but in video I could only pan upward, showing a little at a time. It often didn’t read well, so I scrapped the painting. And that’s just one example. But with print, I can incorporate the text and artwork in tons of different manners. I can play with the ratios of text and imagery. I can switch art styles for things like dream sections without having to consider how I would animate them.

And since I don’t have so many images to paint, I can go much further with the details and the rendering of each image. I’ll show a few examples of what I mean by that. The first image will be the original, video based one, and the repaint will be what I’ve created for the book.
 

I am much happier with the books versions. They feel a lot more like what I’ve been picturing in my head. Part of this is because I have grown a lot as a visual artist these past couple years, sure, but I think this is also due to making the actual image instead of creating assets to animate. You see, with the animations, I must paint rough ideas of the images, in layers. Then I load the layers into different software, see if all the parallax works, then go back and forth until it all reads okay. I got better at this process as I went, so over time there were less mistakes, but it’s still a lot to keep in mind. In contrast, working on the actual image that will be printed is getting me a far nicer result.

Where this leaves me is that I am now thinking of the published “Book One” as a pilot. I still really like what I came up with, overall, and I’m proud of it. I would like to return to this format once I have finished everything, but with some hired help. I think that would be far more reasonable than trying to do every aspect myself. And since I can move much faster in book form, I will be able to release everything at a much nicer pace. Especially considering I have already recorded a bulk of the music. These are all motivating factors as well.
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Now. For those of you who do not collect books but still have an interest in this project, I will be converting the website. Instead of playing the videos, there will be a digital version of the exact same book available. So don’t worry. No one will be left out, regardless of whether you can buy anything, or even want to.

And that’s it for now. I will be posting about this more as I go, especially when I am ready to go to print. And while some unforeseen circumstances led to these changes, I’m glad it happened. The project has only gotten stronger from this, and I’m even more invested in it than I was before. Which is saying something.

So I hope this finds everyone well. And remember to spend some time with people you care about. It’s what matters most in the end.