Within a day of receiving a most enviable introduction for THE SOLAR GRID, a potential agent—who's had the manuscript sitting on her desktop for several months now—finally wrote back to tell me she wasn't sure she could agent it because the book isn't mainstream enough. She is of course absolutely right, and I as a matter of fact take her assessment as a compliment. My “idols” have, after all, never been mainstream. Although many have managed to become largely mainstream despite their material being anything but. There's Crumb, Alan Moore, Philip K. Dick, Hunter S. Thompson, and Burroughs to name but a few. Even Vonnegut started out as a fringe writer.
This puts me in the less-than-ideal position of having to agent the work myself, as I'd like the book to exist out in the wild for readers to discover beyond my limited reach.
I was chatting with members of a grant-giving body a few days ago about another potential book project. One of them said, “So you're writing, drawing, and designing it?” To which I nodded. “Wow, one-man show,” she said.
Not gonna lie, I'm a little tired of this whole one-man show business. The thought of working on the material while other better-positioned folks take care of getting it out there strikes me as very appealing, but it does seem to be insistently elusive for one reason or another.
Today I order chicken and make some soup in an attempt to rid my body of whatever new plague has infected me.
Today's soundtrack is a combination of cafe chatter (played via my phone) and Persian jazz (played via my laptop).
#journal #work #tsg
Got a haircut the other day and I noticed the barber had the sniffles. So I now have a cold.
Growing up, I don't recall my parents ever succumbing to common ailments. They must've gotten sick, but it seems to me they were always able to carry on as if they hadn't. Not me; When I'm sick—even a little sick—I'm sick. I lose my appetite, subside almost exclusively on herbal teas and honey, and find myself incapable of doing anything other than lazing around and, well, being sick.
This especially sucks because I had plans today, and when plans go astray I become unreasonably unhappy (despite plans going astray all the goddamn time, you'd think I'd be used to it by now).
I'm due to be in Houston in a few weeks to lead a comix-related workshop, and I was counting on preparing the exercise(s) today. Three pieces of concept art are also due for a thing asap, as well as some poster art. I need to do three portraits for the podcast series I've been recording, and a handful of illustrations for some of the extra pages that go into the TSG compilation. As well as a few sketches for furniture pieces I'm having custom-built for my place. All of which I'd like to get out of the way before my trip, so I may have to attempt to take after my parents and power through this stupid sickness if I can.
#journal
One of the things I'm sad about having dropped in 2025 is my vomitbook habit. This is largely due to the complete unavailability in Cairo of the slim pocket-sketchbooks I'd grown accustomed to using.
I picked up a small leatherbound sketchbook from Venice some time ago though and I was waiting for the right thing to utilize it towards. It's around the same dimensions as the pocketbooks I'm used to, but much thicker in terms of page-count. Figured I might as well use it as my regular carry throughout 2026 (or however long it'll last). The thickness means I can't carry it around casually in my back-pocket, and I need to have some form of bag if I want it on my person at all times, which is something of an inconvenience, but I suppose we can make it work.
#journal
It's been a strange week.
You can't find dead bodies and not become extremely existential in thought. Especially if the bodies pertain to people you were conversing with only a handful of hours prior.
Carbon monoxide poisoning. Looks like they accidentally dozed off and had left something on the stove. Pot overflowed and put out the flame and the gas kept going overnight.
Had to break in. Thought I could save them but it was too late.
Police proceedings afterwards were their own surreal experience.
Really fucking tragic.
#journal
Spoke too soon: Awoke at 3:00am for no apparent reason, so decided to burn the night oil and continue work on the Ganzeer.com update.
It's mostly organizational: Editing work categories and adding new ones, and shuffling projects around and fixing metadata, that sort of thing. Not fun, but should hopefully result in a web presence that makes better sense.
I did however come across a couple dusty external hard-drives that hold a treasure trove of olden works, including documentation of the first publication I ever put together: 8x8!
Won't get around to populating the website with most of that old stuff till I'm done with organizing what's already on there first. I reckon I'll probably crash by sunrise and have to make an attempt to recalibrate my body's circadian rhythms once again over the days to come.
#journal #work
Lost most of the morning to kitchen counter drama; It arrived with the wrong specs and rather than work quickly to cut and deliver a counter with the accurate specs, company personnel are instead dicking around trying to find someone to blame.
Egypt is plagued by terrible project management issues. So bad is the project management culture that you're bound to experience abhorrent inefficiencies with almost any outfit you work with, no matter how big or small.
We have a long ways to go to course-adjust in the old motherland.
In other news, my body has adapted to the new schedule, and I now auto-awake at 6:00am without the need for alarm clocks or any other interventions.
#journal
The days of springing out of bed and getting right to it are long behind me. I now require about 30-60 minutes of coffee-consumption in complete silence while staring out into nothing first thing in the morning. I then get about 30-60 minutes of exercise before breakfast, a 30-minute tidy up, and a shower. That's 3-4 hours first thing in the morning gone towards nothing of major significance.
Which is why I set my alarm clock to 6am every morning now. I'm hoping a couple weeks in and my internal clock will be adjusted enough to do away with the alarm altogether.
I loathe waking up to an alarm.
#journal
Someone I don't know came up to me at the New Year's Eve party I attended and had very nice things to say about THE SOLAR GRID. Immensely flattering and humbling, but I was a little surprised and caught off guard, mainly because when anyone in Cairo approaches me with nice things to say about my work, it's usually about my street-art from many moons ago, or about one of my exhibitions, or occasionally about my graphic design work.
So this... this is quite new.
In other news, I've become one of those people who play ambient cafe chatter in the background instead of music.
#journal
Bathed her today and, surprisingly, she still doesn't hate me.
It's mating season for the cats these days and there are more cats than humans in Cairo, which is a city of over 20 million people, which makes cat-mating season kind of a warzone.
She may just be seeking refuge from all the horny bobcats out there, of which I can see four sniffing around the studio doors as I type.
In the process of recalibrating my daily routine; Bedtime reading just ain't for me, so instead I'm taking up reading first thing in morning. My place doesn't get any direct sunlight, which is a blessing in the hot summer months, but a frigid curse worthy of Norse gods in the winter. I may have to incorporate a daily noon-time stroll into my routine just to get some sun. I'm terrible at aimless walking though, and need to figure a destination into my plan to make it work.
In other news: I think I'm getting the hang of homemade egg pasta. No machines.
The plan to give up smoking will likely not come to pass, but I can at the very least attempt to heavily reduce it.
#journal
Got the typewriter to work!
Didn't realize the amount of muscle it would necessitate just to type a sentence. Wholly unpractical as a writing instrument, but I can see myself incorporating it into some mixed media art on paper, or into some of my mixed media pocket journaling.
In other news:
Finished the thank you portraits that go into the back end of THE SOLAR GRID collected edition, and received the foreword from someone very dear to me. Still waiting on the introduction and afterword, after which all the material for the book should more or less be complete.
Things fell apart with the publisher lined up for TIMES NEW HUMAN, so have to start reconsidering the best route to release it.
PROJECT ROSEWATER which started at the tail end of 2025 is trudging along but seems to have hit a rough patch.
GANZEER.COM updates still underway and are likely to carry on till the end of next week, by which point work on my kitchen just might also be complete.
There is talk of a project that involves some travel towards the end of February. We shall see.
#journal