Two days without showing up was very unlike her. In fact, just the sound of the door to the garden sliding open every morning would be enough for her to come running.

Suspicious, I decided to go look for her up and down the street, but I didn't need to look far. Right out front, I found her corpse. Next to a small piece of crunched up aluminum foil. Whatever was inside it, gone. Someone poisoned the cat.

I grabbed her and was surprised to find she was already stiff as a rock.

I carried her down to the garden, and buried her. A shuffle in the bamboo a few feet away betrayed her kittens, who were watching.

Her name was Koshary, and she was a very sweet girl.

#journal

One of the surest ways to infuse my life with misery is to sit me in front of a computer screen for multiple hours on end. Unfortunately for me, this past week has been mostly that, and the next week will likely entail more of the same. Some days I find myself clocking in something like 12 hours straight at the computer. Needless to say, this is not the life of the artist one aspired to as a child, but it is exactly what the job necessitates (at least for me I guess) in this evidently despicable century of human existence. Most of these hours don't actually involve doing much in the way of anything creative.

– TSG Exhibition: The ask included proposing objects that can be pulled from the world of THE SOLAR GRID; objects that could potentially be fabricated and displayed within an exhibition setting. This meant going through the entire now complete graphic novel with a particular eye for the speculative objects that could ostensibly work, making note of them, and putting them all into a presentable proposal-ready PDF.

– The Podcast Series: Going over the video recordings of the episodes (wherein I interview Egyptian artists), each one an hour long, and identifying the moments in which the guest talks about a particular project. Make a list of all mentioned projects, email it to the guest so they can send back relevant imagery of said projects. Once received, email them to the video editor along with time-stamps that indicate where the images ought to be spliced in.

-TSG Archive: Two things have necessitated going through my very unorganized history of TSG process documentation. And y'know, TSG took 10 years to complete, so that's a hell of a lot of unorganized history to go through. Which is how I stumbled upon this:

Giving a keynote presentation about THE SOLAR GRID at the Science Fiction Research Association conference held in Oslo circa 2022. Photo credit: lost (I'm so sorry!)

Of course, the above-mentioned projects haven't been the only reason behind recent computer-centric activities. There's also the usual stuff: email, accounting, flight bookings, etc.

My one piece of advice to young artists from here on out with be: Just know that it'll involve something like 70% admin, 20% actual creative work, and 10% putting out fires and/or wanting to die.

#journal #work #tsg

Above: Not a fictional character, not from TV or film, but a real live person. Cédric Villani (actual last name), French mathematician and politician, spotted in Standart's Enki Bilal documentary. Love me an eccentric. Also of note: North American graphic novelists are rarely if ever seen conversing with mathematicians/politicians. This, I suppose, is part of what separates the French from Americans.

Below: The road back to Cairo from Suez. The construction goes on forever. Cairo, already an insane megalopolis, continues to balloon.

Finished the final touches on the design for the box that will collect the serialized editions of THE SOLAR GRID. My co-publishers at Radix Co-Op tell me it'll debut at the NY Art Book Fair in September. Cover reveal when I get the green light.

Gearing up for THE SOLAR GRID panel at Petrocultures 2026 in Dresden, which will take place on August 27 from 11:00am-1:00pm. I am told that it'll be held in a conference room with a capacity of up to 400 people.

Today: – Finishing a small illustration for a new Houston-based micro press. – Conference call for a potential podcast graphic. – Early prep work for a potential TSG-related exhibition. – Getting my brand new kitchen faucet replaced. Already. – Podcast episode review for edits.

#journal

They have advertising screens above urinals now?

A man cannot even pee in peace in this cursed hellscape of a timeline. The state of advertising in this batshit city is really getting out of hand.

#journal #cairo #egypt

The story, I think, is just asking to travel into other languages.

The latest newsletter went out a couple days ago. RESTRICTED FREQUENCY #234: Shortform.

#journal #RF #TSG

One of the interesting things emerging from this process is that in drafting the Arabic, I'm not doing a super faithful translation, but rather I find myself making drastic changes along the way. Not just in dialogue or choice of words or sentence structuring, but even in characterization and plot details. Changes that I feel would make for a better story. So much so that once I'm done with the Arabic, I'm likely to go back to the English draft and rewrite it accordingly.

As I begin to build momentum in my approach to PROJECT HOURGLASS, I'm already anticipating the three major disruptions I have in store for me in coming months:

• Kiddo for two weeks.
• Istanbul for a week.
• Dresden for a week.

Other than that, I should be able to dedicate the bulk of the six months that remain to PROJECT HOURGLASS. As far as TSG goes—which has been complete for months now—still no concrete development on that front just yet.

#journal #work #fiction #tnh

So much so that I felt the urge to take a baking break. I hardly ever want to bake.

Cheesecake. Let's see how it turns out.

#journal #work #fiction #tnh

I'm typically a one book at a time kinda guy, so doing this with two books—each in a completely different language at that—is doing something strange to my brain chemistry.

#journal #reads

The word “Adeeb” is an interesting one. It comes from the root “adab”, meaning literature, and is used to describe someone whose vocation is literature. But it implies more than the word “writer” (that would be “katib”), which by definition is focused on the doing of writing. It also implies more than “author” (that would be “mo'allif”). It's a far more broad term that evokes a sense of all-encompassing immersion in literature that doesn't quite have an English-language equivalent.

Scooped up a big pile of books from Cairo Book Fair (which was just gloriously insane) some months ago and finally getting around to making my way through them. Partly because I have been away from Arabic-language Egyptian literature for a long time now and realized how much I miss it (and boy is it different from most of what is churned out by the anglophone world), but partly also because PROJECT HOURGLASS will be produced in both English and Arabic and a good greasing of my Arabic-language functions is sorely in order.

#journal #reads #work #tnh

Thought I'd finally found a housekeeper to pop in once a week to assist with cleanup. But that was three Fridays ago, and every time she doesn't show up even though the date and time were of her very own choosing. Similar situation with the plumber who first promised to show up two weeks ago. I've set three different appointments with the mirror place, every time they say they'll call me the day of to confirm and never do. Carpenter too been dragging me on for four weeks now.

Not sure why the need to hound someone to do work for you before they do it even after they promise doing it is such a widespread phenomenon in Cairo. I remember only needing to contact a housekeeper back in Houston just once to agree on the day, time, and fees, and she stuck to the same schedule like clockwork for three years before I had to move (Tidyqueen, if anyone in Houston is reading this and looking).

It's such a tedious energy-sucking thing in Cairo, because on any given day I'm expecting someone to show up, I find it extremely difficult to lock in and really get into the zone of whatever project I have on my table; the anticipation of impending distraction lingering in the back of mind all day.

And some of the stuff that needs tending too isn't superfluous. We've got pipes blocked with weeks full of piss and shit at this point.

Now I know why all my homies have moved into compounds; a virtually non-existent development less than 10 years ago. They tell me whenever anything needs fixin', all they have to do is call a number and help is on the way in less than 24 hours. That's enough of a perk to explain the seemingly unquenchable compound craze that has taken over the country in recent years, but I still can't stand that shit. Nothing spells a seething distaste for “the plebs” quite like a gated “community”.

#journal #work #Cairo