How Serious Are You About Wanting Me to Exist?

In Short: Losing control of a project doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It only matters that you finish.

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On My Radar: An incredibly brave songwriter - Edie Marie Webb

I’ve spent nearly three years working on a project that blew out of proportion. What set out as an attempt to overcome my writer’s block ballooned into something that I lost control of.

Why did I lose control?

Simply because I have tried to follow, at each step, what it has asked of me.

Chromatic Zero has shown me that you are never in control of a project. It grabs hold of your life, spikes your intentions, dismantles your ego, and then ruthlessly questions what is left.

Over and over it asks: how serious are you about wanting me to exist?

Answering that question then becomes your life.

Yes, it will ask you over and over to give up. Wouldn’t that be easier? Surely, yes.

But then again, a project asks you who you are.

You see — somewhere up there, out in the ether — that sense of what you think might exist.

And you decide, idiotic as you are, to try to pull it down, down from the gods.

Can you turn it into matter?

Well, there’s one thing that I can tell you about turning things into matter. And that is, that it hurts like hell.

Not exclusively. But it becomes your task to knit out of atoms things that do not exist.

Or rather, they do. You know they do. Because you have that needle, that want, that belief it’s out there. And resist it as you do, no one else will stitch it together for you.

Along the way you will question yourself. You will enter, at times, darknesses.

Filmmakers will release films called “The Odyssey” and you will lazily meander the internet.

“Ah yes,” you will think, “of course it started principal photography in February 2025, a full year AFTER you, yes idiotic you, started your own project!”

“Hmm,” you will think, “how does an epic take less time than whatever the hell this is?”

But then you will remember.

You are an independent artist. You have your good self, and nothing but the time the gods afford you.

And so, you will decide to bludgeon it out.

And bludgeon you do!

Blow by blow, you crash against the rock, and something forms.

At a certain point you realise, grimly, that it doesn’t matter a damn if it is great. In fact, it doesn’t even matter if it is good.

What matters is that it exists.

And, no — it is not a matter of hanging onto your ego, or to your dream — it is way deeper than that.

Because that is what art does to you.

It excavates you beyond every false motivation, every disguise, every last vestige of what is not truthful in you.

And good.

GOOD.

You want your art to be expressive of your love.

Believe me, that is not the route to your love.

It will break your love down until there is only truth left.

That truth will redefine love — because love can only ever exist in the wrapper of truth.

Why do I write all of this?

Because I know that many of you who read this newsletter have made the desperate decision to pursue something beyond the tsunami of content, whirlpools of nonsense and the evaporation of attention that blight the modern world.

If you are in the middle of a long-term project there is only one guarantee.

And that is that you will likely be spilling your guts out and trying to stitch yourself up at the same time.

Yet…yet…and this is the thing — as you do, you are new-formed.

You become something else entirely.

Something that you could not predict. That could not be predicted.

But my God, you have to see it through to earn that unpredicted thing.

I know I am bludgeoning you with abstraction today.

But these are thoughts made from the abstract becoming concrete.

I have just completed the final draft of the image book that will accompany the vinyl.

It has taken as long to create as the album itself. I have cursed it. I never meant to make it. I had to make it. It was asking me to make it.

Poor Lucas, my great friend and designer.

We made the first version.

And then I turned up at his flat and told him that we were throwing it out.

“Lucas, please forgive me for this. But it is not saying what I want it to say.” I said

To make matters worse, I used the line from a break-up:

“It’s not you, it’s me”.

Oh God, did I say that?

But it was the truth. I had given him the wrong words to the story I found myself in the heart of.

“I’m good for the money, and I’m good if you want to walk away, I know how unimaginably infuriating this must be.”

But Lucas, legend that he is, didn’t flinch.

He knows what it takes to make whatever the hell “a work of art” is.

Sometimes you have to throw out six months of work, because you took a wrong turn.

And then that will ask you, again, “is it not better to give up?”.

But to give up is to give up on yourself. To accept that you will be forever haunted by what never came into being.

And so, I got back to work, and that has taken up most of this year for me on the artistic front.

Today, we completed the third edit.

I just saw the cover — over which I had also roasted poor Lucas.

But you don’t “see it” until you “see it”.

Today, I saw it.

The next step is that we will send it out for a test print.

After that, two out of three from the Chromatic Zero project will be complete.

The third?

The long-form book.

80,000 words so far.

Probably too personal to release.

And yet, you have to see it through, don’t you?

Why?

Because it is your life, and your life tasks you with things.

There is a reason you make art.

There is a reason you aspire to it.

Whoever said that your effort to give something back to the world was going to be easy?

Or that the edifice you build to house your message won’t take longer than a feature film to make?

You are one person.

You are constructed from glorious, death-defying human limitation.

Do not let that limitation define you.

Stick to the plan.

Stay on target.

Have the guts to believe.

Hoover up the cost.

Absorb the punch.

Let time take the chunks it will.

This is your offering. When was offering ever made without a sacrifice?

My God, how you underestimate yourself.

How about this?

You see your underestimation through to its limit — and then you go beyond it. What do you find there? That is the stuff you’re meant to find. And that is what you have to bring back.

Cost what it may.

With love, Jim

I spent a lot of time thinking about how creatives can better promote a creative life — especially without it costing the time you have to make art.

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