Three months have passed since the prologue. I’d already written the next two episodes and even recorded them… Then I somehow had to clean the house and turn everything upside down, and then the invitation to the colloquium arrived.

Shit.

Suddenly, I remembered that I still have two university modules to complete and have to prepare for said colloquium in two weeks – and all the blog and podcast plans had to wait. Oh yeah, and my website crashed, too. Nice.

I’m slowly getting back on track.* I survived the colloquium with a heart rate of 154, and thus passed my bachelor’s thesis (very well, in fact) and completed my studies (also very well, in fact). Bachelor of Arts in Communication Design: Done.

And now it’s time for publication.

Really.

I’ll do this.

Of course, that requires a new website, the concept of which is driving me insane. When it’s live, this blog post will appear somewhere between the recent prologue (from three months ago) and the actual blog content (the documentation of the thesis). It’s all incredibly complex and I’m going mad.

The actual documentation had the advantage that my professors had to read it; they get paid for it. It also made sense chronologically. A book (or PDF) that you can simply read through from cover to cover.

Online publication is a completely different story. First of all, nobody out there needs to read my stuff. Second, nobody wants to read 300 pages of text online.

And it all requires so much explanation! And there’s so much I can’t explain.

I’m brooding over an intro article that gently and understandably introduces the reader/listener to the topic of the blog/podcast. And I’m not getting anywhere. So I’m writing this article instead. Just like the documentation, where writing has always grounded me during the project. The documentation was my anchor, my home, the place where I could organise my thoughts and create a new world.

And somewhere in the process, I decided to publish the whole documentation. Not just the Fool’s Tale or selected parts, as had previously been thought. The Creative Tarot isn’t complete without the documentation.

That’s a big step, because it’s so much more than the »technical documentation« required for the practical bachelor’s thesis. It’s really a diary. Something incredibly personal. It contains things I’ve never told anyone. And so far, no one except my professors has read it.

It’s not a finished project or book, not the end result of a creative process – that’s what we usually see: a finished picture, a written book, a final product, some kind of success. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we get insights into the process itself, a glimpse behind the scenes. Sometimes even an honest one, but usually a censored one.

The documentation, the Diary of a Fool’s Project, is different. It’s not a look behind the scenes, it’s the whole world behind the scenes. It’s uncensored. I’ve changed, deleted, or added almost nothing afterward. Just annoying footnotes and silly comments. The actual content is raw. With all its confused thoughts, errors, flights of fancy, and complete disasters. It’s honest, real. You rarely find that.

I have no idea if anyone cares about it. As I said, my professors were forced to read it. Everyone else isn’t. And I can’t even write a catchy intro to explain what it’s actually about.

It’s about a bachelor’s thesis in design.
It’s about creativity.
It’s about the tarot.
It’s about playing cards.
It’s about design.
It’s about illustration.
It’s about writing stories.
It’s about psychology or something like that.
It’s about understanding the world.

Does anyone care? Is there a market for it? Especially in my questionable writing style?

I don’t know. The only way to find out is to try. Damn.

Actually, I don’t really to publish the documentation. It’s too personal, too harsh. I don’t even want to publish the Fool’s Tale. The last chapters honestly make me cry. Even reading the documentary is overwhelming for me, just too much.

I’m probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after this project. And I can understand that no one can understand that.

The project has changed me. I can’t describe it, it sounds so lofty.
It has changed my view of the world.
It has changed my interests.
It has, of course, changed my attitude toward creativity. On a general level as well as a personal one.
It has even changed my hobbies, my interior design, and my holiday plans.
It has taken my whole life apart and put me back together again.

Sounds terribly lofty, right?
But it’s true.

If I let the project rot on some digital or physical shelf, all the work will have been for nothing. I can’t let that happen. I started the project with a mission – and that mission isn’t accomplished until it’s published.
Entirely.

Sometimes there’s only one way.

So, girl, scrape up your courage, craft the website, write your silly intro that no one will read anyway, and send the thing out into the world. There is no other way.
Obey.

I dated this post for June 7th, which should be about right. Today is July 24th, seven weeks have just disappeared.

But … the website is almost finished. I’ve removed a lot of stuff for now, just to start somewhere and not get lost in grueling perfectionist procrasticrafting (Do we need 5 or 10 pixel spacing here? Should the parallax be subtle or regular? Why the hell is the animation of Hawking’s outro not working???). Who cares? It doesn’t matter. The important content is there, everything looks pretty good (Really? Is it too fancy? Not fancy enough? Shouldn’t the blog images be 4:3 instead of 1:1? Shouldn’t the parallax be a bit more subtle? And the background more like #0a0a0a instead of #000000? Shut the f*ck up! It’s good enough!).

So, everything looks pretty good, even the translation (like this one) is there (not perfect, but it’s there), most of the links have been checked, we are ready.

I’ll explain this »We« in a separate article (yes, a third prologue. Not that I’m procrastinating the publication or anything …), but I swear to the puppeteer that the website and the first articles will go live this week.

It’s Thursday morning, 9.01 a.m. Tick-tock…