the taryn zhang blog

With the Alpha Collection still in production mode and the very realistic possibility of it not being done any time before March, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot I can do for the business now, so it’s back to the novel. Right before the New York bar exam, which was before I got the idea of designing purses, I was at work on a novel (and no, not “chick lit”). I had about 265 pages of the first draft before my writing endeavor fell off a mental cliff.

Today, I printed out the manuscript for a hard copy to scrawl edits on. It’s a daunting task, to read your own work almost half a year after its writing. I cringed while I read through the first 50 pages. (“Seriously…did I write this? Did I write this sober?”) Then I tossed it aside and proceeded to look for a hole to bury my head into. And to think, the first draft isn’t even complete. The plot goes inert midway through an alleged Chapter 18 and that is what I have for a last page.

Whatever. Revision. It’s something to do. Either I pour my concentration and creativity into the novel (irrespective of whether I finish or publish it) or I lament, harass people, and whine at the universe about how depressed I am over the crazy production delays. Working on the novel, good novel or bad, seems way healthier. So that’s what I’ll be doing, and there will likely be several blog posts from now until mid-March (when production is finalized) with content that has nothing at all to do with purses or Taryn Zhang.

Issue after issue has cropped up and now, when I was supposed to get the first round of samples by Christmas of last year, I won’t be getting the samples even in time for Valentine’s Day. March 2010 is the new projected finish date. March. That means we’re 10 weeks behind schedule.

When I started on the debut collection in Fall 2009 with (what seemed at the time as) the distant future launch date of Fall 2010, I questioned whether I was being a bit of an early bird, starting a full year in advance. Clearly I was not. At this point, it will be rush-rush just to meet the Fall 2010 goal. I’ve still got quality testing to do, photo shoots, lookbooks, line sheets, dossiers, meetings with prospective buyers, arranging for a visit to Guangzhou, corporate and administrative stuff and of course, production of the debut collection and final QA. All I can do at the moment is pray that it will all work out in the end and when the samples do finally arrive in March, work like an ox. (Oxen are stereotypically hard workers, right?)

On a happy note, the factory seems to be working in earnest and in good faith to do everything it can to materialize my vision.

Sitting in my "corner office." This is where I design.

Oh happy day. The metal logo plates are here! They will be a lovely adornment to the Alpha Collection handbags. Cheers to a good Monday.

My notes from the board meeting:

The corporate lawyer at the end of the table with her nose in her portfolio folder?

Yeah… she’s probably not diligently transcribing everything you say…

After the mind-numbing task of creating every single frame for the [first draft of the] above animation and the [first draft of the] larger-res one that appears on the splash screen, I realized that (1) the square logo kind of resembles the Chinese character for “country,” or guo (total accident/serendipity), and (2) say I really were to run with the whole resembling-the-Chinese-character thing, my [first draft of the] animations animated the drawing of the logo in the wrong stroke order. (See Wiki on Stroke Order.)

The correct stroke order for the character guo is as follows:

In dumb-speak, only three sides of the square are drawn first, then all that interior mumbo jumbo, and then the last bottom line of the square.

My [first draft of the] animations “drew” the entire square first, then filled it in with the T and Z interior mumbo jumbo.

Shouldn’t have been a big deal, especially since I never intended the TZ logo to look like the character guo. Who cares about “the correct stroke order,” or whatever “the correct stroke order” even means? My reluctance to re-do the entire thing convinced me that I did not care.

The effort and energy it took to convince myself that I did not care started giving me anxiety attacks. No, really. So tonight, two glasses of Riesling in, I admitted that I did care. I scrapped the old animations and started over, following the stroke order depicted above, the first three sides of the square, then the interior mumbo jumbo, and then the last bottom line. Bam. Done. No, actually it did not go so fast. It took all night, and I had to stay up past my bedtime.

James, my husband, said that redoing the animations just “to get the stroke order right” was a bit OCD. Well, when you’re doing something for yourself and you know that the result of it will be a reflection of who you are, then you can’t help but be just a bit OCD about a detail like stroke order.

P.S. The above character for guo is not the way I write it, just so that is noted. My heritage is Taiwanese, and so I learned to write Traditional Chinese. The above is the Simplified Chinese way of writing guo. The Traditional character is this:

Prettier, I think, though the stroke order is essentially the same as the Simplified — left, top, right of the square, then all the interior mumbo jumbo, and then the last bottom line.

Full Disclosure: I’m not actually literate in Chinese. Doh! However, I’m trying to change that by learning the language. It’s one of my 2010 resolutions– learn Chinese.