Drunken Owls and Other Delights

I've been thinking a lot about returning to my blogging. On the one hand I went on hiatus because I felt I was just repeating myself over and over with the writing blog and phoning it in on the music blog. On the other hand -- and I've said this before -- the Day Job changes had put considerable stress on me in those last few months before I quit.

I miss sharing the music that I've been listening to. I miss sharing my writing processes. And I also miss the schedule, believe it or not. Scheduling gives my brain a bit of stability and direction. And that in turn inspires me to work more on my fiction.

Hell, I'm even thinking of scheduling my Daily Words again. I'm ready for it.

I just need to stop Making Plans to Do It and JUST FREAKIN' DO IT ALREADY.

Hell, I've already returned to journaling and poetry. Not with any schedule, mind you, but I'm actively pursuing those again.

**

I've also started leaning heavily on my music again. I've been inspired to record my noodling, and not just on my phone for demo references...I'm learning more about what I can do with the foot pedal my sister gave me last Christmas (it's a Zoom G1 Four and it has all sorts of neat sounds and effects!), and I'd like to start recording things onto my PC. (Do I even know what I'm doing? Hell no. But that's part of the fun of it all!) 

Part of this stems from the fact that I haven't been able to write music for a long time, at least not in the way I used to write it. I toyed with giving it up or treating it as a hobby, but I don't think I'm ready to do that just yet. I still create melodies in my head that I haven't quite figured out to play, and they're not going to do anything if they remain there on endless loop. This forces me to hear sounds in a different way and build it up exponentially. That in turn will teach me how to layer a song, giving it depth. It's the same as my writing, really -- the only way I can learn is if I keep immersing myself.

**

So what about my artwork?

Well. That REALLY fell by the wayside over the last year or so, and I'm annoyed and saddened by that. Same reasons as above: creative frustration, little time, too many personal things going on. But you know, it's been months and things are better now, so I'm adding that to my creative schedule as well. Any aim on that in particular? Well, not at the moment, but I think I'm going to approach it a bit differently this time. No projects, no specific aim, no goal. Just taking pencil (or pen) (or stylus, if I decide to finally upgrade to a new Wacom) and doing a bit every day just to do it. See where it goes. I just want to do it all again.

**

So yeah. I miss the level of creativity I used to have just a few years ago. It's high time for me to return to it.

I still have the whiteboard up. Let's get this thing filled up again.
 

So. What was 2014 all about, anyway?

Personally I'd say it was a banner year, with room for future improvement. I hit a hell of a lot of goals I wanted to hit this year. I've missed a few, some failing spectacularly, but for the most part I'm truly happy with how the year turned out. I have new goals for the next year, many that are quite different from the past few years. It's not so much a continued 'ramping up the output' like the last few years, but more along the lines of taking different paths. I'll explain this more in my New Year's Day entry a few days from now...this entry is all about what I've done this past year.

Writing. Despite not having a complete product to release to the world (yet!), I'm actually quite happy with the output I had this year. I also put a number of stagnant and stalled projects to bed and labeled them Trunked. The main focus for most of the year was on finishing the revision of the trilogy, and I nailed that one halfway through the year. It still needs a bit of work, but it's a hell of a lot further along than it was previously. I managed to keep a near-daily personal journal the entire year, only skipping the weekends and the occasional weekday--itself a surprise, given that past journals rarely lasted for that long. I was much more active with my daily words, utilizing the 750 Words website. I had dry spells with no words, but I also had a very long and fruitful month and a half of daily words as well. I also came up with a number of interesting ideas and passages via the 750 Words site, and they've given me inspiration for future projects. The poetry was touch and go, but it was never forgotten. As for the Trunked items, this was a very personal decision--I felt that many of these ideas had been sitting around gathering dust, and I could not find adequate reason to continue them. The half-ideas (demos if you will) were never expanded, one of the well-intentioned projects came to a halt, and others were simply so old that if I still hadn't touched them after all this time, they probably weren't worth revisiting. This also gave me a bit of a tabula rasa for newer and fresher ideas to come in. All in all, I'd say I managed to hit the most important goal of getting better at my craft, and that was my main focus all along. I'll be starting fresh and ready to go come the new year.

Music. I did not get any recording done this year as I'd hoped, but I did get a lot of practice in, and that's the most important part. I've got a few snippets of songs in my head that I'd like to expand on in the new year. Earlier this month I found, much to my annoyance and frustration, that the audio software I use stopped working due to shady business practices on behalf of NCH Software. I really liked their software, but I will no longer work with a company who forces older versions to stop working so users must repurchase the new versions. I've since gone with Audacity and hope it works to my advantage.

Artwork. Being a part of the Inktober meme this year was quite possibly the most fun thing I've done this year. I'd stopped doodling some time ago for various reasons (mainly because my writing work is almost completely on PC), and even though I have the Wacom tablet, I don't nearly use it as often as I should. Doing Inktober was a great push, however...it forced me to draw something almost every day of that month, and in the process reawakened my love for drawing. I also started following a handful of artists on Tumblr to inspire me to draw more as well. I still have a long way to go on this, but the impetus is now there.

Photography. This one's a relatively new goal...I've been more excited about photography for a few years now, but 2014 was the year I stepped up my game with a new and slightly more professional camera. I've taken quite a few pictures this year, and even though I may not have posted them all online, I'm visibly getting better at it. In a roundabout way I'm revisiting my college years and relearning how to capture something visual--this time with still photography rather than moving film. I'd love to see where this leads.

Personal. Yeah, I admit it. I'm getting a little bit older and a little bit slower. I've been keeping an eye on my physical and mental health, going to the YMCA with Emm (although our Q4 attendance has been embarrassingly poor due to work and other issues), eating better, snacking less, and so on. I made a lot of personal moves to avoid or bypass emotional stress, which in the process has brought down my blood pressure and lifted my peace of mind. I'll continue this in the new year.


All in all, I think I did pretty damn good this year. I met my personal goals, with the aim of improving them and continuing in that direction. I'm definitely looking forward to a busy yet extremely fruitful 2015.

So the last vacation week of 2010 ends today. I admit I've been quite the slacker this week, doing very little in terms of writing, though I've kept busy with other things such as errands, shopping, and attending multiple cultural events (John Adams' El Nino at the Symphony, Verdi's Aida at the Opera House, a visit to the Jewish Art Museum, the Nutcracker at the Opera House, and the SF Zoo yesterday). So I may not have been creatively busy over the past week, but we kept ourselves busy with fun things to do. Isn't that what vacations are supposed to be about anyway? It was a nice respite, and I'm bummed it didn't last longer!

Admittedly, my writing has in fact been weighing on my mind off and on throughout the week, so it's not as if I'd been avoiding it or ignoring it. In typical writerly fashion, I did go through a few bouts of questioning if I really should be continuing this crazy dream of mine...these bouts of course were fueled by frustration that I'm not getting anywhere, that I'm not "feeling it", or just that I'm plagued with the same self-doubt everyone else gets at certain stages, in which I'm convinced that I'm just hopelessly average and will never have a decent enough story that will sell (and I'm well past the "they just don't get me" phase, thankyewverymuch). These emotions are only intensified when I see posts from other writers who post high word counts, and I'm still sitting here around the 500 mark--if that. Well, to be honest, and as you've all probably noticed by now, I've always had a really bad habit of getting all wound up in this frustration and self-doubt, releasing it in some self-effacing fashion--mostly here on LJ--then once that's been purged, feeling like an idiot for thinking such things and moving on. Yeah, I know a lot of you have read these posts in the past and may be getting sick of reading these. It's an ongoing process, going through all of this, so I commend you for your patience. I'm dancing as fast as I can.

( Which brings me to an lj-cut )

So...that's what's been on my mind all week, as far as writing is concerned. I'm just as sick to death about avoiding this hurdle as you are hearing about it, so I think it's high time I just jumped over the damn thing already.