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Staying the Course
Since starting this blog almost a year ago, I’ve had a lot of changes go on in my life which have been detailed in other posts. Up until the beginning of this month, it felt like I was being pulled in a bunch of different directions and not really getting a foothold anywhere.
Thankfully, things have really settled into a groove this past month. I think it all started with finally finishing the project of going through all of my CDs and figuring out which ones to keep and which to sell. It took nearly a year (from mid-October 2009 to late-September 2010), but I did it and was able to trim my collection by a fair amount. I’m sure I’ll need to go through them again at some point and trim some more, but I’m not going to worry about that for at least another year.
Also in this month, I’ve figured out how to block time in an efficient manner and have made a rather voluminous list of things that I want to accomplish in the short-term and the long-term. By applying the latter list to the former concept, I’m finally making a dent in all of the things I want to finish and building on the things I want to continue on with.
Music
Things are finally starting to move forward with all of the music that I’ve created over the years now that I dropped all of my projects in June of this year and am focusing on making music under my own name. In retrospect, I can tell I got way too hung up on focusing on a certain type of sound for each project and I wanted to work with lots of different styles, which was the reason for all the projects. I was on the right track with Philistine on the Sidewalk, but even it became limited as there was still a certain sound I was aiming for with it.
Now that I’ve dropped all the limitations I’ve set on myself and am creating whatever I want, I’ve found that creating a new song for this site every month has helped me to explore different aspects of music without getting hung up on making a song sound a certain way to keep it in line with the sound of a project. It also helps me to figure out which aspects of sound work well with my songs and which don’t. I still plan to focus on certain elements of sound when putting together albums, but I want to push my songwriting abilities as much as I can while staying within those elements.
I also have many albums planned for the future, a lot of which are ideas that were conceptualized for old projects (mostly for Amaranthine Skies), and I’m going to be working on these one at a time. I was trying to do two albums at the same time recently, but with all the individual songs I’m doing for compilations, online projects, and this site, there’s just not enough time to do so. As my currently titled “Dreamscapes” album has been coming along rather well so far and the VG cover album only has its track list picked out, I’m going to be putting it on the back burner and I’ll start to work on it in earnest after I finish up “Dreamscapes”. I wanted to get the VG album out before MAGFest 9, but it’s not likely to happen. Never say never, but I don’t think I’ll be done with “Dreamscapes” until December or so.
I also plan on remixing the tracks of original material I did for Philistine on the Sidewalk for an album called “Enlightening the Philistine”, which gives me nine original songs to work with. On the site, it only goes up to 012, but there is an 013 and an 014 that may be put up in the future. The project that 013 (an original) was for fell apart, and the project that 014 (also an original) was for has to have all the material resent because the project manager had his laptop stolen. I asked him if I could remix my entry because I wasn’t quite satisfied with it, and he gave me until the end of October. So, I’m currently working on a remix of the song that’s turning out much better than the original. I don’t want to remix that song again for “Enlightening the Philistine”, so that means I only have eight tracks to work from. I also have a three remixes that I did before planning this album (one for 002, two for 004) and it’s likely they’ll end up on the album in some re-rearranged way as well. Uff da.
So, it’s “Dreamscapes”, the VG album (which has a title, but I want it to be a surprise), “Enlightening the Philistine”, likely another original album, then I want to start reworking some more older material. I have a plan to do a reworked version of “The Great Beyond”, a reworked version of “A New Beginning”, and it’s crossed my mind to remix some of the material on “Mindtrap” as well as a couple tracks from “Dragons of Putrescence”. I also want to dig deep into the archives and do something similar to “Days Gone By, Volume One” with different material and a different title. I’ll probably keep the volume thing, since that’s working out pretty well for the Nevar Say Die and A Chip off the Shizz Block series of compilations.
Speaking of compilations, I’m just about ready to send “Nevar Say Die! Compilation, Volume Four” to the printers (which features two of my works), and I’ve got four other songs that will be coming out on compilations in the near future – two of which are due this month. I also have a song to finish up for the site and I’m going to do an over 20 minute creepy ambient jam on Halloween for the Album-a-Day project and for the sake of challenging myself to do a song that long in one day. I’ve been building my skills in spontaneous music creation lately through Punchfest (“Select Your Pizza” is a 6+ minute track that I did in about three hours), but this is going to be a real test. I’m pretty excited! Of course, I’ll have horror movies running in the background while I work in order to get the proper atmosphere for the song.
As you can see if you managed to read all that, I’ve certainly got a lot of music on my plate for the short-term and the long-term. It’s amazing that I can manage to do anything else!
Fitness
I’ve been keeping my fitness routine pretty simple up until this last week, which was exercising one specific area of the body each day of the week (Mon-Fri), then doing something fitness-related on Saturday, whether it be taking a hike through Carkeek Park, doing some yard work, or what have you.
This week, I’ve increased my focus to making sure I hit all of my muscle groups (I usually skipped a traditional leg workout) at least twice a week. I’ve decreased the amount of exercises I do per area each day (from 6 to 4), but since I’m doing them twice a week now, I’m doing more anyway. Mon/Thurs is arms and back, Tue/Fri is shoulders and abs, and Wed/Sat is chest and legs. I’ve seen some pretty good gains this week alone, so I’m excited to see how this works out in the future!
I still want to do hikes to Carkeek or some cardio on the weekends, but time is a little too tight currently to do so every weekend. I’m glad I was able to get two good hikes to Carkeek this month, and hopefully I can get a couple in next month, but the rest of this month is going to be rather focused on music, as I have four songs to finish in eight days, one of which I haven’t even started. Still, the lifting routine nets me about 9 hours of exercise a week (not to mention running around back and forth at the office), so it’s not like I’m neglecting this area of my life.
Gaming
This, however, is an area of my life that I am seriously neglecting. I game maybe a couple hours a night on the weekends if I don’t get wrapped up in working on another project, doing something away from home, or falling asleep. I do have plans to move all of the old material I’ve done at Nintendo-A-GoGo over the years to the Gaming tab at this site, but it’s hard to say when I’ll be able to start on that in earnest. I want to clean up all the old blogs and format them like this one before I start on that, and I’ve got about 90 that still need to be reformatted. It looks like the rest of this year is going to be pretty game-free, save for some time with Dragon Quest IX.
Beer
I drink it, it’s tasty, that’s about it. Micro brewing is definitely a project that has been pushed to 2011, but it’s hard to say when in 2011. I still have the desire to, but there are still a lot of things I need to first before I can think about starting up a new project like this.
Finance
Things are moving along rather well in this area – my passive income streams are growing slowly but surely, my stock picks are doing rather well and continue to grow in value, and I’m saving as much money as I can to help build towards the future. This is really the area where I’m staying the course the most, as things have become pretty easy to monitor in this area and I don’t have to do a ton of research on investments any more. I still like to look at new prospective companies to add to my portfolio and consider ways to tighten up my portfolio and grow my wealth, but it’s not something I have to devote a lot of time to at this point.
Cats
Outside of taking care of and spending time with Barclay and Bootsie, there’s really not a lot of to talk about here. I still check to see what’s going on with MEOW from time to time and the cats they have available for adoption, but that’s it. They do have a cute little guy named Joey there for adoption that’s got some ear tufts that dwarf Barclay’s, but another cat here would be a recipe for chaos.
Writing
The blog is certainly sufficient for this area at the moment, though I still want to get back into writing short stories (and perhaps some longer ones) next year. It all depends on how well I’m able to finish up other projects and allocate my time over the rest of this year and early next year.
Designs & Photos
While I have some designs and lots of photos to work with, I’m not sure what exactly to do with them and when I’m going to have the time to do it. These are likely to be more 2011 projects.
Website
I’ve been cracking away at the website for a while now, and while I’ve got the format figured out and the Music page is finally online, there’s still a ton of work to be done. I still need to add pages for the Writing, Gaming, Designs, Photos, About Me, and Links tabs, not to mention adding more info to the Music page and like I mentioned earlier, cleaning up the formatting on all the old blogs I’ve done over the past year.
Once I do finish up everything that I want to for this site, I want to format the Concatenation Records site in the same way that I’ve done for For the Love of Creativity. Ten tabs at the top, a two-tab width column down the left and an eight-tab width column down the right. It may not be as time-consuming as I envision, though with 65 (soon to be 66) release pages, it should take at least as much work as going back through and cleaning up the blogs.
Cleaning
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve accumulated a lot of clutter over the years and I’ve finally been hacking through it with some success recently. I’ve managed to turn two full 24-case beer boxes of old mail into a three-inch stack that will be finished the next time I get to it (it was going to be today, but the blog is running rather long). While I’m certainly happy about that, I’ve still got some old boxes of who knows what to sift through, a bunch of old clothes that don’t fit any more to get rid of, those aforementioned CDs to part with, and who knows what else.
I do have some major plans in this area, but right now I’m working on tackling the small battles before I can get to the larger ones.
That’s a Long Course!
I’ve got all these areas of my life that I want to work on, and I hope to give them all the amount of time they require in order to make proper advances with them. Obviously, music has been the main focal point of my life for some time and will continue to be for some time to come, but I don’t want to have all of my creative eggs in one basket.
I do have a rough five-year plan that I’m working from, though the plans for this year (year one) haven’t come together as well as I had hoped they would. A lot of that is likely due to losing Mouse earlier this year, as well as not knowing how to properly channel my time and expanding the amount of projects I was trying to work on to a level too high to maintain. I also didn’t account for a lot of trial and error, but there’s certainly been a fair share.
Some of these new endeavors have been working out pretty well so far (this blog, studying finances, working out at home) and even those that haven’t or that have fallen to the wayside (Philistine on the Sidewalk, Nintendo-A-GoGo) have generally had some benefit. Philistine on the Sidewalk was the last musical stepping stone I needed to take in order to start putting music out under my name again as well as giving me the format to work with more free-formed musical pieces and remixing works.
Also, Nintendo-A-GoGo’s resurrection (and subsequent stagnation) helped me to realize that I shouldn’t create all these different sites when I have a perfectly good place for the content here at For the Love of Creativity. If I was working on a site with other people, then a collective site name would be more appropriate. The same goes for music – if I start a new music project up with other people, I’ll be happy to help think of a name to work under.
That said, I’m not looking to start anything new that I haven’t mentioned in this post, so I’m going to stay the course to the best of my ability and continue working towards my goals.
Discuss this post at the For the Love of Creativity Forum!
Posted on October 23rd, 2010.
External Links
• Album-a-Day – Crap Art: Album-A-Day
• Amaranthine Skies – Amaranthine Skies
• Carkeek Park – Seattle Parks & Recreation: Carkeek Park
• Concatenation Records – Concatenation Records
• Joey – Petfinder Adoptable Cat | Domestic Long Hair | Kirkland, WA | Joey
• MAGFest – Join Us! | MAGFest – the official site
• MEOW Cat Rescue – MEOW Cat Rescue – Home
• Nintendo-A-GoGo – Nintendo-A-GoGo
• Philistine on the Sidewalk – Philistine on the Sidewalk
• Punchfest – Punchfest – Bossies
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