Lately I’ve been trying to post a little earlier in the day to save the situation I’ve often ended up in, which is getting to 2am and suddenly realising I need to go to bed but not having posted so I either have to post when I just want to sleep (and back-date the post so it appears on the right day) or post several days in a blob later on (and back-date all the posts). But it’s getting me in a bit of a muddle because often I do some of my most creative stuff at night and given that this is a day-by-day blog, it feels sort of weird to be saying “yesterday I did this”. If you feel it’s weird too, please let me know in the comments!

But weird or not, I’m taking it on. And starting with…

Yesterday I ended up having a bit of an SEO binge. I explored a few tools, found a couple that might be useful and updated/added/corrected some stuff on caitlinrowley.com to improve its ranking on Google. It’s going to take a little while to seep into the system, of course, but I’m confident I can improve it. What I’m aiming for is to make caitlinrowley.com the top-ranking site on Google for a search on my name. At moment minim-media.com is, which is fine because that was my principal site but now that I’m thinking of closing that one down, I’d like to have caitlinrowley.com up there before I do. It was lots of fun and felt like a big achievement when it was done. Now I just need to make myself not check my stats more than once a day to see what’s going on because there’s no point – Google Analytics only updates once a day. There’s no new data there. No, really…

Today I was stuck at home waiting for someone from DHL to come and take our poorly Roomba away to be fixed again. I’ve been feeling like everything’s a little fragmented in terms of the business development stuff, and lacking a little in direction, so I ended up spending about 3 hours going through various bits and pieces, thinking thoughts and working through worksheets and planning plans, all of which was great, and my ideas have taken another step along the path towards the business being whatever it turns out to be (I blogged about this over at Minimania, so I won’t repeat it here. Is it possible to be a blog-writing addict?), but rather exhausting.

Eventually the Roombaman came and took our digital pet away, whereupon I bolted out to the post office and stood in line for half an hour to send some stuff to Australia. The walk and the wait were great, actually. Really cleared away some cobwebs and made some stuff fall into place. And what I realised was that Raspberry Blue was heading towards the exact same problem that Minim Music & New Media has/had, which is that it didn’t have a clear focus. Splitting the site between the web dev/SEO stuff and the music publishing stuff is detrimental to the development of the business. Not because I can’t do both – I most emphatically can and still think I will – but because the presence of the music stuff undermines my authority as someone who lives and breathes the web. Most people, I suspect, really only have one clear obsessive focus so I think potential clients may find it hard to put their trust in someone who is obviously doing two (apparently) unrelated things at once. So I’ve trimmed out the music stuff and instantly the site feels stronger and more authoritative. I feel less confused about it too and more confident about the prospect of sending people to it. I think the music stuff might need to have a separate site. Whether it needs its own domain name is another point, but I think I’ll focus on the web thing first because that’s what’s going to contribute most to my possibly not needing a dayjob again. Copying is unlikely to develop into anything more than pocket money, I feel.

So big, big thoughts drifting about and more plans being made and I feel like things are coming together enough to tentatively say that the Raspberry Blue site will be live before I have my root canal done on the 24th of March. I think it’s well doable. Let’s hope I’m right…

Oh, and I’ve listened through to the violin piece with the changes I made yesterday and yes, I think it’s essentially finished. I have, however, in the course of tweaking it towards its final form, done a lot of octave switches and added in some extra double-stops, so I need to do a careful check to make sure the double and triple stops actually are really playable and that I don’t have to tweak them back in some way. Also need to work out how to make Finale play back some of the minutiae of the notation so I can produce a relatively real-sounding MIDI version without needing to approach ProTools. PT, frankly, has me a bit scared after having apparently caused the collapse of my backup drive, and I don’t have any drives any more that don’t have stuff on them already! Seriously contemplating switching to Logic.

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If you’ve been reading this blog over the past few days, then you’ll know that I’m contemplating some pretty big life changes – getting my own business off the ground, putting composition centre-stage in my life, working seriously at getting my music heard and audience-building, that sort of thing.

I’ve had some pretty intense ideas over the past few days – one of them just yesterday, which I think might actually bring in some real cash but I don’t want to announce it yet – going to run it by someone whose opinion I value and who falls neatly within my target market – and while it’s been great to feel the ideas flowing, and even better to find myself still composing in the midst of it, I’ve also been starting to feel a little overwhelmed.

So today I’ve put in a major chunk of work on ditching the overwhelm. I had a good long think about the way I work best and realised that I’ve always been happiest in my work when I’m not just beavering away at one thing all the time – my brain likes to hop about. So then I figured that instead of just trying to think of ways to bring in money, I should sit down and work out what sort of things I actually pretty much always enjoy doing. There was a bit of a list, but most things were pretty synonymous with the following key points:

• Composition (well, duh!)
• Publishing and its attendant elements – writing and editing, music copying, layout, picking out fonts
• Helping people do stuff better (so long as I don’t need to speak to them on the phone)

And after that it all became pretty clear that I should probably focus the bulk of my business-building efforts in the direction of publication – I should write my book on how to build a website that actually works, I should publish music and possibly recordings, I should try to get some copying work and get some clients to pay me to design some stuff (I do have a degree in that after all). Because the third point really can tie in very well with the second point if I do it right. And I think that if I can make a living doing a combination of these three things, then I could be very happy indeed.

Which was a comforting thought, except then the fear set in: How the hell do I start building a publishing company? I mean, I have no plans to be Faber or Penguin, but even once you have content, how do you get heard?? Here I found some of the lessons from the e-book I bought the other day useful – just some bits and pieces about being noticed online. Of course I know a fair bit about using social networks, but I tend to keep quiet rather than shouting and I’ve generally restricted myself to the more general or larger ones – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Delicious.

So I figured that if I was to conquer the fear and do anything at all about getting this off the ground, the first step was to work out exactly what I was going to try to do, and for each of those goals, to write down as many actions as I could think of that would need to happen in order to reach the primary goal of having something for sale (actually selling something is part 2 – first up one needs to have something to sell and something with which to sell it). This resulted in 3 full A4 pages of to-do list. Um. Yes. Quite.

Seeing everything I need to work on down in black and white (well, black and yellow) actually was a bit of a kick in the derrière, to the extent that this evening I have written 3 emails, created a Twitter account for our company, Raspberry Blue (@azurefruit – yes, a little lateral thinking had to come into play as raspberryblue is taken and even though it hasn’t been posted to in a year, alas, it is not available. Go on, follow us!), created a SoundCloud account to post my music to, and discovered that I actually did open a Bandcamp account a few months ago, so I’ve tweaked the profile details there and basically it’s all ready to start receiving content (really quite excited to see what happens with this particular part of the plan – more on this later).

There’s still an absolute Everest of tasks to do – including building a whole website for Raspberry Blue, creating yet another blog and writing some starter-content for it, writing the book, working on laying out my scores, making semi-proper recordings of my songs, where possible, designing business cards, designing flyers, getting the laser printer fixed… on and on and on – but it feels fantastic to know that I’ve taken some real steps today, and now that those steps have been taken I’m significantly more confident about where my feet need to go tomorrow. It’s the big breath before the leap.

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Today I made my first-ever Christmas pudding. I feel simultaneously elated with the joy of creation, yet curiously let down by the fact that I can’t just serve it up – it has to just sit quietly till the 25th and then be steamed for another 3 hours before we’ll discover if it’s actually any good. It does seem to smell pretty good, though, from what I can tell with my nose all stuffed up. And the little bit of mix I tasted gave me hope that perhaps this will be a recipe I might be able to tolerate (my general attitude towards Christmas pudding is “ew yuk, take the horrid thing away!”). For those who are interested, I’m doing the Nigella Lawson Ultimate Christmas Pudding from her Nigella Christmas book. I was supposed to do our family’s traditional pud recipe, but there was confusion because the recipe we were supplied with called for “a packet” of cinnamon. I’m pretty sure I know what sort of packet this would be in Australia, but spices don’t come like that here and I’d hate to guess at the spice quantity and then mess the whole thing up. Nigella, on the whole, seemed safer. I shall take a peek under the lid tomorrow to see what it looks like and find out whether the whole thing’s been a disaster.

Still tearing my hair out over the Remembrances score I was supposed to send off earlier this week – it’s been dogged with annoying problems – everything looked fine, then I discovered the voice part was entirely in the tenor clef. After much poking at Finale I got this fixed, re-exported, re-trimmed, re-imported into InDesign… to discover that when I fixed the clef, the vocal line had dropped an octave. So now I’m re-re-trimming and hope to have it finished tonight.

Quintet is not happy. I think I may need to add something in the middle. This makes me also not happy.

I introduced my parents to my trifle though, which seemed to go down quite well – brioche slices, a touch of Napoleon brandy, fresh raspberries, custard, whipped cream, slivered almonds.

Oh, and posted a new blog post too. The Digital Dimension: 1. Programme notes, which then received a response post from Killing Classical Music, from whence the incentive to write the original post came. All very incestuous!

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I should be quick tonight as it’s nearly 5am. Whoops. The evening just got away from me, mostly in writing – I’ve been working on two related blog posts on ways ensembles and composers can add value to their work using digital options. The first one, on programme notes I’m hoping will be up tomorrow (um… today, I guess) – just need to review it and make sure I haven’t said anything totally mad.

I bought a pudding basin. And suet. Friday is Christmas pudding day. Yes, I know it’s very late. Nigella seems to think it’ll all be OK.

Worked on the quintet for about 3 minutes. Was hard to work on this earlier today as the lady upstairs decided it was easy-listening day. From about 3 in the afternoon till 8pm. But I didn’t want to go to bed without having put down at least a couple of notes.

Score for Remembrances is… done. Well, sort of. Looking great, flicked through… then realised that every single vocal stave is using the tenor clef instead of treble. So now I have to go back to Finale, change the clefs, re-export all 7 pages, open them in Photoshop, trim them and reimport them back into InDesign. Not Happy.

Heigh ho.

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Well, I don’t know what else it can possibly be. I’ve been SO productive since yesterday’s relaxation session with my physiotherapist. In spite of nasty cold, sore throat, no voice, generally feeling crappy and done in, and in spite of computer being tediously slow, I’ve just been powering through my to-do list and generally Getting Things Done.

• Quintet is now at 2’30″ or thereabouts and has decided to “head for home”, which means working out how to reuse the slow intro and other opening material and is basically (or should be) an easy run down to the end now. Obviously there’s a lot of tweaking still to be done, niceties of notation to sort out and so on, but it’s looking like it’ll be at least 3’30″ when it’s done, and possibly the 4′ I wanted it to be (it has to be under 5′ – the trick is to keep it shortish so as to maximise rehearsal time, but have it long enough to do something interesting).
• Wrote a blog post which will appear on caitlinrowley.com later this week. It’s the first time I’ve tried scheduling future publishing, but it’s something I want to get into the habit of – if I’m to have regular visitors on my site, then I need to be posting (interesting) content regularly. Not sure I’ve quite got the “interesting” down, but I think my online writing is quietly improving.
• Started the rather tedious layout process for a set of songs I wrote about 14 years ago, Remembrances of Half-Forgotten Dead People. They were laid out when I first wrote them, but a. the originals weren’t PDFed and have been lost apart from one hard copy in Australia which my mother scanned for me and b. the layout is seriously dated. very word-processory because that was all I had at the time. So it needs to be updated a bit, notes revised and so on so I can print, bind and send it off to the singer who’s considering performing them in March.
• Set up a new notebook on Evernote to hold bits and pieces for a CD of my piano music which I’m hoping to get off the ground with a friend of mine in Australia. The first step is to get him scores, so I’ve been trawling round to (again) see what’s in a fit state to be played. Finished tweaking Egg the Tenth for this, so I guess that’s ready to go onto caitlinrowley.com too. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done to some of them – lacking dynamics and so on – but it’s not a mammoth task. I just need to keep plugging away at it.
• Cleaned about 700 emails out of my inbox. Because they were depressing me and making me worried. There’s still too much stuff in there – mostly notes I sent myself on my last day of work, which is a bit horrible – but 200-odd is MUCH better than 900-odd.
• Caught up a tiny bit with some of the reading and thinking for the Creative Pathfinder course I signed up for. It’s pretty good content – but there’s just so much of it!!! I’m working through Week 3 at the moment… but my inbox is up to Week 14…

It’s just as well the quintet’s making nice progress again, though – had an email today from the Masterclass organisers with the schedule for the course and notes about what to bring: so far it’s looking like I either need to change the way I write in a hurry or invest in a tiny printer to take with me – no printers available. Otherwise I can see myself spending evenings when I should be at t’ pub frantically copying out parts by hand for the composer’s ensemble – seems we have to write a piece for the ensemble during the few days we have there. Oh, and there aren’t many pianos, so we’re encouraged to bring a little keyboard if we need one. iPad Pianist Pro app FTW! Might try to devote some time to ideas-generation before I go to see if I can get a head-start on what to write for the ensemble… Because I don’t have enough to do!

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I’ve been accepted into CoMA’s Midwinter Composers Masterclass!!!! This is both deeply awesome and rather scary. Not having really received any feedback from other composers in about 15 years, it’s a wee bit daunting. As is having to write a string quintet from scratch by the middle of December, but I really feel like this is a big step towards whatever’s next on the agenda for my music. Scared but elated. The Masterclass is organised by CoMA, who are an organisation who promote contemporary (classical) music for amateur musicians, and the composer in charge of us composer-participants is Tansy Davies… who is the same age as me, which could be a little weird, although I’m hoping not. I really liked what I heard of her music on her website and, reading about her approach, she seems to use architecture as a launching-point in a similar way to how I’ve been using modern art, so it could be interesting. There’ll also be a composer ensemble, made up of whatever we selected composers can play. Not sure if/when we’re advised of what that is – the notes sent through recommend flexible instrumentation – who knows, maybe Deconstruct:Point, line, plane could get another outing? SO EXCITED!

Anyway, that was at the end of the day. Haven’t achieved a vast amount otherwise, but I was feeling I needed to get back to composing, but I’ve been finding the prospect a little daunting with so many people in the house, even if it is a large space and we’re not all on top of each other like we used to be in the old place – it’s just not the same as being on your own. Anyway, so I figured I needed to start doing something about it so I pulled out the music for Egg the Tenth, which I wrote earlier this year (it was the original interlude for the Whitman songs, but didn’t really mesh well there, so I put it to one side to be an egg, but never got around to putting the detail in the score) and dropped in appropriate accidentals, hunted out fonts and did a little layout on it, so it’s basically ready to go now. I also did a MIDI export because I was planning on reworking it in ProTools to sound a bit more like a proper performance than Finale can do… and then discovered that I don’t remember how to wire my tracks in ProTools to get it to use proper sounds, at which point I lost heart and had a nap.

And there was a baking experiment too. When I was seeing my nutritionist, she encouraged me to get hold of this natural sugar substitute called xylitol so I could avoid using sugar when I baked (if you’re new here, I have an insulin resistance – it’s not diabetes [yet] but basically the insulin my body produces forgets what it’s supposed to do with sugar it encounters – unless I exercise regularly, but having been crippled for coming up on a year now, this hasn’t really been happening, hence decision to experiment…). I was in the organic shop today picking up some bits and pieces, and thought that maybe I should give it a go, so I decided to make a crumble with the tasty-but-dry remaining nectarine and some lingering apples – I figured that at least if it was only in the crumble topping, then that could be abandoned if it was too awful. Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘awful’. I guess the flavour was kinda OK, but the texture was All Wrong. The crumble didn’t crisp and it certainly didn’t go chewy. But it wasn’t particularly sweet either (that could have been my fault). So basically it ended up like one of those worthy but tedious baked bars they fill with jam. But without the jam. Sort of bland and like eating a high-fibre pillow. There’s a bit left from the rather small packet, so I might have a go at using it up in a cake (possibly cut with some real sugar) and see if that fares any better.

And finally I started work on getting IE6 sorted out with the website layout while I watched Alice in Wonderland – turned out the problem with the fonts wasn’t anything to do with either fonts or code, it was to do with IE6 not applying styles to the new HTML 5 elements which were referenced in the cascade. So that’s sorted out now, which is a bit yay

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… to accommodate the tape part which has yet to be transcribed. I didn’t – but I do now!

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Coming along nicely. Notes are all done now. Tweaking the layout.

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Yep. Finally transferred the markings. Printing now, then I need to check over layout and at the piano to make sure everything looks and plays through OK. I think some of the intervals are a little wide and impractical. Might need to add to the composer’s note something to the effect that these can be rolled.

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The original files got corrupted a couple of years back, so all I have are Finale files just of the notes, a PDF that doesn’t quite match what’s in the Finale files, and scans of a printed version which my lovely mother found in a filing cabinet. From this I am piecing together the score again so I can send it off to a singer who’s interested in trying it out.

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