It’s been a big day today. But for all that, I’ve only really achieved three things, but two of them are whoppers so that’s OK:

1. I have achieved, after many hours of sorting, Inbox Zero once again (or near enough – Mac Mail won’t remove the Notes from my inbox and they’re things I need to keep on my iPod Touch, but apart from that it’s empty). Feels soooooo good! Only problem now is that I need to try to achieve the same thing in Evernote, which isn’t so hard but more than a little annoying.
2. I have ditched NetNewsWire as my RSS feed reader because the interface was messy and it was stopping me from actually reading stuff. I tested out Reeder, which I’ve heard good things about, and while the overall concept was nice, the lack of text contrast was killing my eyes, so I ditched that one. Nice Mac-like interface though. If they fix the contrast issue or introduce user-definable colours, I could well give it another go. Anyway, I’ve ended up with an open-source reader which I’d never heard of, Vienna, which has the rather nice attributes of being skinnable with CSS themes (so no contrast problems), a nice clean interface, and integrated with Evernote so I can send articles I want to read later straight into EN without needing to launch them in a browser first. Quite pleased with it so far. I do, however, think that I need to review the feeds I’m following and do a bit of culling – there’s a lot there I don’t necessarily want to read all the time and perhaps there’s a better approach for these than RSS. Also, as I’m working on businessy stuff, I suspect my focus will change to a certain extent. Wonder if there’s a way to archive a group of feeds so they don’t show up as readable but can be resuscitated at a moment’s notice – that would be very cool for people like me who go through phases of what they want to read.
3. I have spent a fairly large chunk of time uploading stuff to SoundCloud. So far I have 3 pieces up there. I’d like to add one more before I launch, just to give a bit of an overview. Not entirely sure what to choose though. It’s been a good experience so far though – I like that they limit you by duration not by filesize, so I can upload a big fat file which they then compress for me and all that costs me is the time to upload it, it doesn’t reduce the amount of music I can put online. Easy interface to use and mostly good options to fill in. I like that you can include a ‘Buy’ link – might use that when the scores are online. The only thing that’s a little annoying is that you have to choose just one Genre option, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to search by Genre – it seems like you can type anything at all into the Genre box, so the chances of small variants between similar terms (classical vs classicalmusic vs classical music, for example) are extremely high. i’m guessing that’s not much of a drama for most pop genres but for the classically-derived new music world it becomes a barrier to finding new content because everyone thinks of their music with different terminology – new music, contemporary classical, nonpop, art music, serious music – it’s a long list. plus all the typographical variants that can happen – it makes it hard to hunt down music that might be of interest. But time will tell – looking forward to seeing what the response is!

Tagged with: completion, gtd, music, organisation, publishing, reading, self-promotion, tools, web | Add a comment

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.

Tagged with: blogging, copying, dayjob, design, editing, fonts, gtd, ideas, learning, mentalhealth, music, organisation, publishing, self-promotion, thinking, tools, web, writing | Add a comment

Today’s been a bit of a washout (again) as far as real work is concerned – been too worried about the cyclone in Queensland to really focus properly. Not that I have friends or relations there or anything, but it’s more that friends of mine do – my cousin’s wife is a Townsville girl, to start with. But basically I’ve found sustained thought a little tricky today. I’m sure tomorrow will be better.

I did, however, achieve a couple of small but significant steps: I managed to get in touch with the person running the course at TVU, which ended up with me getting the answers I wanted to hear and finally submitting my application, so YAY! Hopefully next week I’ll have the trial lesson and we’ll see how that goes. I can’t wait, but at the same time I’m a bit nervous – I’m doing this because I want to push myself to learn more, to think outside the box I sometimes feel my musical brain has got a little stuck in, and while that’s exciting, it’s also a little bit scary.

I also (and this is much less impressive) finally called the bank. I’ve been trying to work out the details of my current account for a form I have to fill in and ended up horrifically confused, because the bank assigns so many account and customer numbers it’s hard to know which one is the right one, and on top of that, the account number sometimes appears with an additional digit at the start and sometimes not, and on top of THAT, it seems they changed the sort code for my account when Alliance + Leicester became Santander. Add in my pathological dislike of telephones and horror of automated phone systems, and you get some serious procrastination going on. But that’s over: I bit the bullet this afternoon and rang them up, negotiated my way through the mire of stupid options to find a real person who gave me the info I needed. Which is a HUGE relief. Words cannot express. Now I can proceed with the form and some other stuff that goes with it which will actually bring real live money into said current accout. Whee!

And I stewed some apples. With a little dark muscovado sugar, vanilla extract and cinnamon.

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Always a good feeling, that. I still didn’t get everything done I wanted to do, but I sure made a hefty start, most noticeably spending most of the day test-driving Drupal modules in preparation for a quote I need to send out tomorrow for a rather complex site for a non-profit organisation. I’m really rather impressed with Drupal, I must say. Today I’ve played with user permissions, an email-list module, search, adding images to user profiles, installing a security upgrade, implemented rich text editing (rather than plain-vanilla HTML) and a bunch of other stuff – and I haven’t once had to touch any code to do it. Obviously theme-creation is a completely different kettle of fish and I haven’t even looked at that yet – saving that for tomorrow. But so far, very impressed with what it can do pretty much straight out of the box.

And in the lulls while I waited for files to upload and delete as I performed the security upgrade? Well, I arranged the first four movements of Pieces of Eight for string quartet, which I’m thinking will be my submission to Sequenza 21′s current call for scores (I’ve abandoned the cello tango I was writing for this as too complex for the time I have – I still want to write it, but it will probably take several goes to get to a point where I’ll be happy with it). I was tossing up between arranging it for string quartet or piano and percussion but the quartet won out in the end – limited time and I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted the percussion to do but I didn’t want it to be just a bong or bang here and there.

I also sent off a bunch of emails that have been lingering and sorted out a survey for the composers from Durham – we’re setting up a Facebook group and wanted to give ourselves some semblance of authority, so we’re voting on a name… results by the end of the weekend, I hope.

Oh! And my next round of Amazon-junkie-goodies arrived! Alex Ross’s new book, Listen to This, and the next book in my pre-opera reading round, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. I’ve rethought that idea about keeping the subject of the opera under my hat – in the light of it probably taking me several years to actually produce any part of it, it seems a bit lame, so here’s the announcement: It’s to be (loosely) based on Tey’s novel (yes, I’ve read it before) which focuses on the revisionist history of Richard III (the one that says he wasn’t a deformed tyrant who murdered the princes in the Tower). As an opera plot, I think it’s up there with the best of them: murder, slander, rumour, illegitimacy, deceit, pretenders to the throne – it’s got the lot!

Tagged with: composition, dayjob, experimenting, gtd, learning, music, reading, research, shopping, study, tools, web | Add a comment

First real day of real life after Durham. It’s been quiet, but productive. I’ve worked through a bunch of stuff off my to-do list – sent a ton of emails, updated my website with the recording of the string quintet and generally sorted things out a bit. I also made a start on all three pieces I’ve been thinking of starting over the past couple of weeks – the orchestral arrangement of Deconstruct: Point, line, plane for the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra call for scores; a solo cello tango I’m thinking of submitting to the Sequenza 21 call for scores; and finally took the first tentative steps towards my first opera. I’ve known what I wanted it to be about for some time (keeping it secret for now!) but I wasn’t sure how to begin. After talking to one of the composers at Durham I got all fired up and a bit of an idea on how to approach it, so now I’ve asked a friend who has a strong interest in the subject area to recommend some books, which she has, and I’m thinking of characters and possible arias and how to structure the whole thing. Very exciting!

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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!

Tagged with: blogging, composition, copying, creativity, design, gtd, health, learning, mentalhealth, music, reading, self-promotion, writing | Add a comment

At last! After a couple of weeks of the quintet being stalled, I’ve finally pushed it forward a bit. I made myself sit down and review the themes and figures that have been used for the earlier parts and realised that a bunch of related figures might actually work all piled up on top of one another – and lo! they do! Not entirely sure where it’s heading for next. Hoping that will come clear tomorrow. May have to be a little disciplined and go all pomodoro on it for a bit in order to keep it moving forward.

I’ve also put in a big push today to get my to-do lists in order. I’ve ticked off about 8 things from my list and done a bit of clean-up. I’d been hearing about this iPhonePod app called Epic Win – a to-do list masquerading as a role-playing game. You complete chores to earn points. Very cool concept, so I’m giving it a go – not for my overall lists because they’re too complex and I need to be able to categorise them in more detail than Epic Win allows, but I’ve moved all the regular but dull and not critical tasks out of  Remember The Milk and into Epic Win to (a) encourage me to actually do them (stuff like reconciling accounts and downloading bank statements) and (b) stop them cluttering up my other lists so much that I can’t see what I’m doing. Crossing fingers it works well. I’d really like to be able to just have one manageable to-do list but it doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon. Got to just keep plugging away at it, I guess.

And now it’s time to bake

Tagged with: baking, composition, cooking, gtd | Add a comment

Finally got around to designing up some proper business cards and sent them off to MOO. I think this item has been on my to-do list for about a year and a half, so it feels fantastic to have finally got it done. I’ve used three black and white photographs for the backs of the card and the front (with my details) uses the caitlinrowley.com visual ID. And URL. Guess this means upping the priority on getting the wretched site working in all browsers by next Friday. Eeeeeek!

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Indeed, have gone! Our landlord’s coming tomorrow with plumber to do some repairs/improvements, and everything was such a mess that I really felt I needed to clear some stuff up, so I’ve done 2 loads of laundry, put away the clean sheets that were drifting about for ages, cleaned out the fridge, put out the rubbish, put on the dishwasher, tidied the remnant laundry which was flowing out of the basket and all over the floor and generally neatened things up. I even managed to clear out and get rid of another box. I know (like yesterday’s) that this isn’t hugely creative in a concrete sense, but for me being tidy is often a first step to getting my brain in the right place to actually do some work. So yay!

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Well, it may not be hugely creative but one thing’s for sure: getting one’s financial records up to date sure helps clear the brain to make way for more exciting stuff. Plus there’s the pleasure of ticking things off the to-do list and feeling super-organised!

Tagged with: completion, gtd, mentalhealth, organisation | Add a comment