Well, not seriously. I didn’t really expect to just be able to walk in to the Apple Store at Shepherd’s Bush and walk out with an iPad 2. And look! I was right! But I did achieve my officially-stated goal of inspecting the covers. They’re very cute. Such a shame they didn’t make one that covers the back too. I mean, it’d be less sleek, but a whole lot more effective if you drop the thing. And of course there are no third-party covers out pretty much at all at the moment that one can inspect for feel, style and weight, so I guess I’ll have to go with an Apple cover, even if only for the interim. I was going to get an orange one but in RL the orange is a little yellowy and not really that grand. The red leather is gorgeous but way too expensive. The green is practically fluoro. So I’m thinking I might go for the low-key pale grey. Keep it nice and neutral. And maybe get a nice bright neoprene pouch for it to travel in. Summat like that. But of course first I have to get my paws on an actual iPad all of my own. Apple’s now opened up instore reservations from the website for next-day pickup, which I made an attempt with, but the wretched system let me get all the way through before telling me there weren’t any slots! VERY annoying.

I shall cease to talk about that experience any more. It was very frustrating. I shall probably be similarly frustrated every evening for several weeks to come.

Apart from that, not too much to report. I watched the last bit of the summary videos for the end of the first week of my JavaScript refresher course. So far I seem to understand everything. There’s been one or two newish concepts (or rather, concepts that I knew existed but didn’t know quite how they fitted in) but mostly – understandably – the first week’s been mostly about basic principles. I’m pleased to say that I got through the week’s coding challenge first time, and worked it out in just a few minutes. Huzzah! Not as dim as I felt I was!

I also finally sat down and went through the new orchestral song thingy trying to pick out themes. There really aren’t that many to speak of, which is a little disturbing. The piece itself seems to have stalled somewhat following its superhero start, which is disappointing. I should push myself more with it. The plan is to send it off to my tutor on Wednesday so he can see what I’ve been up to and prepare stuff accordingly if need be. Um.

And had a bit of a panicky doubting think about jobs and what I should be doing about them. Conclusion: I have no idea. I’m a total mess and don’t know what I should be doing. I’m enjoying the composition teaching, but that’s not really a money-making option (not enough private students and academia is out because a. I don’t have any contacts and b. I don’t have even a Masters degree). I like building websites but I don’t really like dealing with clients. Or people in general. I like publishing and so on but ditto. Which kind of seems to wipe out the work-for-myself option because there’s no getting away from clients when you’re freelance. I’m beginning to think that, in spite of all the conceptual journey I’ve been on over the past couple of months, I’m kind of back where I started: short term web contracts, while trying to bring in a little money from this and that on the side. Which is a little depressing. But I think it’s more practical. I got so caught up in the sideline stuff of getting my own business running that the music kind of got shunted to one side. And when I de-shunted it because it became clear that I might need to have to find a job sooner than expected and I didn’t want to waste composition time, then the business stuff ended up shunted. Maybe I can’t actually do both. How depressing. I want to be superwoman! (I’d prefer Batgirl because the outfit’s cuter, but still…) Anyway, thoughts still bubbling away, ideas about priorities and how do I deal with them. Still no solution on the if-I-get-a-real-job-how-do-I-keep-the-music-going-while-not-letting-down-either-my-employer-or-myself issue. Perhaps there never will be. If you have any suggestions, please comment away!

Tagged with: code, composition, dayjob, learning, mentalhealth, music, programming, shopping, study, thinking | Add a comment

Finally got my cave day today that I’ve been craving half the week, and it’s been just great. Stayed in my pyjamas all day, cleaned up my Gmail, listened to some stuff on SoundCloud and posted a new file to my account – Nightride, a film score I wrote back in 1998. I read a bit and watched a couple of videos, including this most excellent one, Snooky and the metronome, which I have to say totally made my day. Poor little kitty

So it’s been grand. I have achieved very little and I’m proud of it. I feel more rested, more sane, and my tooth isn’t quite as bad as it was yesterday, even without painkillers.

Cave days. Highly recommended.

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This week has been getting progressively worse and worse. Today I struggled in the morning, went out for a meeting which my meetee had forgotten all about, so I bought myself a muffin and came home. I did get to the post office in the afternoon to post a friend’s birthday & Christmas presents which I should have sent back in September. I think that’s a win even while being a massive fail. And then I came back, found something on the internet which made me massively angry and wrote a huge ranty blog post about it (not posted, unlikely to be, on reflection) which then made me late for the evening appointment for which TFL made me even later and the bus driver not knowing if he went anywhere near Putney Railway Station made me even later than that. Dinner was nice. Nice friends, nice food. Overly long walk at speed to pub not so nice resulting in achey unhappy ankle and achey unhappy insides. Gig was not to my taste and resulted in extreme boredom (but thought up some ways to improve the beginning of the violin piece).

But, like I say, I got to the post office.

Tagged with: blogging, composition, concert, friends, health, mentalhealth, music, social life | Add a comment

I think everyone has days where they just want to hide in a cave from all the world. Some of us more than others. Today was just such a day. Last night the horrible nightmares returned. While this in itself isn’t a good thing, it’s a sign that my creative brain is up and running, which is a good thing and better than it being in a slump. But the nightmares totally wreck me for anything creative the next day, which of course is not a good thing, and as the only way to make the nightmares go away is to be creative and work through stuff, I think you begin to see my dilemma. Anyway, today was worse than usual and resulted in a more-than-usually strong cave-dwelling desire, but my to-do list wagged its finger and said ‘no cave for you’ so I had to find something to do that I could face…

Finances! This may seem a strange thing to do in the face of cave-dwelling, but in fact it makes perfect sense – my brain didn’t want to think about new stuff, didn’t want to be strained in any way, and finances is primarily putting numbers in boxes, so it fitted really well. And when I discovered that I hadn’t caught up on them since October, I was very glad I had. Things are clearer now. And I moved some money about so it will make me more interest, which has to be a good thing, eh?

I also faced down one of the to-dos on my list that I’ve been dodging since… erm… September, which was to wrap up a friend’s birthday and Christmas presents ready to send them to Australia. I have drawn her a Mr Pickleberry in compensation for their excessive lateness, so I hope she forgives me.

Tagged with: drawing, gtd, mentalhealth | 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

Feels like a wasted weekend, even though I know it isn’t. Today I finished the London Composers Forum secret project site – all that time with Drupal the other week has really paid off and I’m pretty pleased with the functionality I’ve been able to provide – secure logins, simple document workflow, inline images in rich text, document submission and storage – fun stuff!

But yet again, no music at all, which is getting a bit frustrating.

Also on the plus side, more painting today means that the new furniture should be able to be launched into place tomorrow, which will allow – AT LAST – the piano to return to its home in the study so I can actually use it.

So tomorrow I think I need to implement a new plan of attack – start organising my days better and make sure I’m getting stuff done. Think I need to sort myself out a bit. I suspect this weekend has been somewhat hijacked by the sudden appearance of what would pretty much be my perfect dayjob on the horizon. Which wouldn’t be a problem, if choosing to go for it didn’t mean abandoning the dream of not having a dayjob at all. Really not sure what to do. Going to think about it a bit more.

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Today I did something a little different – I took myself off to the Royal Academy of Music for a free seminar/workshop/presentation thingy by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. For those of you who don’t know of Max, he’s the Master of the Queen’s Music, which is the composer-version of Poet Laureate, and a very prolific and fabulously interesting composer.

Well, I have to say, that was certainly 3 hours VERY well spent. The talk had been billed as him talking about creating opera, with specific reference to the new opera he’s just finished writing, so I’d thought it could be useful as preparation for the Richard III opera, but it turned out to not really be about that at all. He did talk about a couple of his operas and some music theatre stuff, but mostly it was about the way he uses drama and theatricality as a structural force in all his music, even the concert music that has no obvious connection with the theatre at all. Really fascinating. I took a ton of notes.

He talked a bit about his very first opera, Taverner, on the life of the 16th-century composer John Taverner (as opposed to the composer John Tavener who’s around today), and specifically about how he wrote it simply because he wanted to. He never expected anyone to ever perform it (although they eventually did), and so he just basically let rip and did the whole thing the way he wanted to do it, with no reference to what anyone else might think. This led to what I think was the most inspiring quote of the morning:

If you’re going to do anything, go for it – for God’s sake, go for it! – you’ll get there… if you’re any good. And if you believe you’re any good, you probably are.

Amazing stuff. Really confidence-building. As anyone who’s followed my journey online over the past few years knows, I’ve had (possibly more than) my fair share of self-doubt, but the one thing I’ve never doubted is that I’m good at what I do. So let’s hope Max is right and that that means I probably am!

Tagged with: artist date, composition, events, ideas, learning, listening, mentalhealth, music, study | Add a comment

OK, so I’m still labouring under a black cloud – it’s been a pretty crappy day – but I’ve managed to pull off some small achievements – went for a walk and managed to get to Boots in time to buy essentials for Edinburgh (most notably mouthwash – the abscess on my tooth is playing up again – really need to go back to the dentist and get myself referred for that root canal she threatened me with last time. Oddly, am resisting this. How strange). I walked back via the station and picked up my tickets for tomorrow and felt a little better for the exercise. I had a brilliant idea for solving the train-snack issue which Tesco had been unable to provide a non-sugar-or-preservatives-overload answer to – and ended up making a pair of little apple crumbles, one for tonight (YUM!) and one for tomorrow. I finished packing the dishwasher and have actually run it twice AND done two loads of laundry. My bag is about half-packed. And I’ve ruled up the remaining pages needed for me to work on the orchestral arrangement on the train tomorrow – straight lines plus moving train is never a happy combination. Something has to give and it’s usually the straight line.

Oh, and I finished reading The Betrayal of Richard III and have greedily started in on The Daughter of Time again. Betrayal was a really excellent book – easy to read, enough detail to give the author’s arguments weight; not so much as to bog one down. I particularly liked that the final, tiny, chapter was devoted to possible answers to the Princes whereabouts if they weren’t actually murdered at all (which, given the lack of evidence for the murder ever having taken place at all, seems likely) – really quite fascinating. I think I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone as a first step to finding out more about the whole issue – short, detailed, easy to read. And this edition is annotated to bring certain facts up to date with current discoveries without interfering with V.B. Lamb’s excellent writing style. I think this book could be very useful in pulling together the synopsis for the opera, but I’m also looking forward to reading a more detailed volume too. Guess I should order that…

Tagged with: baking, composition, cooking, mentalhealth, music, research, walking | Add a comment

Bad head day today. Not sure why – intermittent panic attacks, excessive need for sleep, inability to actually get anything useful done. I have half-packed the dishwasher, failed to launder clothes to take to Edinburgh tomorrow, failed to go out and do essential shopping (although if I pull myself together in the next half-hour I may still be able to do this), failed to do anything musical at all even though I really really need to get back to both the orchestral arrangement of Deconstruct: Point, line, plane and the string quartet version of Pieces of Eight. Hoping I may be able to report better news later in the evening, but right now it’s not seeming likely. I even managed to put off to extinction working on the last counterpoint exercise of the chapter which would mean I could get on with the next chapter in the book, but I guess that one’s going to have to wait till next week now – the only thing I actually DID achieve today was to book train tickets to take me to Edinburgh to spend the weekend with Djelibeybi seeing his new investment property.

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SUPER-frustrating day today. My phone decided yesterday that it would send every SMS out 3 times. This morning it upped the ante to 7 times so I sighed and sat down to see if I could do something about it. First step: clear off the disk and install the operating system upgrades that have been languishing for a week or so. Result? 14 copies of a single test SMS. In the end, after much inconclusive research, I backed up (as much as I could – seems Android doesn’t seem to have a proper backup system and all the ones in the app store seem flawed) and did a factory reset. Fortunately this seems to have fixed the problem, but I’m still reinstalling and tweaking settings and making sure everything’s set up the way I like it. Pluses: Android Market keeps track of what you’ve bought with your Google account and lets you just reinstall with no fuss. Quite nice having a clean disk again. Minuses: Helluva pallaver. Android Market doesn’t seem to keep track of the free apps you had, so I’m just trying to remember what those were and taking the attitude that if I can’t remember it, I probably wasn’t using it that much. The whole process has taken most of the day, with a despairing nap and quick round of Sim City on the iPad in between. No music achieved at all, which makes me tetchy and sad, given yesterday’s hard work setting up the desk. I did, however, listen in to Deutschlandradio’s Philipp Blume profile – some lovely music there. Damn shame mein Deutsch ist so schlecht I couldn’t understand anything that was being said so I am none the wiser as to which pieces I was listening to. Heigh ho. New music FTW at any rate.

Tomorrow I’m planning on going to the Gaugin exhibition at the Tate Modern – been feeling like I’m gradually sinking into a dark grey hole over the last couple of days – I guess with Durham having been so fun and intellectually stimulating and hanging out with wonderful new friends, being at home on my own with a huge and depressing to-do list and feeling a little lost with one of the pieces I’m working on, is just making me sad. So I think I need to take myself out and see something marvellous to shake my brain up and show it it CAN be perky even without the stimulus of Durham and lovely friends. I have also, tonight, ordered a bunch of books from Amazon – first-reading stuff for the opera! I’ve not really ordered from Amazon Marketplace sellers till recently, and never books, so I’m a little nervous, but hey! one of them was only going to be available second-hand anyway and at £0.01 (plus postage), who’s complaining?!

Tagged with: listening, mentalhealth, music, shopping, tools | Add a comment