Mind you, my creative activity has increased vastly since the time when I set up One Creative Thing. So much so that I no longer have the time or energy to blog about all that creative activity, so I guess that’s a good thing!

What I’m leading towards is that I’m thinking that I might change the focus of this blog a bit. Not quite sure where it’ll go – it’ll still be about regular creative activity, but I’ve been wanting to post about general creativity topics for a while now, and frankly it was getting a bit dull just writing endless lists of what I’d been doing – posting my soul on caitlinrowley.com on a regular basis has shown me that it’s more interesting for other people to read about the thoughts that go into a creative activity rather than just knowing about the activity itself. Otherwise, it should just be a blog of lists, bare-bones. Maybe it could be a bit of both. I’m not sure yet.

Today I’m recovering from the first cold of 2012. This one’s hit me hard & I’ve been in bed for a week now. Not a great start to the year, but I’ve done some thinking in that time, and especially following on from doing the 2012 list, I’m thinking of consolidating my sideline blogs. There’s this one, plus Minimania, which was my Vox blog and now languishes at Typepad, plus a couple of neglected Tumblogs too, and it occurred to me that if I broaden the scope of this blog, then maybe I can consolidate the ex-Vox content (which currently is really only updated with the annual goals lists, birthday & Christmas lists for relatives in far-flung places and the occasional personal post) with what’s here and ditch the nasty TypePad experience altogether. Maybe this space can build more on the work in progress posts on caitlinrowley.com, giving a day-to-day account of what I feel is right (or not) with the work as I’m doing it. Given that I’m going to be starting a Masters degree later this year, and that I want to start doing more active listening, more scheduled composition sessions, that could be a good thing.

Will it still be One Creative Thing? I’m not sure. Guess I’ll have to see where these thoughts take me.

(Oh, and today Djeli and I attempted to make “Princesses” – chocolate meringues – out of my new-for-Christmas French baking book. They were a bit of a disaster, but I think I know where we went wrong, so I’ll be having another go soon. Also designed and ordered proper business cards for Raspberry Blue. And read a lot)

September looms large this year – I am determined to be healthier and more organised before I start my Masters to give me the best possible chance to do well at it – this involves getting a healthy balance between freelance work, composition and rest time really working so I can clear old projects, bring in some money but keep my mental & physical health intact. I am most emphatically planning to not injure myself in any way more serious than perhaps a papercut.

2012 is, most significantly, all about new beginnings and new directions. There’s a lot of change going to be happening – going back to uni, (hopefully) buying our first house & moving out of London, developing my freelance business to be (again, hopefully) able to at least cover my basic expenses.

So without further ado, here is The 2012 List.

Music

• 3 performances in 2012 – one more than I set myself for 2011, getting ambitious here
• Complete all piece requests from 2011 before start of uni term in September – alto flute piece for Carla Rees (due spring), flute piece for Nicole Camacho, recorder quartet for Pink Noise, Pieces of Eight arrangement for Shana Norton
• New score downloads implemented for caitlinrowley.com
• Blog at least once a month on caitlinrowley.com January – check, February – check
• Work out how, and apply for funding with Pink Noise to (hopefully) achieve first paid commission.
• Keep up flute practice
• Start a Masters degree!
• Finish Carrion Comfort for LCCO deadline YESSSSSSS!
• Write at least 1 piece for a call for scores & send it in
• Take 2 pieces along to LCF WiP/WiT sessions for feedback
• Schedule in (and DO) one listening session a week. Take notes to make sure I’m getting the most out of it
• Get back to counterpoint/harmony study – schedule as part of weekly plan. NEED to make some progress on this before September.
• Put at least 2 pieces up on SoundCloud in MIDI versions
• Finish laying out 2×4 & send to Christopher D. Lewis

Home & Travel

• Move out of London
• Set up my own study before the summer
• Try at least 5 recipes from “I Know How to Cook”: 6-Jan-2012: Coq au vin. Have also done the Venison-roast lamb but I can’t remember the date.
• Try at least 3 recipes from new French baking cookbook: 6-Jan-2012: Galette des rois, incl. crème frangipane; 8-Jan-2012: Princesses (chocolate meringues) – not actually a success, but definitely tried. Will try again. 15-Jan-2012: Chaussons au pommes – YUM!
• Travel: EuroDisney, Spain, Australia, weekend trip somewhere?
• Work on creating a good, reliable multigrain loaf, in case of (suspected) bakery dearth in Gravesend: 13-Jan-2012: An excellent start – not fully multigrain because I was just using up leftover flour, but it worked really well. 19-Jan-2012: Tried the same recipe, this time with all wholemeal flour. Worked very well, in spite of forgetting about it a couple of times, leading to overly long rising times. Feeling quite confident about getting this recipe working well.

Health

• Limit sugar & dairy intake.
• Keep up with vitamin supplements to help keep food & energy on track.
• Get back to the morning squirrel-walks once calf is better
• Semi-regular massages to keep stress and tension headaches under control – no more waiting till the pain’s so bad I can’t function
• Work my way up to being able to do a 4-mile walk without pain
• Develop regular schedule so can have relaxation time in the evenings and proper weekends and reduce stress of neglecting one or the other. Key components: Freelance work, composing, listening, training, writing
• Weight: *sigh* Shall we say 76kg by the start of the uni term? Surely that’s doable? *gives self a stern look and a threat to not injure any more parts*

Business

• Schedule training to keep my skills current & keep me employable by others – do some every week. Key areas: JavaScript, design, marketing
• Design business cards & get them made 8-Jan-2012: Order sent! And I just scraped in to get a 15% discount from MOO too!
• Write beginner social media guide to sell on raspberryblue.com
• Start blogging on Raspberry Blue (not going to make this any set schedule – minimum 3 posts in the year though)
• Schedule talk at LCF Open House on some webby topic – social media as a tool for composition perhaps? Or maybe something on how to use the web to promote your composition?

Other stuff

• New laptop. This year for sure. D to get old one.
• Knit something that isn’t a scarf Send both parents’ birthday and Christmas presents ON TIME
• Call parents once a month: January – done.

I’m still hoping I may get to a note or two tonight, but not really holding my breath.

I have, however, been doing a lot of thinking about the massive stress that’s been holding me back and messing up my head so badly over the past few weeks. Thinking of how to deal with it in general, and what I need to do or cancel doing in particular. I think I’ve decided to just put Australia plans on hold for the rest of the year – this has been about the 4th attempt I’ve made to get to Australia and every single time something has gone horribly wrong. This time my teeth are acting up again and I’m very worried the root canal work I had done in March (the slow recovery of which and attendant back pain cancelled the first and second planned Australia trip) may need to be re-excavated. Dentist’s appointment when I get back from Spain. So I’m thinking it will be better for my peace of mind if I just cancel the whole Aus 2011 idea, focus on getting better, both physically and mentally, over the next few months, maybe spend a little money on making my working and living spaces happier and more serene – buy & frame some pictures for the walls, get that Le Creuset frying pan I’ve been wanting for so long to help me cut down the amount of fat I need to cook with, maybe invest in a proper desk rather than what I have right now (a double-gateleg dining table, which is a bit awkward because of the legs getting in the way) – that sort of thing. I had a look at the idea of renting a small office or studio space for a few months this morning, but I think that won’t really work because unless I moved the piano and all my books & stereo into it, it wouldn’t really be productive, and moving that amount of stuff for the short term just isn’t really worthwhile. Heigh ho.

So plodding along. Making progress with getting the technology set up to do the work, but notes are in short supply right now.

Update: GPO is installed! And the file is making the right sounds now, and in spite of having been running hot most of the afternoon installing stuff… NO STUTTERING!

But I did get there in the end and the machine seems very much the healthier for it. I downloaded and installed a truckload of stuff that needed to go on, and installed (finally!) the whole of Logic Studio – can’t wait to play around with all of those instruments!

It evidently did me some good though because after a couple of rounds of Labyrinth and finally getting the house to myself, I’ve been able to have another listen to the piece. And I ADDED A NOTE. How sad that this seems like progress. I think I’m stopping there though because my brain feels like it’s on the brink of overwhelm and Finale is driving me insane because it’s stuttering on every other note, so I think the time really has come to do the full system reinstall I’ve been threatening for a month. I am therefore now in the middle of manic backups and thinking about how best to organise my system when I redo it. Now that I’ve upgraded to Parallels 6, I’m going to see if I can ditch Bootcamp, for a start. I pretty much never use it, and hopefully the improvements to Parallels will mean I can run some of my PC games inside a virtual machine, which should free up some disk space. Looking forward to a shiny new system!

I’ve been doing the Authority Rules conference run by Copyblogger over the past couple of weeks, and it’s been fantastic. Actually way more interesting and useful than I ever thought it would be, and SO worth the money. It’s particularly interesting because it’s making me think in new ways about all my endeavours. One of the things they’ve been talking about is about finding your ‘right people’ and putting up  a ‘red velvet rope’ so that only your right people are the ones you work with – because they’re the sort of clients who bring out the best work in you and who you’re happiest and most fired-up to work with. And it makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of the trouble I had with thinking about running my own business before was because I was thinking generically “helping small businesses make websites that actually work for them” whereas the people I relate to best, enjoy working with the most and probably can help the most effectively are creative types. And that makes such a huge difference. So the projects I have now are for a violinist here in the UK and a Pilates studio in Australia, and it’s great. I’m really enjoying working on these, and I can’t wait for them to see a big difference once their new sites are launched.

Carrion Comfort is slowly slinking forwards. It really made such a huge difference to ditch the vocal part for a trumpet – it was what it really wanted. Now I’ve been cleaning some things up and I think I have the beginning of the next bit, but it’s been feeling structurally stalled a little bit. In today’s lesson my tutor has suggested I take my initial theme, pull it out of the piece and just mess about with it seeing how many different permutations I can come up with and then seeing if any of them might be useful in the piece, but without pressure to produce something that will be, or expectation of same. I’m liking this idea and looking forward to being able to do something on that over the weekend. He played me part of the second movement of Andrzej Panufnik’s Violin Concerto [sorry - it'll start playing at you as soon as you click that link] as an example of what can be done with a simple interval (it’s basically just constructed out of thirds!). Absolutely gorgeous. I’d love to hear the whole of it, but alas, the excerpt linked to there is the only thing I can find online without buying an entire CD or signing up to emusic’s subscription plan. Which I may do anyway but good golly it’s been frustrating! And all the more so as there ARE recordings. Menuhin recorded it in the 70s, and EMI seems to have a fairly current recording on their books, but it’s nowhere to be found in the online music stores! Even iTunes, which I consider a last resort because I object to DRM on principle, had a bunch of other Panufnik stuff but the only Violin Concerto bit was the third movement! Ack! Hmm. Well, grateful for small mercies. It’s still beautiful, even in just that snippet.

It’s been a productive sort of a day, really. Apart from that I’ve also set up – finally! – score downloads on BandCamp, like I’ve been saying I’ll do for at least the last 6 months. There’s only Diabolus up there now, but it’s looking pretty good, I think. My only real reservation – and has been all the way along – is that BandCamp is so heavily geared towards downloading recordings that it’s not instantly obvious that this is a different way of doing a score download. You have to download the ‘album’ to get the score, which is actually a package containing the PDF score and an audio file of the MIDI rendition to give you an idea of what it sounds like. So I’m not entirely convinced it’ll take off, even though I hope it will – it’s just that I can’t think of a better way to do it. None of the existing score repositories seem to have much character or much community, whereas BandCamp has both. I guess if it doesn’t work then I’ll have to look at creating my own system, which I really really really don’t want to do. I mean, it’d be good to work with databases properly at last, but it’d be a lot of work, and if I then wanted to charge for something, then that’s a whole can of worms I really don’t want to face. Anyway, I’ve posted the link on Facebook and asked some people for their feedback on it – whether they like it or think it’ll be confusing. I shall cross fingers that somebody responds. Apparently 5 people have looked at it so far, but I’ve had no comments or actual downloads. Eek. If you want to take a peek, it’s at caitlinrowley.bandcamp.com.

And last, but most definitely not least, because it’s probably the most obviously creative thing I’ve done today, is that I’ve finally embarked upon the follow-up post to the one I wrote back in February about Diabolus, my solo violin piece. It’s far too long at the moment, so I need to do some serious editing before sleep, but it’s great to finally be really thinking about what I’ve learnt through to process. And also to see (although I’ve not really written about this) what lessons I’ve then applied in the piece I’m currently working on. It just feels fantastic to see some real continuity through these pieces – from what I learned in Durham to Diabolus to the orchestral piece. Just grand. I feel like I’m finally making some progress!

So most of the afternoon has, of course been spent setting it up, loading apps, transferring settings, syncing, etc. And generally playing about, This was taken with the iPad’s camera using PhotoBooth:

Not sure that app will get a huge workout, but hey, it’s fun.

Also did a tiny photo walk today while waiting for Djelibeybi to arrive at Holborn for us to go and fetch the new member of our techno-family together. In the rain. Some nice shots, I think, but they’re on Flickr so I’ll add them in later.

The rest of the day was pretty tame, but quite nice. A troubled night due to the troublesome dentals (6 days to root canal) and woke up with a crashing headache – haven’t had one of those in months, so I didn’t push myself too much but mostly tinkered around with fixing up my GTD implementation – my to-do lists in Remember the Milk had become insanely unweildy and totally unusable, so I deleted everything except my Tickler list and am starting again with a new approach. Ended up shunting about 15 projects into Someday/Maybe which had crept into Current, but just weren’t being dealt with and weren’t about to be. Someday/Maybe now lives in Evernote, which I think will help keep RTM much cleaner and entirely about the “what am I doing now” rather than the “hmm, what to play with next?”. I also went to Ryman’s and bought a stack of manila folders because my filing system’s no longer a system and needs help. Feels really, REALLY good to be getting organised again and feeling more confident that I know what needs to be done and what should be done nowish.

Diabolus for unaccompanied violin by caitlinrowley

I’ve been getting some nice comments about it too, which is comforting. People seem to think it’s worthy of getting a real live, performance. Ooh I feel all glowy.

Did some listening & score reading in the afternoon – Nicholas Maw’s Life Studies, which my tutor suggested, which led to some reading about Maw which led to listening to Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, which is the piece that inspired me to write a 12-tone work for my HSC. Gosh it sounds pretty tame now, compared to other 2nd Viennese School stuff. I enjoyed it though. Also gave Gordon Crosse’s Thel another run through. Then changed tack entirely and listened through to Tansy Davies’ new CD Troubairitz because it’s, well, new. And awesome. Did a little drawing too, which always seems to consolidate thought.

I’ve also come up with a shiny new plan for The Next Piece. Tansy posted an amazing-looking opportunity to the ChaCoCo group on Facebook today – a residency opp with Manchester Camerata, which looks to be right up my alley, but requires 2 works to be submitted: 1 for up to 6 players (which I can do easily) plus one for 9+ players or chamber orchestra (which I don’t have). It hath a deadline of 18 April. Then I found an opp for songs for voice & chamber orchestra due in September, so I figure if I write a song (or start writing a set of songs) for voice and chamber orchestra, then I can hopefully kill two birds with one stone. Hey, presto! PLAN!

And after the plan was made I sat down and accidentally wrote almost a minute of said piece, which Djelibeybi seems to think is a promising beginning, as do I. Guess I need to settle on a text now. The Blake I was investigating as a possibility I think won’t really fit. Maybe Manley Hopkins? The sister-in-common-law has suggested I investigate Cavafy. He seems to be (just) dead enough to avoid copyright problems (although translations may be difficult and I don’t speak Greek) and sounds interesting. Considering…