Australia Day

I frickin’ HATE Australia Day. It usen’t to bother me – it just seemed a bit pointless. Now it actively offends because the whole thing has become so American. I have no problem with Americans being American about American celebrations. But for a day which is supposed to commemorate the founding of our laid-back nation, the current trend for flag-waving just nauseates me. Not to mention that for a small but significant proportion of the population it’s Invasion Day. The current patriotic overkill just seems to rub that fact in just a little bit more. And maybe squeezes lemon juice in the wound too. So I don’t like it. And I don’t celebrate it. I do my very best to ignore it, which seems pretty much impossible, with the result that I am always in a filthy temper on Australia Day. And today seems to be no exception.

However, I have turned it to my advantage and drafted up a blog post on whether I’m an Australian composer or not (jury’s out on the verdict of that one) which has made me feel a bit better. I also battled my way through some more work on Carrion Comfort and came to the conclusion that I don’t have the foggiest what key it’s in. My harmonic skills are not advanced enough to wade through the chromaticism and come up with a definite answer. It definitely starts in G minor, with moments of G major, but after that, who knows? It may possibly end in C-sharp minor, but I really wouldn’t swear to it on a Bible, so I am taking the wuss’s way out and declaring it to be atonal, which means ditching all key signatures and relying on accidentals. I hope the amateur players won’t be too put off by that. I am converting all sharps to flats, in an effort to make it easier to read. Really wish I didn’t have to do that. F-flat is not the same as E-natural in my book – conceptually it’s a completely different animal, but there you have it. It’ll be easier to read. I do wonder sometimes whether my loose interchanging of sharps and flats when I’m writing a piece isn’t influenced by being a flautist – B-flat or A-sharp, it’s the same fingering regardless, so it’s more about what goes on in the head than what goes on with the fingers. Maybe for string or keyboard instruments it’s not so easy to change mental gears like that. Or maybe I’m just weird.

I’ve also made a bit of progress on the fanfare. It had got a bit stuck, so I’ve tried a different approach and started a new section, using the same material, hugely slowed down and separated out and with a fair bit of whitespace too. I’ll review it tomorrow and see what I think.

I doubt Carrion Comfort will go to the printers tomorrow. Or at least not tomorrow during the day. I’ve achieved too little on it today. So the absolute deadline is for it to be waiting in their inbox at 8am Monday morning, so as to have a hope of being able to pick it up, bind it and send it on Monday afternoon. CAN’T miss that deadline.

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Thoughts

I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit over the past few months, I know. And then last week I went and posted my new year goals list here which feels a little like I’ve sullied the purity of this space, but if I’m honest, pretty much nobody reads this blog and while it’s been useful – and continues to be from time to time – I’m not managing to keep up the daily posts.

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)

Tagged with: baking, blogging, cooking, creativity, dayjob, design, ideas, organisation, reading, self-promotion, thinking, tools | Add a comment

A busy day!

Super-productive today. As with a lot of my days recently, I’ve been largely focused on self-promotion stuff rather than strict creativity per se, but it does exercise my creative brain in that I have to think up new ways to do things.

The last few days I’ve been working on getting a proper mailing list established for caitlinrowley.com using MailChimp. I have to say, that I am absolutely delighted with MailChimp. Great-looking product, easy to use, very generous with their free account (2000 subscribers! 12,000 emails a month!) and the whole thing seems to be completely customisable, assuming you’re willing to put in a bit of coding work. I had some difficulties and emailed their tech support without much hope of anything coming of it (because tech supports in general are pretty useless for anything other than pre-scripted issues) and WOW WOW WOW! Not only did I get a reply within 2 hours, but the guy had actually read my email (SO rare) and had multiple solutions for me, even though it’s not an off-the-shelf problem. SO impressed. And when you set up a campaign they give you a PDF download to make your own papercraft chimp. Now that’s got to be a winner.

Anyway, so the list is set up now. Today I also posted a new blog post and have linked via the signup form to the score of the piece – it’s a temporary measure because getting it working properly is going to take a little time, but it’s better than the SoundCloud option I’ve been trying out which turned out to just be incredibly clunky and uncomfortable (and some regular internet users said they couldn’t even see the link to download. Fail).

So super-excited about all that. Hoping I should get some subscribers soon. It’ll be interesting to see if and how well it works…

Oh, and the on-again-off-again film project is on again. Got a call on Monday about that one. And I went to see a potential client about a website project yesterday… and came away with another film score project (and a website one) – woot!

Tagged with: blogging, code, completion, composition, dayjob, experimenting, learning, music, programming, publishing, self-promotion, tools, web | Add a comment

Feeling social

For quite some time now I’ve been gradually resigning myself to the thought that it might be sensible to add Facebook Like and Twitter ReTweet buttons to caitlinrowley.com – at least to the blog posts. From the feedback I get, quite a lot of people enjoy my posts, but not very many people are commenting on them, so it seems sensible – or at least an interesting experiment – to give them a mechanism whereby they can lodge their appreciation and easily share the article which hopefully might encourage some more people to start reading it too. So this evening, I’ve installed a WordPress plugin to do just that. I’m not 100% happy with this particular plugin, but it looks like it should do the job and it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I’m considering this as a first step and if it proves popular then I’ll reconsider the option of maybe building my own from scratch, which hopefully might do away with Facebook’s hideous iframe code (tables! ewww!)

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!

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Coming out of the cloud

I feel like I’m coming out of a cloud a bit. Back’s still messed up and with the osteopath having told me I can’t go to Scotland for Easter, sounds like it’s still got a little way to go. But I’m gradually starting to get things done again and that feels pretty good. I’ve been getting a lot of listening done. Today a friend on Twitter recommended a couple of albums that were a little outside my usual comfort zone – Mono/Poly ‘Manifestations’ and Grouper’s ‘A I A’ – both of which I very much enjoyed.

I also tweaked and posted a blog post on caitlinrowley.com, The wrong teacher, or just the wrong time?. I’m glad I wrote this post. Not only does it seem to be getting a rapid and enthusiastic response, but I think it’s been important for me to realise just how far I’ve come since my first year studying composition, and to acknowledge that I was at fault at least in some measure. I doubt I could have known that back then – I was timid and ignorant and there was no internet to ask questions of even if I’d thought to do so – but I think it’s good to reconsider the situation and what I could have done to improve it. And maybe it’ll be helpful for other new students who feel they’re not doing so well as they hoped they would.

And finally I finished the iPad case! OK, not 100% – I still need to make a loop to hold the stylus securely, but the case itself is finished and ready to travel. YAY! SO glad to be done with the handsewing. Never again…

This isn’t the finished case (still need to take proper photos of it) but it shows pretty much how it’s ended up. I’m rather pleased with it

Tagged with: blogging, completion, health, knitting, listening, mentalhealth, music, tools | Add a comment

Reconsidering

Well, this month really isn’t getting any better. And today definitely contributed to the downhill slide into dismal oblivion with the news that my very first composition teacher, Eric Gross, has died. Prof Gross was really a lovely man and a very fine composer, although I didn’t really get either of these things when I first started learning with him and for a long time I thought that he was just the wrong teacher for me.

But today I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that experience and I suspect that a large part of the blame lies with me. If I had been less timid and a bit more confident in my own abilities, if I had asked more questions in particular, what might that first year have been like? At the time I thought his music was terribly modern inaccessible. Now, after 20 years’ worth of listening and studying and writing and thinking, I find this is most definitely not the case and I wonder what I could have learned from him were he my teacher now instead of then.

So I’ve written a blog post about it which will go up on caitlinrowley.com tomorrow afternoon.

Rest in peace, Eric. I’m looking forward to exploring your music properly and learning as much as I can from it that I wasn’t ready to learn from you 20 years ago.

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Recovery achievements

Still recovering from the dental work and lower back pain. Honestly, I feel like an old woman! Must sort myself out before I crack up entirely. But it was a good day nevertheless. Small achievements.

• Had a letter from ING Direct offering me a fancy rate on a cash ISA for next year if I pre-ordered. And for once I actually just filled out the form and sent it straight away. So that’s good. Don’t need to think about savings for another year (apart from actually putting money in the thing).
• The bonus from my last employer for referring a new staff member to them came through. This is very exciting. £1000! Half of it is going to a friend because the girl I recommended is a friend of my friend. I’ve actually never met her, so it seemed only fair to share the loot. His half is going on a tax bill. My half is going on dentistry. Woah. Stop this crazy fun-filled ride?
• Wrote a blog post! For the first time in a couple of weeks my head was actually clear enough to think about and then write stuff. I think it might be mildly interesting to some folk. Maybe. Hope so. The hardest part about blogging is actually thinking up stuff that others might find interesting to read, but I guess that’s all part of finding your “Right People” – if it’s something you find interesting, then hopefully someone out there will find it interesting too. Time will tell. Traffic on caitlinrowley.com had a mysterious spike last Tuesday. No reason for it. I haven’t created much new content – posted a couple of files to SoundCloud (the Three Whitman Songs, if you missed it ), but that doesn’t usually generate backlink traffic because most people just play them and don’t read the blurb or go hunting for more info. And the promotion I did for those was directly to SoundCloud so no clue what’s happening there.
• And we watched A Single Man, which was amazing. Colin Firth is just incredible. So glad Djeli picked it. And he made me soup because I still can’t eat anything much that’s not squishy. What a darling. (Djelibeybi, not Colin Firth.)

Tagged with: blogging, film, gtd, writing | Add a comment

Another poorly day

Feeling quite a bit better than yesterday, but still a little woozy and wobbly, which has meant that I’ve not got to the Composer Workshop at TVU. Which is annoying. Because term’s been running for a month now – I only found out where and when last week, when I couldn’t go because I had to be in town at the time it ended, and now this week the world’s been too spinny for me to tackle it. Not to mention that I STILL haven’t got my student card. First real composition lesson is tomorrow though, so really looking forward to that and really hoping that I’ll be able to get some momentum going again very soon.

So today’s been another stay-at-home day. More productive than yesterday though, although not in directly creative ways, but it’s been good. I discovered how to get Google Analytics to ignore my own visits to my sites without needing to keep track of my IP address (I’m beginning to suspect, because we have 2 networks sort of chained together that my IP address may change depending on which end of the house I’m at, so that wasn’t working very well). And I downloaded and installed GIMP, which has done a far, far better job of my caitlinrowley.com favicon that the conglomeration of tools I used before. The conglomeration resulted in a 25Kb file – GIMP has given me one which looks better but only weighs something like 800bytes. Add that to the optimising and compressing work I did yesterday, and my whole homepage now weighs in at just over 40K, as it should do. Still got a bit more work to do, but overall I’m pretty pleased with the speed of it now, and really quite ecstatic at getting it to compress anything at all – something I couldn’t manage to get working at all while I was doing the W3C mobile web best practice course.

I’ve been thinking about my homepage too and thinking I need to make some changes to that – the work I did last week which saw it jump to second position for a search on my name (where it should be), has apparently been negated with the complete change in homepage content which occurs every week when I update the blog. So I’m thinking that instead I may need to drop in a brief para about me at the top of the page and just include a teaser paragraph for the article. Might also give a truer view of who’s reading what on the site if they need to click through to read the whole thing.

Music stuff? Not so much. Diabolus (the violin piece) is still near completion but I haven’t done anything on it in a couple of days. I was hoping to go inspiration-hunting at the Tate Modern after Wednesday’s lesson, but as I had to cancel the lesson, that didn’t happen, so I’m still no closer to knowing what I want to work on next.

But the continuing rest and recuperation with tiny bits of interspersed laundry and tidying are, I think, doing me good. Time for another episode of Buffy…

Tagged with: blogging, experimenting, health, learning, music, research, self-promotion, thinking, tools, web | Add a comment

Whee!

Having a GREAT day today. Tired but happy – got a heap of things done. And worthwhile stuff too. While I’ve been enjoying the business-building stuff I’ve been focused on for the past couple of weeks, it’s been great to have a day that’s been predominantly about creating and promoting my music. Really refreshing.

Well, Monday is blog day on caitlinrowley.com, and as yesterday we had a friend over for lunch and then I totally zonked out because I was so exhausted after the week so I didn’t get my usual Sunday blog-writing moment and had to do it today. I wasn’t ready to write more about the violin piece (more on that in a second) partly because the piece wasn’t really ready, and partly because it’s a post I’m going to want to do a chunk of thinking and probably some analysing for, which is going to take more than just a morning. So I decided it was time to launch a new series of blog posts I’ve been thinking about for a couple of weeks. After reading an article about tools by Havi Brooks I’ve been thinking a bit about the tools I use for composing and I thought that in the context of trying to write more about my process, it might be interesting to also talk about the awesome stuff that constitutes the tools I use – not necessarily (or just) things like my computer, pencils and so on, but also the things that inspire me and the stuff that gets used while I’m working through my thoughts.

So I leapt in. I’ve started with Elaine Gould’s notation reference, Behind Bars, which I’m actually finding quite inspiring and exciting, in spite of the fact that it sounds dull. Every time I look something up in it, I stumble across something else that makes me go “ooh! maybe I could use that” so I spent about an hour just writing about that book this morning. And hey, presto: blog post. And I’ve already had a little positive feedback on it, so hopefully people will get something out of it.

I also continued on with The Great Backup Project – I installed a plugin both here and on caitlinrowley.com to back up both these blogs to our new S3 space, so if they accidentally get wiped, there’ll be a recent backup to restore rather than having to remember to do it by hand. I’ve had Time Machine running perfectly all day now – the only downside is that if I’m not at my desk then I’m not being backed up, but so long as I remember to return the laptop to the desk overnight, it’ll switch itself on and hopefully run a backup first thing. Not perfect, but a darn sight better than the nothing I’ve been relying on for too long. I’ll look into ways I might be able to access the new drive wirelessly sometime soon…

And the violin piece! I finally tweaked myself to a standstill, then gave myself a talking to, PDFed it up and sent it off to a couple of violin-playing friends from Durham. And got an answer within an hour from one of them saying she had “great fun” playing it and yes everything’s perfectly playable and indeed mostly very comfortable under the hand. She suggested a couple of open-string tweaks, which was great because, yes, that was the sound I had in mind, but I’d completely forgotten to put the symbols in, and one cautionary accidental, which is now in place. So I’m down to the final layout, choosing fonts and just the last publicationy bits and pieces – a brief note for the front, design a cover and it should be winging its way to New York by the end of the week. It actually has a title too: Diabolus. I didn’t want to do some reference to 1-minute/60-seconds whatever, and the whole thing is built on the interval of the tritone (the diabolus in musica) and by the end the time signature changes had become pretty dizzying, so I think this name will stick.

Tagged with: blogging, completion, composition, fonts, music, organisation, publishing, tools | Add a comment

Getting myself in a muddle & out of it again

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.

Tagged with: blogging, completion, composition, copying, dayjob, ideas, music, organisation, play, publishing, research, thinking, tools, web, writing | Add a comment