This week is turning into one of those WHY???? weeks where nothing goes right. I’m trying not to whinge too much because I’ve given up whingeing for Lent, which is why I’m here rather than doing an aaaargh on Twitter, because nobody reads this blog when there isn’t a specific project on, but I need to try to get some stuff straight in my head.

I feel like I’m kind of in a transitional period, compositionally speaking, which isn’t surprising, given the vast number of new experiences I’ve had in the past few months and the wide array of stuff I’ve been trying. This is a good thing, I know it is, but given that I have this one week to work in, but am sick as a dog thanks to a germ I picked up from the dancers last week at Laban, I feel like I’m losing time to consolidate stuff, and going back to Fear of Falling feels like a backwards step because already, by dint of writing that piece and all the work I’ve done on Still River Air (the Ansel Adams piece) and my CoLab project since I started it, it feels like a piece from another time.

I’ve also been doing quite a lot of listening the past couple of days, going back over some pieces of Australian music I want to play to the postgrads in my listening session on Tuesday, and it feels like something I really want to explore more. I feel more connected to this music than I have ever done before, and listening to it is making me realise how much of my own style is informed by this stuff. I’ve also been reading the interviews in Andy Ford’s Composer to Composer, which I haven’t done in many years, and there are certain resonances that really strike me, that I want to explore further. It seems the more I study at a European institution, the more of an Australian composer I feel I am becoming.

Already I’m doubting my decision to stay here. Maybe a year or two after I’ve finished the degree will be enough, then back to Aus and launch into a doctorate. Right at this moment though, I’m feeling sick and full of germ and lacking in energy and imagination and wondering why I ever thought I could be a composer at all. I’m worried about Still River Air (still don’t like that title) and what problems may arise with it because I had to rush the score and parts production due to the massive tech problems I had to deal with. I’m trying not to worry too much – 1. there may not be any, or nothing major; 2. if there are, I’m sure I won’t be the only one!

Tomorrow the forms are due in for the string quartet competition, which I had intended to write something for, but I just don’t know that I’ll have the time, now I’ve lost four days, effectively, to being poorly. Might put it in anyway, but a bit disturbed that I need to provide a title. Also that there’ll only be a week to write it in, when I should be working on Fear of Falling and my Cy Twombly pieces.

Finances are also becoming a huge issue – turned out that Djeli had miscalculated how much we owe HMRC, and there’s another £3,000 to pay, and still no job on his horizon. D’s part-time job is about to evaporate too, as the store he works at is closing down.

I’ve been listening a lot to Peter Sculthorpe’s string quartets this week. Not sure why I settled on those – I’ve actually never really listened to them before – but I’m finding them really comforting and I’m struck by how right their delicate textures seem. I never realised before how slim a lot of Peter’s work is, something which I aspire to in my own music. I’ve been wondering what it would be like to go back and study with him again maybe. I wonder what I would learn this time round.

Anyway, nobody said any of this would be easy – going back to school as a mature-age student, studying full-time on another contractor’s dubious income – and it sure isn’t! I’m just trying to keep focused on what I have to do and not get distracted by money, illness, feelings of worthlessness that tend to crop up whenever anything’s not going quite right! And now that I’ve quietly vented, I’m going to put my headphones back on and see if I can finish off with the time signature changes in Fear of Falling…

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The performance is really starting to take shape now and I seem to be carving out a role for myself but it really is carving – definitely not something I’ve just stepped into, but I’m glad I decided to not bring my flute. It might have been easier if I had, but I think this experience is actually more valuable for me as a composer, even if it’s a bit uncomfortable at times.

This morning we finished making the camera-instruments, assembling our timers, the flash component (made safe by John) and the switch and pot control into the camera body. Fiddly work, but very satisfying and the cameras closed up perfectly once everything was in place and wires wiggled so as to be as low-lying as possible.

The afternoon was spent rehearsing the performance and I spent quite a bit of time working with Marie, who was organising the dancers and providing them with feedback due to being poorly and unable to dance herself. This was very satisfying, between discussing things with musicians, suggesting and discussing ideas with Marie, working out cues for musicians and dancers alike. It was a very productive afternoon, one of the best we’ve had, I think.

While the dancers were rehearsing Hug after this, I co-opted the musicians to try out some ideas I’d been playing with for the sudophones. Well, that was a bit of a bust, alas. And not helped by everyone being tired! So that idea’s gone in the bin, but we’re considering performing Stealth in the concert instead. Not entirely sure how that would work, but it might. At any rate, it was useful to work on the failed piece and while I’d hoped for input from the performers to try to make more of it, it still helped in that I think I’m beginning to see how working with unusual instruments such as these, for non-specialist performers, requires a different way of thinking from how I usually approach writi music. My ideas were too precise to work, I think, even though I’d tried to take into account the temperamental nature of the instruments and that they don’t all respond the same way – it seems to me that writing for stuff like this, you actually need to compose gestures rather than sounds. Compose the gesture and the sound will follow, but if you try to duplicate particular sounds, even allowing for variation, it all comes apart.

The main piece is coming in at about 17 minutes and I think John’s and my estimates were about right – it really couldn’t be any shorter – it needs that length to work through all the material, both audio and visual.

Last day tomorrow!

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Normally this post would be all SQUEEE! SHINY! but somehow I can’t get myself terribly worked up about this new laptop. Yes, I’m wildly excited at the prospect of actually being able to be productive again, but I’m just not excited about it. I do hope it’s not just that I’m getting old. I’m pretty sure it’s not. I think there’s a few things going on here:

1. While the Macbook Pros are gorgeous, they’re all identical. There’s no personality expressed in choosing a Mac. You pick your size and there it is, the same as everyone else’s. Previously there was at least a little difference in whether you got a Macbook or MBP (and before that even more when you got to pick what colour iBook you wanted!), but now they’re all the same: 13-inch, 15-inch, 17-inch, Retina display, Macbook Air. You pick what fits the budget and the job and along comes your mass-produced friend. Until I turned to Mac, all my computers had a name (Edward, Edward II, Edward III, etc.). The Mac has never had a name. While I love the OS, and the machine has seen me through some pretty hefty work moments, I’ve never been fond enough of it to give it a name. And the new one, I fear, is just Nameless II. When I had my Vaio, nobody else I knew had one. It was pretty and slightly purple, but also a little unique. Now, though, my laptop looks like all my friends’ laptops. There’s also that aspect of ‘I never had a chance to choose anything else’ – because I want the Apple OS, I have to get a cookie-cutter Mac (unless I live with the potential unreliability of a Hackintosh. One day!). My decision was made purely on the intersection of what I could afford and how long I might be able to make it last, within boundaries of what the minimum was I’d need to run my software. No emotion involved.

2. The OS (Mountain Lion) basically looks the same as Snow Leopard which I’ve been running on the old machine. Yes, it does all sorts of funky things which Snow Leopard didn’t, but it looks the same.

3. I’m finding the screen colours are a bit muted. I’ve run calibration and it’s improved it a bit, but still not as contrasty as the old machine. Will try running it again, this time with Advanced Options switched on and see if I can perk it up a bit.

4. Really not enjoying the lack of trackpad button so far. Especially after the issues I’ve been having with the old machine, it feels like I’m breaking it when I have to click with the whole trackpad (and what’s with not letting me tap to click on the login screen?????)

5. One thing which I personally feel is a design flaw – the indentation in the front where you flip up the lid has really sharp points – which lie right under where my hand wants to be to use the trackpad. Quite ouchy.

6. I have quite small hands and I always really liked the keyboard on my old MBP. The keys on the new one though are quite far apart and I’m hoping this won’t cause a problem.

7. It actually seems to be slightly bigger than the old laptop, which is a direction I never want to go in, being short, not particularly strong and with long-term shoulder tension problems. If the 13-inch came with a quad-core processor, I’d probably have got that, purely for the portability (Macbook Air’s a bit useless – it’s not light enough to really make a difference given the huge trade-off in processing power, no DVD drive, and lame hard drive capacity)

Obviously 4, 5, 6 and the whole backwards-scrolling thing they have going on in Mountain Lion, are things to do with getting used to the new machine. I’ll give it a few weeks. The backwards scrolling can be switched off, I believe, to have it be normal, and if I really can’t handle the trackpad and keyboard stuff, then I can always get an external mouse and keyboard, at least for when I’m at home. But I’ll try to get used to them. Hoping that, if I can’t get too excited about this computer on a SQUEE! SHINY! level, I can at least get excited about the work I’ll be able to focus on now I don’t need to faff around with a broken trackpad!

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It’s time to admit I have a problem. It’s not that I don’t like these middle section ideas I’ve come up with – rather it’s that they don’t seem to have any enthusiasm to go anywhere. They’re sounding fine as they are but I’m just not getting any prompts about where they want to head. They’re directionless, which is all the more annoying as the “still water” music had LOADS of direction, but this moving-water music has none!

So I think I need to do some dissection. Yes, I think the rhythm’s a bit dull, but I’m feeling there’s a more fundamental problem at work here. The central section was always a bit tacked-on – a way to get from the still-water music which I really wanted to write, to the waterfall music which I have some ideas for and which will probably also be quite still (yes, I know that doesn’t make sense, but I’m hoping it will when I get there!). In The Plan, this section kind of almost doesn’t exist. Um. It’s kind of fleeting, and I know that’s because I’m just not enthused about it and don’t really know what to do with it, whereas I had clear sonic ideas for the other two.

If I go back to the images for the central section, these are the concepts I end up with:

1. mist, smooth, soft, quiet, fast but still, sheets of water, orderly

2. rumbling, foam, rocks, changing directions, channeled

3. violent, spray, rocks, lone tree, thunder

I think there’s a clear progression between these images, and maybe this is something I can really do something with. Maybe the violent climax of the piece is actually II(3) and not III, which would leave me free to do things like held piccolo notes, string and harp harmonics, subtones on the clarinet in the final section, maybe some multiphonics, like I want to do.

Next question: Working from the material from section I, how can I adapt this to the needs of II? What new material do I actually need? What actually will be the place of rhythm in this? It feels important for this section, if only because I and III are more about stillness and held notes, so rhythmic contrast would be good.

Enough thinking. Time to deal with notes!

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Last year, in place of my usual pull-apart-my-failed-goals-for-the-year post, I wrote about 10 things that were good about the year. This felt a lot more constructive and gave a lot more insight and a better broad view than dissecting how I did or (more often) didn’t reach my goal for performances or knitting. So I’m doing it again.

1. Obviously, I started a Masters degree. This has meant a simply vast amount of work, but already I’m seeing huge improvements in my music and how I’m thinking about my work and I’m really, REALLY excited about all of it: new friends, the composing, my teachers, new ideas, everything.
2. Bought a house! God, was that only this year? It seems to have been going on forever, but yes, in April this year the bank finally approved the mortgage and we bought our house.
3. Moved into our house! Yes, for most people this would have been a part of 2, but given than we weren’t able to move in until September and even that was a huge struggle, I think this deserves its own item. As of writing, while it’s still largely a building site, we’ve managed to make it not just habitable but almost comfortable. Certainly, it’s starting to feel a bit more like home and a nice place to be.
4. Completed my first album, thanks to RPM Project and a bunch of awesome online friends. This consisted of writing 9 new pieces and working up an arrangement of Pieces of Eight, which said awesome friends then recorded and sent back to me. I’m still really pleased with the result.
5. Completed my first opera! A mini one, true, but an opera nevertheless, AND got it recorded, again thanks to awesome online friends.
6. Completed my first real orchestral piece (cos I don’t count the one I did in my undergraduate degree which was rubbish)! It may have taken 9 months to write 3 minutes, but I think they’re a good 3 minutes. And London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra evidently did too because they workshopped them and then shortlisted the piece for their end-of-year concert.
7. We had an amazing week-and-a-half-long trip to Spain, which I loved, in spite of being wracked with flu for half of it and agonisingly sunburnt for the other half. We saw Picasso’s Guernica, proper amazing flamenco dancing, explored the countryside and wandered through the streets of Seville. We also made and consumed a lot of Tapas, which was a wonderful experience in and of itself.
8. Completed 6 client projects as Raspberry Blue. Not much for a year, but I’m pretty pleased to be able to report that number. And two of those were repeat clients.
9. Actually enjoyed the Olympics for the first time ever.
10. Djelibeybi. OK, so not a “thing”, but this year marks 15 years we’ve been together, and 2012 has been a really tough year, but worthwhile. He’s supporting me financially through my studies and even when things have got tough with money, he wants my composing to come first and for me to not have to faff around trying to fit work around my studies. He is an amazing man, and I’m very lucky to have him – and even luckier that he’s considered me worth hanging around for a decade and a half.

Now that that’s done, next step is to consider my creative goals for 2013… hmm…

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A great productive day today. After last night’s last-minute start to the Ansel Adams piece (I updated the blog at 12.30am to report it at 30 seconds long. It’s now a full minute!), I’ve been on the trail of this piece with a vengeance today. All of a sudden everything became clear – which images to use, how to work with them, what I wanted the overall concept of the piece to be. I opened up Procreate on the iPad for the first time since I downloaded it on special months ago, looked at a rough tutorial for it (ooh! it does proper pencil sketching! MUST try this out soon!) and drew up a plan. Interestingly, colour doesn’t feature in this plan. Of course it’ll affect the final piece, but I’ve got kind of a monochrome thing going on, which plays well with the whole black-and-white photography thing. The lines/shading on the plan don’t really reflect musical movement, but rather indicate which images will be the basis for which part. Each of the three blocks is planned to be about 3 minutes long, giving a total length of around 9 minutes, which gives a bit of leeway in both directions for the specification of 8-10 minutes.

So what I am planning for this piece? Well, rather than focus on one image, or one set of images around a single focus, it’s going to kind of encapsulate the exhibition. Yes, I know that sounds excruciatingly ambitious. The title of the exhibition is “Photography from the Mountains to the Sea” and the piece is going to follow a similar progression: From still waters, through moving water (rivers, etc.) through to waterfalls. These are the images I’m using for the sections (Apologies for using links instead of embedding these, but I don’t want to get in copyright trouble over this and there are quite a few of them! I’ve tried to link to official-ish sources, but if you Google the name there are often larger versions of the images elsewhere):

Still waters

• Grass, Water and Sun, Alaska. 1948
• Submerged Trees, Slide Lake, Teton Area. About 1965

Rivers
I’m not 100% settled on these ones, but these images will give an idea of what I’m thinking of:

• Fern Spring, Dusk, Yosemite Valley, California. About 1962
• Shrub and Rapids, Merced River. 1968
• Cascade, Happy Isles, Yosemite Valley. About 1940

Waterfalls

• Upper Yosemite Fall, Yosemite Valley. About 1946
• Base of Upper Yosemite Fall, Yosemite National Park. About 1950

The images in sections 1 & 3 were some of my favourites in the whole exhibition. The section 1 images in particular had me absolutely spellbound.

I’m still working out what to do with instrumentation and how to make the best use of the crazy ensemble. What we have to work with is:

2 flutes (with doublings)
1 clarinet (with doublings)
2 saxes (with doublings)
1 keyboard (piano/harpsichord/organ sounds or can programme it to use samples)
1 harp
3 violins
1 cello
1 jazz drumkit (bass drum, snare drum, 2x tom toms, 2x cymbals, hihat)
1 voice – SAT or B, no text allowed
1 acoustic guitar

We have to use everything in the ensemble, so no rejecting the guitar on the grounds that it’s similar to the harp, or chucking the saxes because it’s too wind-heavy. It’s very low on bass instruments, so I’m thinking one of the saxes may need to be a baritone, and the clarinet may need to be swapped for a bass clarinet instead.

I’ve had two main ideas for using the ensemble, both of which involve dividing up the instruments into opposing groups.

Idea 1 is winds vs strings vs percussion, where “winds” includes the voice, “strings” only the violins and cello, and “percussion” is keyboard, harp, guitar and drumkit, each one taking a section of the piece. After thinking on this for a little though, I think this will be too restrictive and clear-cut. I want to blur things a little too, so…

Idea 2 is to use one principal percussion instrument per section: maybe guitar, then keyboard, then harp, with the drumkit throughout, with melodic interest focused on flutes/clarinet/saxes for part 1, strings and voice for part 2 and a mixture (perhaps making use of some of the doubling options to give a more expanded sound) for part 3.

Today was also the last day the college library was open so I trekked in to stock up, expecting loads of other students to have done the same, but the place was a ghost town! I had to distract the cafe lass from her iPhone to get a cappuccino and it seemed like this was the most interesting thing she’d had happen all day! Ran into a couple of friends, but apart from them, it was pretty much silent as the grave.

I’ve brought back the score to Elliott Carter’s Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux for flute and clarinet, which inspired the opening texture of the Ansel Adams piece, so I wanted to have a more thorough listen to it than I got at the London Sinfonietta’s New Music Show 3 the other week. Also Stephen Montague’s Snowscape, which he recommended I look at as an example of a piece that is quite loose in interpretation that might be useful for Fear of Falling. Also a couple of books on art and music which I hadn’t seen there before, the Alfred Blatter book on orchestration (recommended for our Orchestration – Large class but not required, which is why I haven’t yet invested in it), and there were a new batch of ex-library CDs on sale and I accidentally came away with the complete (or near-complete) orchestral works of Honegger, and song cycles by Vaughan Williams and Holst. Whoops.

Got a bit more research done on the Twombly project too. Still thinking about whether to stick with the mushrooms or try to work from paintings I don’t have access too. Um.

Oh! And did some thinking/talking about the Rude Health concerts with a couple of friends and we went and checked out the Peacock Room together, which is where they’ll be held. There’s a tiny organ in there! Super-excited about that. Might have to make use of it…

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Hmm. Need to pull my socks up again – I’m slipping! No composing done today. This morning I accidentally slept in because the heater got left on overnight and so I was all sluggish from the heat in the morning. Then I realised I had to touch up the paint on the bedroom floor where it got scratched up when we moved the bed and Djeli assembled his chest of drawers, so I didn’t really start to think about my own work until about 1pm.

I did, however, get some study done for the Cy Twombly project – reading a book called Visible Deeds of Music at the moment, which has a very interesting first chapter mostly focusing on how art and music have been considered, in terms of what they are, should be and how they interact, over the course of history. Tomorrow’s the last day the college library is open until the New Year, so I’ve been focusing on the Twombly project to try to determine what I might want to borrow to look at over Christmas. I don’t know that I’ve really come up with an answer to that, but I’m going to go in anyway, wander the shelves and see what appeals. I should probably try to bring back some scores too – perhaps of some of the stuff on the Orchestration – Medium listening list.

Due to ongoing headache though, I didn’t really get much done today. Painting, reading, made soup, deleted my Instagram account now it’s gone all Facebook on us (but ooh I hope this resuscitates Flickr a bit – I so miss the old gang there!), listened to some Fauré piano music (very restorative for the soul) and wussed out of going to birthday drinks for a college friend because by the time I should have been getting ready not only was the headache much worse but my vision was going all fuzzy and everything spinning gently. The problem improved with the application of cheese and since eating the soup, I’m feeling quite a bit better, so I guess it’s a combination of stress, tiredness and not eating well. Shame. I really wanted to go!

I have at last made up a Finale file for the Ansel Adams piece, which I really need to get started on. It doesn’t have any notes in it yet, but at least it exists. Yes, that’s lame, but there it is… [update: as of half past midnight, it's now 30 seconds long. Yay for beginnings!]

I also started thinking about this year and working on a ‘creative goals for 2013′ post. Going to refine this over the next few days before I post it. I seem to have failed at about 90% of my goals for this year, but most of the ones I failed at were overtaken by other stuff, so I don’t mind all that much.

Anyway, to bed now. Hoping tomorrow will be more productive.

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I finished painting the bedroom floor! Well, not entirely, because moving the bed around has lifted a few little spots and there are some scuff marks I’ll need to repair, but yay! It looks SO much better. Kind of actually like a real bedroom, not a slum campsite. Woot!

And I took delivery of the enormous Writings on Cy Twombly – this is the one I was working with at the Tate the other day, the one that I calculated was cheaper to just buy than to pay for even half the trips required to go to Tate to read it. Can’t wait to really get stuck into it now.

And I was a good little girl and did two pomodoros-worth of work on Fear of Falling. I’m really liking this piece (now just a few seconds shy of 3 minutes long) but don’t really have a vision for how it’s going to end and I feel I need to think about that – and soon. It’s been proceeding so well without a plan, or at least just working off the idea I had for the opening – this one’s been very much an intuitive piece, following along where it seems to want to go, but with two minutes to work through still, I think I need to be working out how it wants to end and think about how to help it get there. Still haven’t started on the Ansel Adams piece, but at least this one’s progressing well.

Plus some client work. And messing a bit with the mindmap I started yesterday for the Twombly project. And sending an Amazon thingy back where it came from via a huge queue at the post office. Busy!

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Laptop’s still not behaving itself so I’ve tried to give it a day of rest in the hopes that it’ll be better tomorrow. Bloody better be! Neither compositions nor client work will finish themselves!

Today, therefore, I have done offline stuff. I painted the other third of the bedroom floor, then did a second coat over half the floor (odd measurements because of needing to shift the bed to paint, allowing access to varying amounts of floor!). I also finished transferring my existing notes for the Twombly project into the notebook and found some useful stuff for that online.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking for the Twombly while I’ve been painting and cursing the computer and so on, thinking about materials and layout issues and what equivalents for white space might be in music – silence? Ostinato? Background noise? Variations on aural spacing/surround sound/placement of musicians? As part of that I’ve started this mindmap to map out the real and perceived materials in Natural History, Part I: Mushrooms as a way of considering what’s actually going on in these images:

The more I read about Twombly, the more fascinated I become with him and with his work, and the more I wonder whether I might be restricting myself by just sticking to the mushroom series. I love them, but I kind of want to explore the possibilities opened up by the paintings too, especially some of the later ones. On the flip side, I don’t have a lot of time for this project, so maybe limiting myself to one set of works is a good idea. And on the flip side of all of these is the question of whether I need to specify a particular work when I pull together my proposal at all. I think it would be a good thing, though – I’ll be needing to start composing as soon as the proposal is done, if not before, so no matter what, I’ll really need a clear idea of what I’m working with by then – plus, I suspect the proposal (worth 10% of the mark, I think) will be stronger if it’s centred around a particular work or group of works and I can present clear concepts that I want to explore. Another benefit is that the mushrooms are there at the Tate Modern. Not on display, but you can ask to see them, so I don’t need to work 100% from reproductions like I’d probably have to if using the large scale paintings. As with everything, more thinking needed!

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Hugely productive day today. I’ve spent the entire day at the Tate Library at Tate Britain doing research for my Cy Twombly project. Gosh I love research. I’ve so missed it – must try to keep it up after the degree is over. I’ve been gathering some useful general info on Twombly and having a look at his other works on paper to start building some ideas for how to approach my project and how to document it.

First thing I have discovered: Index cards are really annoying for anything other than short-term 100% text-based projects. I am ditching them in favour of a not-quite-A4 plain paper Moleskine – this will ensure I can carry around all my notes, make extra notes in margins and scribble/draw/paste stuff to generate ideas, all in the one place. I’d hoped to get a hard-cover one, but it seems Moley don’t make ‘em in the extra-large size *sigh*

Second thing I have discovered: Found a fascinating and massive book called Writings on Cy Twombly, which starts with early reviews of his work and goes through to long-form essars looking at his themes and processes, by way of anecdotes and poems and all sorts of things. It is massive – 300 pages and about 50cm tall, on nice-quality heavy paper with large margins. You know the sort of thing. Classic art book. I got through about 50 pages today, so that would work out as 6 trips to Tate to read the whole thing. Did some sums, looked it up on Amazon, and it is cheaper to buy this massive art book than to take the 6 train trips needed to read it at the library. Again. Madness.

Third thing I have discovered: Tate Britain do an excellent mocha in their vestibule cafe.

I’ve gathered a lot of info and am starting to build an impression of Twombly as a person and as an artist, but it’s kind of hard to express that yet here. Suffice to say: it took the whole day but was very useful.

Once the library kicked me out I went to see the Turner Prize exhibition. And OMG. Go and Google “Paul Noble artist” if you don’t already know his work. Gorgeous and fascinating.

After that I did a little Christmas shopping then went out to Stratford and had Brazilian barbecue for dinner with Djelibeybi. Very civilised. AND I got dried pears from Waitrose

On my train trips I’ve aso been starting to read Tony Buzan’s The Mind Map Book. Buzan apparently created the concept of the Mind Map, and as I found it just sitting on the shelf in the college library, I figured the start of a major research & composition project was as good a time as any to research some study skills. It’s very interesting! I like how he explores a little of how the brain works by way of introduction and talks about how standard note-taking bores our brains into forgetting the very thing we’re trying to remember. I’ll be interested to start applying some of his ideas to this project. For the moment, it’s sort of hard to apply because textual research kind of requires that you keep track of exact quotes, so there’s a lot of copying out rather than idea-generation. Still. All useful info and I’m sure it’ll come in handy soon.

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