Dateline, 17 February 2020

I’m probably not going to continue with that title, but maybe just this once. Yesterday was a decent day. I exercised, walked the dogs, did some laundry, made burritos for lunch, practiced drums, vocals, and guitar. I also studied some Korean (TTMIK lesson 7) and spent some time drawing a lesson from a Udemy course I’ve been slowly working through. What’s missing is any substantial writing study or practice. I tried to resume the James Hynes course but was getting distracted with other thoughts (nothing important, probably my plan to move my RAID drive a bit lower to reduce the noise) so I abandoned that plan and went ahead and exercised.

In the afternoon after I had finished everything, I sat down to read, resuming “Inside the Victorian Home”, by Judith Flanders. This was one of my books purchased in service of research for “Luma” (working title), my planned epic fantasy trilogy. To paraphrase Professor Tolkien, “the research grew in the reading”, and I’ve given myself months if not years of future study. Not a bad problem to have, since I love the subjects and the learning, regardless if I plan to put them to good use in the future. Anywho, I didn’t get very far before I started drowsing off, so I abandoned that plan and resumed watching “The Expanse”, a great Science Fiction series based on James S. A. Corey’s novels. This had started on the SyFy channel but was picked up by Amazon after three seasons when SyFy canceled it. It worked out well in the end because the video quality is better and there are no commercials.

All that to say I’ve been setting myself up for failure slightly by waiting to read until late afternoon. I either need to change my time to maybe late morning (pre-lunch) or at least have myself a cup of coffee before setting down to read. I want to devote some time every day for “productive” reading (research, etc.) as well as my more light reading. I’ve got a huge TBR (to be read) collection of books and I’m not making much progress at this rate.

Overall, yesterday was a successful day. I’m gradually making progress at my musical disciplines. The passing of Neil Peart got me reoriented into studying his style and I’ve decided to try and approach it from the beginning of his Rush discography (Fly By Night), assuming the difficulty level will be marginally lower than the later albums. Yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time futzing with the drum pedals, I still haven’t quite got the configuration the way I want. I’ve been starting to learn the heel-toe technique in service of faster bass drum playing (more for metal than Neil) and while I think the right foot is coming along okay, I’ve been having more difficulty with the left foot. This may be largely due to the left foot being mostly neglected in comparison to the right since I started playing about five years ago. I think part of it is due to the particular pedal setup I’m currently using. I bought this DW combo double bass drum and hi-hat pedal setup that’s all connected and I think for most applications it works well, but not heel-toe. I’m looking at eventually buying these pedals by a company called “Trick Drums”, as they have a very clever design that’s much easier to adjust and they look rock-solid in construction.

On guitar, I spent most of my practice time continuing to work on getting that intro riff to “The Spirit of Radio” correct after many years of playing it wrong. This is in service of gradually learning the song on drums and bass as well for the full song cover as discussed in the regular blog. I should be devoting more practice time to the other components of musicianship (ear training, theory, technique, etc.) and I need to start setting aside that time during each practice session. One of the great challenges of managing so many disciplines is not lapsing into auto-pilot when the overall weight of time required each day can start to overwhelm your more organized/planning mind.

Writer's Journal

I’ve been taking a variety of writing courses, including “Writing Great Fiction” by James Hynes, as well as Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass on the Art of Storytelling. I’ve collected no small amount of books and other online programs that I plan to work my way through gradually, and I also recently added Joyce Carol Oates’ Masterclass on the Art of the Short Story. I had been working on the broad strokes of a planned epic fantasy novel/trilogy and trying to incorporate the various writing exercises in these classes in starting to build the characters and scenes from this novel.

I’ve realized that it’s the practical act of writing that’s most important, and I need to find ways to spend most of my time engaging in this process, whether in service of this novel or any other purpose. The appeal of JCO’s class was projects that I could finish in shorter course that would allow me to have more experience at seeing a story through from beginning to end. All this preamble to say I’m adding this section to my page as a sort of “writer’s journal” at the suggestion of JCO’s course.

Her advice is to carry a journal (pencil/pen, paper, notebook, etc.) with you at all times and jot down any impressions, feelings, observations, et al., that occur to you during the day. I may eventually put that into practice, but since I spend most of my days in my home (yay, fee basis lifestyle), I’m going to try and make this a regular part of how I begin my mornings. I’ve been doing a version of this in my blog for nearly fourteen years now. Still, I wasn’t posting every day (sometimes going months without a post), and I was usually posting what I would consider “newsworthy” issues (in my particular milieu).

My intent is to make this a habit of just writing what’s on my mind, and I’ll probably have a sort of after-action review of the previous day, including any significant discoveries, accomplishments, failures, difficulties. You know, stuff.