It’s been a couple weeks — nothing big yet? 😄

Some thoughts on Written and The Now Habit

Last week I was queuing up some audiobooks for my trip to California, and I decided to look for books by Oliver Burkeman. Like everybody else, I’ve been a fan of his writing since his landmark book Four Thousand Weeks. That book can be described as a productivity and time-management book unlike any other, in its insistence that the true foundation of a healthy, happy, productive life is in accepting this: the fact that life is distressingly short, and you will never, ever be able to accomplish more than a tiny fraction of what you want to accomplish. Burkeman insists that life goes better when you start by acknowledging the harsh limits of our mortality and, in consciously choosing what to do with each day, fully let go of the rest.

That message has been helpful to me over the past few years, helping me to choose more carefully how I’m going to spend the downhill slope from 40. However, Burkeman was on my mind for a different reason. I knew he’d written at least one other book, a takedown of the way positive psychology has been popularized and debased, and I was curious if he’d written anything else that I didn’t know about.

And he had. In addition to that book, I found another one to which he has contributed a foreword, a book which speaks directly to my current choice of deciding to spend more time writing: Written: How to Keep Writing and Build a Habit That Lasts, by Bec Evans and Chris Smith.

For me, this book has been exactly the right book for me at the right time. It’s been helping me get back into a practice with my writing without creating artificial demands and constraints around it, without overthinking the process and, importantly, without overvaluing the efforts and products of any given day, week or month.

What I mean by “overvaluing” is a number of bad mental habits, bound up into one ball of neurotic awfulness. Expecting myself to be a genius every time I open a writing app. Expecting myself to produce more than it is possible for me to produce, given the constraints of my busy, adult life. Expecting myself to adhere to a punishing, rigid schedule. And then feeling bad about myself when I don’t measure up to these impossible, self-set standards and expectations.

I’ve fallen into all of these psychological traps, over the 30+ years that I’ve been writing, though not so much over the past decade. But the one thing I perhaps needed to hear most in their opening chapters, was a reminder that it is not actually necessary to write every day for hours in order to produce good writing. For years, that was my only approach. And if I wasn’t writing daily then I wasn’t writing at all.

Of course, even a moment’s reflection will reveal that almost nobody could possibly write in this way. The number of full-time book writers is very small, and even most people who are known for their books fit writing in around their other responsibilities. Routine is important, of course. One does need to come back to the practice on a regular basis. But, as these authors argue, what you need to do is find a schedule, rhythm, or process that works for you. That could look like anything, but if it works for you, then that is the right way — for you. Figure it out, and go all in.

I agree with that perspective completely. In my teens and 20s, I had encountered the gospel of the daily word count. The idea here is to set yourself a target number of words to write (or pages to fill up), and do that every day. It sounds reasonable enough, and in fact it did work in one sense. I did write quite a lot!

But there are two flaws with this approach for me. For one, it’s too rigid a plan to follow strictly for long periods. It may go fine for a week or a month or two, but the rest of life will always interfere. And second, it can come at a psychological price: if you don’t give yourself permission to be less than perfect, it can transform your writing practice from a pleasure into yet another reason to feel bad about yourself. When I inevitably “fell behind” on my word count, I would try to make up the difference over the subsequent days. And then when I failed at that, I’d end up feeling like I was incapable of achieving my writing goals.

This was ridiculous, of course. But I was hypnotized by the idea that writing to a daily word count is the only way to ensure consistent production and, thereby, a career. And so a failure to make my arbitrary, self-set word count felt like a failure to make progress towards my goals. Even if I had gotten pretty close. Even if I’d spent hours at it that day!

So what. A dumb mistake for a smart kid to make. But I was in good company with this kind of thing. According to the authors, Cheryl Strayed was also blocked for years by this misconception that the only way forward is to write daily. For years it didn’t occur to her, or to me, that it’s not actually necessary to write every day in order to write enough, and that word count is not a measure of anything that anyone actually values in writing. It’s not even a proxy measure of anything important. Word count is a useful tool for editors, who use it to estimate various things that concern them. For example, in the case of this blog post, that would be average reading time.

Speaking of which — by my calculation, you’ve spent about 4 minutes reading this far. I thank you for sticking with me for the length of a song! That’s not so easy these days.

The upshot of all this is that I’ve been figuring out my writing process this last month or so. What sort of routine, or rhythm, would work alongside all my other activities? That’s my real “writing project” right now.

As promised, I did start an essay a couple Mondays ago — several of them, in fact, as I begin collecting ideas to work on. I’ve resumed collecting them along with quotes in a single place so that I’ll have somewhere to start when writing time comes around. My experience is that if you keep feeding the note file, and keep returning to it, eventually something will blossom into a piece of writing.

This ties into ideas from another book I’ve read recently, Neil Fiore’s Now Habit, which promotes the idea of starting small and regularly. He argues persuasively that setting small commitments on big projects helps to beat procrastination. Don’t worry about the horizon, just commit to working for half an hour right now. If you focus on making low-stakes starts, he says, the finishing will take care of itself. I’m finding that to be quite true, and it’s proven a wise approach with all my projects and interests, including writing, so I’m leaning into those ideas right now. Soon enough, something will emerge from my “atelier.” I just need to give it a little time.

Because for me at least, the fundamentals are there and have been for a long time. I learned to write in my teens and 20s, so the basic mechanics of drafting, line editing, and structuring my work (as well as getting feedback) all feel as comfortable as an old shoe. Right now I’m feeling an intrinsic motivation to write, which has not always been the case in my life.

And although it’s separate, this seems equally important: I’m not intimidated by the publishing process the way I was when I was 20. I have long since achieved the goal of becoming a Published Writer, and all that holds little romantic glamor for me anymore. Which I think is an advantage. From having worked in publishing for years, I know exactly how that aspect of writing works as well. The entire process, from first creation to marketing and publishing, holds no mysteries for me, and I know I am equal to it. All I need at this moment is to find the right routine and rhythm, and keep at it. So here I go.

Big Things Are Coming!

Not long ago, a meme started circulating (I first saw it on Instagram) that poked fun at bands who’d announce on their social media that “big things are coming!” and then disappear completely, for all intents and purposes. Well, I’ve been guilty of that very thing here on this blog: my previous post is dated almost two years ago, announcing that the blog would “soon” become active again. Well, I guess if “barely within two years” counts as “soon,” then this is soon! Of course, as things turned out, it just wasn’t a good time for me to start writing in public again. And that is okay.

But here in 2023, I’m in a different place. I’ve been through some major life-altering passages in the meantime. But today, I’d rather focus on everything that is to the good. The core of my life remains intact: I continue to enjoy a wonderful marriage, my health continues to be good, I continue to love my adopted home town of Portland, my creative life is as varied and interesting as ever, I’m somehow (at my age!) continuing to develop as a pianist, my music studio is thriving, with robust and stable enrollment; and, last but not least, in my mid-forties, I am finally — finally — secure financially. For the very first time in my entire life, I do not have to worry about this month’s bills, nor even next month’s bills, but rather about the bills I’ll have two months from now. That’s a change so profound that it more or less enables all the rest of what has been going well, by making the necessary mental and emotional space.

Which brings me to two things have recently come back into my life, which have been enriching my days.

 The first thing is that I decided to start making visual art every day, something I’ve been wanting to do at least since I was 19, but I’ve never felt I could afford to spend the required time on it, owing to the demands of developing (first) a writing career, and (second) a music career after starting a decade later than everyone else. Today I bought a new easel and started learning how to paint lavender flowers in watercolor. I’ve been taking a classical drawing course too. So that’s where I’m at with that! It is a wonderfully restful part of my life.

 The second thing is the French language. A long time ago I got to a level of reasonable fluency — around B1 in general, enough to function perfectly well in the country while I was living there. At some point in the past two years, though, I decided it was time to raise my fluency in French from a level of “haven’t thought about it in years” to something close to mastery. And I’m getting there rapidly, taking in French media daily, taking classes, and using the language with native speakers five days a week in conversation exchanges. According to an assessment I recently took, my reading comprehension is at C2 (the highest possible), my written expression is at C1, with my oral comprehension also at C1, and my oral expression at a high-ish B1. (I can easily say things like “I would have if I could have,” but found myself unable to remember the word for “quiet” the other day.) It’s typical for adult learners to exhibit this pattern of mastery, with reading comprehension reaching the highest level first and oral expression reaching it last, in a very messy way, and that is why I’m making time for daily French conversation right now.

 But at any rate, all that is just what I’ve been up to lately, and none of it is why I have written this long and wooly blog post. The actual point, to risk looking foolish once more, is to announce that, um, well… Big things are coming.

 So let me back up a little bit.

 Some weeks ago I was driving from one piano lesson to the next, listening to David Runciman’s charming voice on the London Review of Books podcast. He was discussing Montaigne, the French 16th-century nobleman, scholar, and politician with a talent for remaining, shall we say, “not-assassinated” during a very dangerous era of anarchic civil war. His many interesting exploits aside, he’d be forgotten but for one thing: he invented the modern essay. He gets credit for this because he named his pieces essais or “attempts”, in a frank admission that he had no idea what he was doing with these peculiar bits of writing that, from their titles, would appear to have a clearly defined subject, like a classical treatment of a topic, but which in practice only begin with the supposed subject and quickly stray off the path, ending up somewhere else entirely. They don’t resemble the models he had at all, instead being more like a conversation. And although this conversation is necessarily one-way, it is so entertaining and engaging, and held in such an intimate tone of voice, that his works feel remarkably immediate even though they were written some five hundred years ago. Somewhere in the show Runciman remarked that you feel as though he is speaking directly to you, and this is exactly right.

 It happens that Montaigne is one of my favorite authors, though in my opinion, to read him is to love him. I had long known his moving words on friendship, actually from finding the end of the following phrase quoted in a novel during my first foray into French — “if you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I” — a line which surprises me every time with its straightforward acknowledgment of the total incomprehensibility of love and friendship.

 But five years ago, I began to absorb his complete works (in English), first as an audiobook which I remember listening to during long breaks between lessons on hot North Berkeley days, and then finishing up in print with the Everyman edition, which I read on the balcony of my then-new apartment during hot summer afternoons in Portland.

 Thus, when I think of Montaigne, I think of a genial companion on a hot summer day.

 After I listened to that podcast episode, I reflected on a thought I first had around the time I paused my writing career, over a decade ago. That thought was: maybe I should be writing essays, instead of all this other crap I’ve been failing at all these years.

 At the time, I had spent about 15 years single-mindedly pursuing the path of a writer. Starting in my teens, I spent about a decade writing fiction, with only a small amount of artistic and publishing success. And then I spent another half decade pursuing arts and politics journalism, also with only a small amount of success. By my early 30s I felt that I had reached a dead end. But it was a uniquely frustrating dead end, because I was surrounded by success stories, some of them spectacular. I was on a first-name basis with many successful writers in San Francisco (still am, with a few of them). Not the true household names, though I did meet Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, and Cheryl Strayed once or twice (none of them would recall me). Rather, I was friendly with many widely-known inside the literary world, and not much outside it. However, even their level of success didn’t seem to be in the cards for me. And when it came to making a living with writing — actually paying my bills by stringing words together — my practical career prospects were appalling. In 2011, it mostly amounted to working for blog mills and doing junk journalism.

 But worst of all: I was no longer getting any enjoyment at all out of my writing practice. So why even go on? I wasn’t a failure, not exactly, but something much harder to bear: somebody who had succeeded about as much as he was ever going to. And unfortunately, that level of success was a disappointment. So I did the sensible thing, and quit.

 And proceeded to make a much less-sensible decision, and turned to music as a career — of all things! Thankfully this turned out to be exactly the right thing to do. It changed everything about my life for the better, and I owe all my subsequent success to it.

 But I have never quite set writing aside completely, these past dozen years. And that brings me back to that thought I had back when I decided to stop trying. It seems that I’m not cut out for fiction, poetry, or journalism. And that’s too bad, I guess. But I have a strong feeling that I probably am cut out for the essay, and possibly memoir, because that is the kind of writing I’ve been turning to for years in the privacy of my own studio, and not publishing in any form.

 It’s also the kind of reading I persist in doing. I almost never pick up a novel, unless it’s in French and I therefore have another reason to be spending time with the text. I read a little current-events nonfiction, and some history, but for the most part I choose essays, memoir, or autofiction. My favorite authors for the past dozen years fall under all these genres, and often in a way that blends all three: Lydia Davis, Geoff Dyer, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, Marcel Proust, lately Annie Ernaux — and of course, Montaigne.

 So what’s next? It’s clear that I need to answer this inner call back to writing. I have spent now half an hour to an hour a day for a week, working on this blog post, which shows how out of practice I am. But I’ve decided to set myself a goal of starting to write one essay tomorrow, since the current school session is concluding this coming week, and I will be responsible for almost no lesson preparation, freeing up about an hour each day. I don’t have a subject, or plans for publication, and though I have some thoughts about both, I don’t really think those things matter at this stage. What I do have, is a vision of myself spending time at this and enjoying the practice once more, and seeing where it may lead me. And I’m very much looking forward to getting back into it after all these years away.

 So yeah. Stay tuned. Big things are coming! Maybe! Probably!

The blog is back / good habits / Ravi Shankar / math review / Python

I’ve decided I’m going to start blogging here on a regular basis. I’ve been doing daily writing in my journal for nearly a month now, and I think I’m ready to start sharing a little writing again. Today’s post is a bit of a mish mash but I think it’s as good a place to start as any.

good habits / It has now become a habit to sit down on the couch with my coffee, read a little bit of a nearby book, and then when I open my MacBook the first thing I do is start Ulysses (my writing app). It opens to my journal and I begin writing. This is a habit I’m glad to have established. On my upcoming trip I’m going to have to try and do the same thing with the iPad (I’ll be leaving this laptop behind.)

Ravi Shankar / Another habit I’ve established is putting on some music the moment I can. This morning I am listening again to Ravi Shankar’s experiments from the 60s and 70s in blending classical Indian and classical European music, a 2-CD set from EMI that I have borrowed from the library. It’s fun and interesting stuff, but it mostly just makes me think of old Bollywood music, to be honest. (A genre I’m a fan of.) The one thing on this 2-CD set that really draws me intellectually is the single example of a classical raga. While listening to it somewhat attentively, I was thinking about how much it reminded me of a jazz track. Of course that’s not accidental, but the influence went in the other direction. It was the sitar music of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan that had an influence on John Coltrane (primarily) whose work was subsequently so influential as to change the entire character of jazz.

I wondered if I was drawn more to the classical raga just because of that underpinning influence. Coltrane was the first jazz artist I got completely obsessed with and couldn’t stop listening to, especially those long quartet improvisations on the Impulse! label that were recorded in the years before the album *Ascension* inaugurated a period of (relatively) more-chaotic, large-group, free improvisation. They usually had an arc like a classical raga, with a lower energy opening featuring a recognizable theme, gradually building into a frenzied climax. It was interesting though listening to the raga and noticing the implicit structure involved from minute to minute. No matter how intense the music got, it seemed completely clear to me when a new formal section began. From what little I understand, although ragas can sound completely improvised to the Western ear, each section in a raga is defined by very specific melodic and rhythmic figures or groupings, what in the west are called scales or cells, which belong to those formal sections and are only used at those times. Jazz of course is about self-expression and, in the music I’m comparing it to, collective expression, so the only formal boundaries are those of the “head” (the theme) and the “solos” where one player is featured, and the figures are only arrived at by the performers’ choices from moment to moment.

At any rate, this CD set has been interesting but I’m not going to listen to it again, I don’t think. I may well seek out more of Ravi Shankar’s classical Indian albums though.

math review / It has turned out that the geometry course on Wondrium is entirely inadequate to my interests, so I purchased the book *Geometry for Dummies* as an e-book after borrowing a copy from the library for a while. However, just this morning I learned about a platform called Brilliant.org, which looks promising, especially as I’m planning to pursue this math review all the way through calculus, which I expect will take a year or two at this point.

Python / Speaking of this area of my interests — I don’t know if I ever posted it here, but I did eventually code a working version of my text-file-to-midi-clip Python script. I’m not totally happy with the implementation, in that I dealt with outlying data points mostly with randomness, and given how many outlying points there were, it represents quite a bit more chance than I really want to involve, ultimately. (With so much chance I may as well skip the text file analysis.) But it was the simplest way to deal with the issue and just get it working, and I got some cool results from it. I’ve written long enough for now so I’ll go into my ideas for the next version in a future post.

2021-06-01

So, I've just come through a bit of a lost month. I got my second vaccine dose at the start of May, and experienced a pretty strong physical reaction, leaving me feeling sick for days and chronically fatigued for at least a week; simultaneous with that, we lost another pet: my favorite cat, and the second one in pretty quick succession. Then the sunny weather changed to spring rain for days on end, all but eliminating my outdoor walks for a couple of weeks there. It would be overly dramatic to say I was depressed, but motivation was hard to come by, and I started just doing the minimum amount of work each day -- just enough to get paid and keep getting paid -- and sitting my ass on the couch as soon as was feasible. Each day I looked forward to the evening, when I would drink a bit too much, and each week I looked forward to the weekend, during which I would also drink too much, and do the same semi-productive or completely unproductive things I'd been doing during the week, only now without the guilty conscience. The "too much alcohol" part in there would disturb my overnight rest, causing me to wake up short on sleep and feeling... unmotivated... and hence, the cycle fed itself.

At some point I just decided to call the month a lost cause and found myself waiting until Memorial Day to get a fresh start on everything.

And through the simple magic of turning a calendar page, I do indeed find myself feeling pretty good about things and wanting to move forward on my music projects, and ready to change my habits. The excessive boozing each night and weekend stops today, and my attention to exercise and proper sleep hygiene resumes. I haven't done much today except survey the past month and the state of my temporarily abandoned music projects, but that's okay. I needed to consider the status of everything I dropped before moving forward.

I said "semi-productive" up above because I actually did pursue a bunch of interests last month, and got some pieces in place for the future. It's not like I was just sitting around moping and playing Breath of the Wild all day long. I read many more books than usual in a month, I set myself up with a budgeting app finally and settled on a retirement fund to invest in, and I learned a lot of Python before burning out a little bit and needing to take a bit of a break. In fact, I wrote a half-functional program which led directly to my minor burnout, which I'll describe in a moment.

The other main thing I got into over the course of May was a comprehensive review of basic math. I started doing that because I was starting to work on something in Python that had to do with sine and cosine functions, and I recognized that I no longer remembered how this even worked. I could of course have not bothered at all, or at most simply brushed up on that one thing. And I did actually spend a bit of time on the Khan Academy pages on the topic to get a little insight. However, after pursuing what I had forgotten to more and more elementary levels, I thought it might be most fun to go through the entire core math series on the Great Courses Plus, thinking that might be right on the exact level that I'd want for this material, given that I've already learned all of it at least once before.

So far, it has been perfect, and actually a lot of fun. Their series represents a complete review of basic college math, including the necessary fundamentals: they start with arithmetic (18 hours of lessons), and go through algebra (36 hours), geometry (18 hours), trigonometry (18 hours), & calculus (36 hours). I'm now in the midst of the elementary algebra course, determining the graphs of parabolas from their equations, and having flashbacks to the seventh grade and my senile algebra teacher and having to essentially teach myself this stuff from the textbook alone. The good news is that it is much more fun this time around.

I want to stress that I'm not doing this for any particular reason apart from entertainment. I know I don't need to review all my math for programming -- that in fact I don't really need to review any. It's just kind of a more-interesting set of puzzles than sudoku, which I was spending an hour or more on every day not so long ago.

Now finally I want to talk about the Python script that I'm actually quite proud of, even though it doesn't exactly work yet. The project is to turn a piece of text, such as a blog entry like this, into a series of MIDI notes that actually make sense as music.

Here's the general flow of the script:

  1. Take a text file and place a line break everywhere a period is found.

  2. Find the length in characters of each of these resulting lines, and constrain these values to the MIDI range of 1-127.

  3. Save these values into a "list", which is a Python data structure.

  4. Compare the values in this list to a "canonical" list of values stored as a "tuple" (another data structure), which represents the specific pitches over two octaves that I want these values to round to.

  5. Round each value to the nearest value in the canonical list, and output them as a sequence to a final list.

  6. Pass this sequence to a module called MIDIUtil, which will interpret the list into an actual MIDI clip which I can import into Ableton and press play on.

I've gotten quite a ways with this script. Steps 2 and 3 work great; I can turn text files into usable lists of MIDI-compatible values; step 1 I haven't figured out yet, but it should be trivial so I just haven't bothered; and step 6 "works" in that I know how to pass manually massaged sequences to MIDIUtil to give me MIDI clips. And they sound awesome! So I'm pretty motivated to finish this thing. 

But so far, steps 4 and 5 -- rounding the values in the original list to the set of values in the tuple, and then outputting a new list to pass to MIDIUtil -- this has got me totally stumped. And after half a week of working on the problem I was so burned out on it that I just took a 10-day break from Python altogether. I can get it to work with one value, any value in the defined range. But as soon as I try to loop over the process with a second value I get completely unexpected results, and no amount of stepping through the debugger seems to be giving me insight into what I don't understand. It has something to do with the way lists, tuples, and dictionaries interact, but I haven't been able to nail it down just yet.

Writing about that now, I've actually gotten myself more motivated than I've been in two weeks to have a second look at it. This is what I'm talking about!

And this also gets me excited about getting my music out again. This month I'll be releasing a single which has been done more or less for over a year; and my EP, which has been finished since April, I think I will set for an early August release. My original plan was early July, but I kinda lost a month there...

Oh well! Time to teach.

2021-04-19

  1. The EP has been done for three weeks and now I'm deep into the process of getting it out into the world. Which is a lot like constructing a building, in that 80% of the timeline is spent just getting the foundation right, and then the rest happens swiftly. Got some publicity photos done this weekend and am working on the press kit -- the story of me, and the story of the thing. All that stuff. Picking a distributor and a publisher. Beginning the long slog of trying to get people to write about it or just post tracks on their playlists. Thinking of releasing my first pandemic track, totally unrelated, in the next couple weeks just to help juice the social media machines for the Big Release in July. I was listening to the final master this evening and I can legitimately say I'm proud of it. That's no small thing.

  2. My current project is learning to work with analog synthesizers, my vehicle being the Minibrute 2S. Since April 1st I have put in about 30 hours of work and practice, and this morning I finally came up with some interesting sounds and sequences in a 13-minute jam that I recorded. This project is actually going faster than I anticipated, although I'm only halfway through the manual at this point, and have just barely begun to get into what is possible with it. The device has three parts: a synthesizer, a sequencer, and a patch bay which allows you to totally rewire both of the others. I'd estimate my mastery of the synth, with the default wiring, at about 40%. The sequencer part has a depth of functionality that I'm only just beginning to grasp, so I'm at maybe 25% with that. And I've barely touched the patch bay, just the most basic, most obvious patches so far -- LFO stuff and what they call a 'hard sync' patch which everyone needs to know early on. So, 2%? That's an average of 22%, which feels about right. Catch me after about a hundred more hours.

  3. I grew about a million chives, parsley plants, and thyme from seed in the past month, another thing I never thought I'd do before Covid. It's interesting to me that of all these vigorous sprouts, only a handful of them are going to be the plants I'll live with all year and eat off of. Agriculture in action, on my balcony.

  4. Python is still proceeding as an interesting hobby. I'm at the point where I can finally see the actually interesting stuff cresting on the horizon. I have a solid grasp of the basic data structures, and lately I've been learning to create and use functions to access, change, store, and display that data. Next up in the course are something called classes, and how to use external files, which I expect will be at the heart of what I will do with Python. My first idea back when was to generate waveforms from data sets with a periodic aspect (like weather data) and then use the results in one of the wavetable synths I have. That seems clearly possible. My knowledge is just so basic that I simply can't imagine the limits. 

  5. One-third vaccinated. I'm ten days post dose one, and will be offering in-person instruction again starting 6/1. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.

Newsletter thoughts, EP progress, learning Python

Some thoughts for the morning:

  1. I'm thinking about starting a music recommendation newsletter, a music-review newsletter, as a way of bringing regular writing and publishing back into my life. I do miss it, but I just haven't found a sensible way of including it in my life again. I'm going to let this idea percolate, and maybe try writing a couple test newsletters.

  2. Outside of my teaching obligations, I am trying to stay focused on mixing my EP. I ended up with 5 completed tracks, and though I’m not going to make even my extended deadline of 3/19, I’m still not going to be too far off — and still well within my ambition of completing the whole project in the first quarter of the year. So I’m satisfied with that. To finish and release 5 tracks inside of 3 months is in itself a feat, given that I released only about three proper tracks in all of 2020.

  3. Last night I started to absorb another chapter of the Python games book. It finally occurred to me while studying that script, a Tic Tac Toe game, that the flowchart part of each script is almost more important than the actual code. The code part is incidental, or at least it's not nearly as important as designing the flow of decisions that the computer needs to make as it runs down the script. Which, at least at this level of simplicity, probably could be achieved in a similar fashion in any language. This is probably blindingly obvious to any experienced programmer, but to me it was a little bit of a revelation, that the specific code is just the trivia that gets you to the result. (Similar perhaps to how music actually operates on a much higher level of abstraction than the low-level trivia you're obliged to obsessively internalize as a beginning student. It doesn't matter so much what key a piece is in, what matters is the spatial relationships of the notes to each other -- but you can't tell that to an 8-year-old who barely knows half a dozen scales, at best.) I think this insight probably came because in this particular app, there was almost a one-to-one correspondence between each box on the flowchart and each function defined at the head of the script, so that it made me realize that the program, as such, when it finally got underway about halfway through the script, was an implementation of the logical flow of the flowchart itself and the blocks of code were implementations of the boxes on the flowchart. This makes me want to try and design something slightly more complicated than I have done before, just for fun, using this insight. So far, the only interesting thing I have written from scratch is a script to serve random prompts from the Oblique Strategies deck, and a similarly simple app to serve semi-random starting points for writing music (just duplicating what I have long done with a single six-sided die). Maybe I can imagine something on my walk today.

All right, on to mixing.

Things Are Looking Up

Seems like it's about time for a little update. I'll try to be brief.

1. I've settled into a nice weekday routine. I usually get up around 8 and then for an hour or two I listen to music and do some reading or some other kind of pursuit, about which I'll write more below. Every morning, no matter, what, I spend at least 2 hours, and sometimes as much as 4, working on music in Ableton Live 11. After that, lunch with Jessica and some chores, and then from 1-7 on weekdays, I teach. These aren't solid blocks every day, but I am pretty busy, and finally making *almost* enough money again. When not teaching or doing administrative things related to my teaching, or my business affairs in general, I'll pick up a guitar and practice something for a little bit. Then dinner and cocktails, usually with some TV, and after that a little reading and gaming. (Stardew Valley! Breath of the Wild! Whatever looks good on the Nintendo eShop!) Then bed, generally. I'm getting pretty good sleep lately. Can't complain.


2. I'm working so much on music because I set myself a goal of writing and releasing an EP this quarter. I have 3 more or less complete tracks and a 4th idea that I'm still developing into a track. My deadline to submit everything for a 4/2 release is 3/12, with about a week's worth of margin after that deadline. It feels good to finally be releasing music again.


3. The "other kind of pursuit" that I alluded to above is, essentially, learning to code. I kept having technical annoyances that I knew I could solve if only I were more skilled at using the command line and scripting in general. And for months and months I was spending half an hour to an hour a day solving sudoku puzzles, to relax. It occurred to me one day that learning to code would fill the exact same role that doing sudoku was doing for me, plus then I'd have a useful skill for all the time spent. This theory has panned out: I know just about as much as I need to know about the command line environment to solve these recurrent annoyances, and I now have a much better technical basis for when I set up a permanent server here, later this year, *and* it has been a very compelling and fun project too. Now I'm using the same time to learn Python, via CodeAcademy for now. I chose Python specifically because it has applications for Ableton Live -- or rather, hacking potential -- that would be fun to exploit, if I get that far. All I can do so far is set variables and do simple arithmetic with them, but I'm having fun with it.


4. For next quarter I have one big creative goal. Instead of working on music for release, for three months I want to focus on practicing sound design. I am skilled enough to modify presets I find, but not quite skilled enough to make my own sound. My plan is to purchase a particular semi-modular hardware synth sometime this month, the Arturia Minibrute 2S, and use that as my learning tool. The hardware imposes limits to start with, which I think I need. But it also comes with a patch bay, which means that once I have mastered the default setup, I can begin fucking with it. The synth works on its own, but it's also extensible into Eurorack, which I am attracted to. And the sequencer on that thing is simply insane. I could go on for hours about it. I've been thinking seriously about doing this for almost exactly one year now, and the desire has never subsided. So I think it's time.


5. One rather sad note: we had to put down one of our cats again. They are all *extremely* old for cats, and this one was very clearly dying when we took him in (as in, just days left) so it didn't wreck me completely for weeks like the previous one did. But it still was deeply sad, and reminded me that my favorite cat, who is sitting beside me as I type right now, is for sure in his last year of life and could take a turn for the worse any day. So I'm enjoying the time we have left, and am being extra-nice to him, and am steeling myself for the inevitable.

I think that's about it, actually. I could write more about the negative aspects of my life right now, which sometimes really dominates my entire consciousness. But today I'm trying to keep it positive. I've got some tracks to finish.

Marching in Place

So, it’s been a while.

I’ve written many versions of this post over the past month or so, but the main thing I keep trying to express is this: this year has basically destroyed any sense of creative direction that I previously had, and right now I’m trying to find my way to some new direction.

It’s the pandemic, yes, but it’s also the fact that it arrived right in the midst of a midlife re-evaluation of all my goals, at a moment when I was already feeling pretty exhausted creatively, and after four exhausting years of exhausting, awful politics, with exhausting, awful people right at the top of it all. I keep using that word because “exhausted” is a good way of describing how I feel right now about just about everything. Exhausted and anxious.

To be honest, at this moment I’m just kind of waiting for the election to resolve before I take any direction. I’m not sure why I feel this way, but I do feel quite strongly that there is no way I’ll be able to really move on with my creative life until the election is done and decided. Naturally I’m hoping for a decisive change in leadership, because things will clearly keep going deeper into the shit if there is no change there. But my life just feels kind of stalled until that shoe drops, regardless of outcome.

Essentially I’m experiencing the worst case of “why bother”-itis that I’ve ever gone through in my life. But right now seems like a good time to start pulling myself out of this mindset. So I’ve been trying to pick up the pieces and figure out what I even want to do from now on. Most of what I had been doing stopped making sense shortly after the pandemic arrived (in my case, March 13th), and a lot of those things seem over for good at this point. So now what?

On the positive side, I’ve been playing a lot of piano this whole time, in a focused and serious manner. Learning classical music has been a powerful source of self-soothing this year. You’re not confronting a void and trying to fill it with something — you’re confronting a score and trying to figure out how to bring it to life. Each measure poses a problem to which you need to come up with a creative solution, but in essence all you are doing is solving a puzzle that many, many, many others have also solved. Knowing there must be a way to do it is very reassuring. I’ve spent much time on several intermediate-to-advanced classical pieces by all the big composers, and I’ve applied myself to mastering lots of basic technique that I just never got around to working on years ago. (For example, scales in 10ths and executing arpeggios cleanly at speed.) I’ve honestly never played better in my life. And the music itself is inspiring and lifts the mood. Schubert’s Impromptus op. 90 have been the steadiest companion through all of this. I always meant to learn them and now I have.

I’ve also put a lot of work into studying the technical skills of orchestration and arrangement, and brushed up on my conventional harmony and counterpoint skills. In addition to that book work, I’ve used the savings from not traveling to do a comprehensive upgrade of all my hardware and software, and I’ve been learning to use all that stuff during these past months. That’s not as interesting to read about as the music I’ve been learning, so suffice to say, I’ve acquired a number of technical skills that will help me when I do start regularly composing and writing again.

I feel certain that some kind of creative work is incubating inside me. What will it be?

Right now though, I need to go on a walk. It is sunny and bright and cold here and I have about 90 minutes until I start teaching. Maybe the cafe will still be open and I can get a coffee there.

I Wrote 300 Words Every Day for 150 Days. Here's What I Learned.

(originally published on Medium on 10/22/2019)

I Used to Be a Writer…

At least, that’s how I put it for about seven years: from the time I decided to give up my writing career in order to pursue a career in music. And during all those seven years, I hadn’t ever looked back. There was no reason to. Music turned out to be a good career choice and I’d done well for myself. And I never missed writing for others. It was enough to write in my private journal each morning.

But that changed last summer. I had just moved to Portland, Oregon, and since I was so new to town, I had little work and few friends. It was one of the hottest and driest summers on record, and I spent my days of unemployment in my darkened living room, almost overwhelmed by the heat, picking through the many boxes and hard drives of old writings that I had carried from apartment to apartment for years, yet had somehow never really looked through or organized before, in all that time.

Oh yeah, I thought, as I turned over the journals, poems, essays, articles, short stories and novels to which I had devoted my 20s. I used to be a writer. And I could be one again.

But how to start?

I know: just write. But that was inadequate advice. I’d been “just writing” my whole life. What I needed was a supportive venue. I needed an audience who’d bear with me as I once again practiced the art of writing for strangers.

As a musician, I had conquered performance anxiety by busking. When you’re playing on the street for spare change, it doesn’t matter if you suck. Few people look at you twice, and half the passers-by have earbuds in anyway. I developed confidence performing literally on Valencia Street in San Francisco; a couple years later, I was playing shows in a popular bar on that same street.

I needed to find a similar path with my writing.

A Place to Write

Those drowsy, rootless summer days quickly gave way to an active professional and social life. And as my music work picked up that fall, it became that much harder to sustain a routine writing practice. In fact, once I decided to pursue writing again, it took me almost a year to find a rhythm with it.

It happened like this. In early May, a friend of mine posted on Facebook: “I kind of miss writing,” and she expanded on that thought by evoking the glory days of Xanga and LiveJournal — specifically, what it was like back then to practice writing just for the handful of her friends who themselves had blogs. I had been on those sites too in the early aughts and also missed that vibe. This started a discussion about how to “get back into writing,” and many ideas were proposed, from face-to-face writing groups to email lists to using Facebook Groups for the purpose.

All of those were good ideas, and I considered pursuing the latter. But that same day I did a little Googling and discovered something interesting.

Write Together

What I discovered was a tiny blogging platform called Write Together. It’s a paid site, launched on January 1st, whose object is to create a community around the goal of writing and posting 300 words every day. The primary feature is a stripped-down form for entering text. You can only hit the “publish” button once your text reaches 300 words. And if you post for two or more days in a row, the site tracks your streak and displays your icon on the site-wide leaderboard.

The site immediately resonated with me. For one thing, I liked the small user base. It reminded me strongly of my early days writing on LiveJournal for an audience of about half a dozen friends. Such a small group seemed likely to make for a supportive place.

For another thing, I liked the emphasis on daily minimum practice. For years I’ve been giving my piano students a directive, “touch the keys,” which I learned from a book by Kourosh Dini, MD — who is a wonderful improvising pianist in addition to his many other attainments. Every day, even if you don’t have time to really practice, always at least touch the keys of the piano and, ideally, play for the few minutes you have. This keeps you literally in touch with the instrument and your larger practice. The goal of 300 words a day reminded me of this — a way to “touch the keys” of my writing practice, the literary equivalent of improvising for five minutes before getting on with my responsibilities and obligations.

The membership fee of $8 a month was a drawback for everyone I mentioned it to, but to me it seemed like one of the most positive aspects. At the very least, it meant that everybody who was writing on there would necessarily be of serious intent. Nobody pays $8 a month in order to be an internet troll. I wanted to practice in a place where all my readers were similarly engaged. And in case I had any doubts, I could make all my posts “community-only” (as I ultimately did), meaning the outside world wouldn’t be able to see them.

I figured I may as well give it a shot. I signed up for an account, and on Saturday, May 11th, I made my first post introducing myself to the community.

The people there turned out to be exactly what I had hoped for. And for the next 152 days, I wrote and posted at least 300 words, and often quite a bit more than that. No matter what else was happening in my life.

What I Learned

You can always draft one page.

The daily goal of 300 words is trivial — just a single page — and the Write Together leaderboard reminded me every day that I was trying to keep my place on it. Keeping the streak was a minor challenge, but achieving it each day was fun, and it gave me a small sense of accomplishment. And I badly needed that feeling for a few months. So of course I kept at it.

This combination of factors kept me practicing my writing, on days I likely wouldn’t have otherwise — the weekends — and through times I definitely would not have, such as when I was slightly intoxicated, recovering from surgery, sick with a cold, or close to falling asleep. (Fortunately, never all four at once.) However, this experience reminded me of a lesson I first learned in my twenties:

How I feel is (mostly) irrelevant to how the first draft comes out.

For most of my twenties, merely supporting myself took up most of my time. I’d go from one minimum-wage job to the other during the day, and would write in the little scraps of time left over, before work, after work, on the bus, on my lunches and five-minute breaks. I got into the habit of writing whenever the opportunity arose, no matter how I felt, always carrying a pen and half a dozen sheets of paper folded up in a back pocket.

Over the course of several years of this, I learned that I can draft complete garbage while fully rested first thing in the morning, and I can draft great material at the end of an exhausting day. Within certain obvious limits, it just doesn't seem to matter what condition I'm in when I show up to write a first draft.

It helps a lot to write for well-intentioned strangers.

On Write Together, I got to know my audience through their own posts, and after a while I started trying to write specifically to their interests. Having an audience is key to my own motivation in both writing and music; knowing what my audience is interested in helps me select projects.

In those early days it was also really important for me to feel like I was writing for supportive readers. The first time around, I had writing groups and sympathetic editors, whose presence in my life offset the impact of nasty responses — or worse, total indifference. This time, the people on Write Together served that function. And after a while I felt secure enough to expand my ambition. I started wanting to write pieces that would require more than one session, aimed at a wider readership.

Which brings me to the next lesson I learned.

Just because you write every day, doesn't mean those writings will add up to anything.

This seems obvious, but at several points in this run of posts, I convinced myself that whenever I posted for several days in a row on the same topic, I was “really” working on a larger project.

The thing is, I never did gather those posts together for revision, so, no, I wasn’t really working on a larger project. Regular drafting is an essential part of a writing practice, but for the work to amount to anything more than that, you must devote quite a bit of separate work to shaping, arranging, and revising what you have drafted. And that requires a lot more time and concentration than the initial drafting does; perhaps ten times as much.

And at the very end, I learned something surprising:

Once my daily habit was firmly established, the daily post started to become an obstacle to further development of my writing.

The effort of writing and posting every single day very clearly began to draw energy and attention away from projects that would take more than one session to complete.

I hadn’t anticipated this at all. Towards the end of my 150 days, I thought I could write up a few notes in my private journal, go on to do a quick Write Together post, and then work on a longer-term project. But I found myself repeatedly picking ideas I could complete in one sitting, and putting off the more-ambitious efforts. It had started to amount to virtuous procrastination.

So I decided to commit to a goal and schedule that would better serve my new ambitions. Instead of daily posts, I would write on weekdays only, and aim to publish a longer piece each week on Medium and my blog. This essay is the first product of that effort.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed the 150+ days that I was writing and posting daily on Write Together, enough that I have decided to remain a member for the time being. I’m enjoying the posts from the friends I’ve made there, and I’ve been posting there sporadically since I changed my goal. I definitely recommend the site to anyone who’s interested in starting a daily writing habit, because it was a fun and supportive place to practice for half a year. And it worked! It absolutely got me back into the habit of writing, and back into the mindset of writing for an audience. But in the end, I needed to move on in order to have time for more ambitious projects. And I’d call that a success for both Write Together and myself.