A public place is a portal...

I took a break from my big non-fiction project over the last week or so. Seems like I've needed to take a step back from it. In the meantime, I've been revisiting some unfinished stories and new ideas. I think the time has been good, but I ought to get back to the big one.

So, the big non-fiction project is a series of essays and tangents that all relate back to the public parks in my hometown. When I started working on it, I didn't expect it to be any longer than maybe 15 pages (typed, double-spaced, one-inch margins). I had a whole bunch of ideas about what it might be, but I didn't think it would really be something that I would invest a lot of time working on. But, while researching the parks, I've discovered that these public places give me access to moments in time that I normally wouldn't reflect upon - moments of my own history, and that of my community. Some of those moments are nice. Some of them are dark, and difficult to write about. The places act like a prism, filtering the components that form a culture, and culture is complicated.

So, back to it...

Learning by doing

Project Waldo (Image by Nate Simpson)

Last fall, my roommate Hermann (who has since returned to Iceland, boooo!) sent me a link to a blog called Project Waldo, by a fellow named Nate Simpson. Nate quit his job back in January of 2009, and planned to create a storyboard for the film he'd been dreaming of making for ten years. But few months into the project, he scrapped the film and decided to create a comic book instead.

The blog has documented his progress as he has learned "how to make a comic by making a comic," and I think it's fascinating. I've often heard people say that they don't want to read work on making art - writing, making music, etc. - unless the artist is famous, or has attained some kind of recognition for their work. I think that what those people usually mean is that they don't want to hear pronouncements on how art ought to be made, unless it comes from someone they respect. But there are other ways to write about, and talk about, the process of creation, and I like to hear what it's like for other people who, like me, know that they don't have the answers, but can share their failures and successes as they try to figure out how to make their art live up to their dreams.

That's what I hope this blog will eventually be - a document of things that I've tried, strategies that worked, and snapshots of those occasions when I've fallen flat on my face.

Tally-ho!

Hey, nose! Meet grindstone.

Not an actual grindstone

I am still in the thick of this nonfiction project I've been working on all summer. It's starting to look like it wants to be a lot longer than I imagined at the beginning. I've been kind of stuck lately, because writing about real people brings all of these ethical issues into play, and it just makes me want to stop writing and start watching television or playing video games or developing some kind of hobby that doesn't involve pressuring myself to create something that kicks ass. But let's not kid ourselves. I love the pressure.

And now I have all of these ideas for other, new, shiny projects just flooding in, and I haven't been letting myself work on anything else all summer. Maybe this is a mistake. Sometimes it's right to really focus on one thing until it's finished, but when I have multiple projects it often seems like they end up feeding one another, and they all end up better than they would have without the others. So I think it's time to try branching out for just a little while, to let myself get some perspective.

The summer reading is going well. I've been taking advantage of the public library, and I have a great pile of books on my mantle (yes, I really have a mantle). I stumbled across this fantastic little collection of Soviet short stories, and it has some gems. When I'm done, I'll post a review up here.

Photographic Memory

I'm kind of in love with this photo. It was taken with expired B&W film on the Diana Mini camera I received as a graduation gift. I took it about a month ago, but it looks like history, or somebody else's memory.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about different ways to represent the ways we experience different places, and the way we experience the memories of a place. The sort of territorial, proprietary feelings we (okay, maybe just I) get about the places we've lived, whether we loved them or hated them or were just passing through.

I've lived in my current apartment for about a year and a half, and I have no plans to leave in the immediate future. Looks like this is going to be the longest I've stayed put since I was eighteen. I've been immersed in a writing project about my hometown, so I've been spending a lot of mental time in Southwest Missouri circa 1990...but I think I am just about ready to turn my focus to the city.

Under Construction

Big life changes in the last few weeks. Mostly good ones. I graduated, got a job, and made some decisions.

I'm working for a tech startup, and it's pretty fun and exciting so far. I have been learning a lot, and I'm getting opportunities to write, to be creative, and to take on responsibility. It's a big change from my last few jobs...in a very good way. The funny thing is, I applied for this job the week before graduation. I had signed on with a temp agency as a last resort, because all of my resumes were going out into the void with no response. Temping wasn't quite what I had in mind for myself when I went back to finish my degree, but I was down to the wire with no good leads. Still, I had this superstitious kind of feeling that if I kept looking, I would find something at the very last minute that would be perfect for me. And then I did.

The mixed blessing is that I'm only working three days a week right now. This makes my checking account sad. I'll have to figure out a way to make more money before too long, but I'm scraping by for now. The upside is that it's giving me a lot of time to focus on some personal projects, and it seems like this is a good time for me to be frugal, go to the gym, spend some time on my own, do some cocooning, make some progress, and figure out some long-term plans for myself.

I'm participating in a writing workshop this summer, and I hope that it's going to help me gain some creative momentum. I worry that - now that I'm out of school and don't have deadlines or assignments - I won't be able to find the motivation to keep working on my writing projects. I'm probably going to apply for an MFA program in creative writing, and I can imagine it being very easy to keep putting it off until next year, then the next, then the next. So, in the workshop, I'm trying to get rolling on the project that I'm planning to use as my portfolio. It's a non-fiction project that is rather close to my heart, which makes it easy to think about and talk about, but it's difficult to meet the standard that I have imagined for the piece. I think I may have had a breakthrough on the subway yesterday, though, so hopefully I've reached a turning point. The goal is to get it in shape by the end of the summer, so I can send out applications at the end of the year...

Updates

So, the big news right now is that I've just started contributing to futurist blog Temporist. This means that I am spending ever more time reading science news and trying to imagine what other people will find interesting. I, of course, get excited about it all. I'm trying hard to work my way to a bloggier/informal style, but gosh, it's hard not to skew academic when writing about stem cell research.

The other biggish news is that I've started sending some short stories out to journals for consideration. Already got a rejection letter and everything. I'm not discouraged about it; this is rite of passage. It would probably be some kind of jinx if my first piece were to be accepted somewhere immediately. One nice thing about the process is that I had to write a short personal bio, so I spent some time thinking about how to make myself sound like I've accomplished things in my life (and I HAVE accomplished things, I just haven't been paid for any of the work I'm proud of). So watch for my "About Me" blurb on this blog to change sometime soon. You'll be surprised at how cool I am. And to think you never knew...

My projects for my life right now are:
Write about the future.
Continue working on the electricity piece. (I think it wants to be a book!)
Wrap up some short stories that have been lingering unfinished.
Stay in touch with people who have been supportive or encouraging.
Keep up with the schoolwork.
Update my resume.
Find a JOB!

Bio-Inspired Networks (Temporist)

My first post for futurist blog Temporist is on mathematical models that draw upon the efficiency and robustness of networks found in slime mold and leaf veins. Click for the full piece: Bio-Inspired Networks.

Notes on writing lyrics

Sometimes people ask me how I write songs, and I usually give cagey, unspecific answers. This is mostly because I can ramble endlessly on the topic, and partly because the writing of songs is, in my experience, a lengthy and frustrating process that I don't imagine would be as interesting to others as they might suppose.

However, because I am in the midst of a songwriting frenzy, I thought this might be a good time to organize some thoughts on the subject - specifically, on writing lyrics.

In these current sessions with Joe and Jonathan, the composition process has been very collaborative. We usually begin with instruments; it is rare for us to begin with a vocal melody and to write instrumental parts to accompany it. In the beginning, we usually have a rather bare-bones musical arrangement, and maybe some idea of what the song could be about. Sometimes we have a title, and sometimes the title determines the lyrical content of the piece. Other times the original title ends up being discarded after the lyrics are written.

On Monday, we began writing the song provisionally titled "Slinkitzer." We started with a wandering Wurlitzer/guitar/walkietalkie jam. Joe had mentioned to me that he wanted to have a song about capillary action. To paraphrase, he said we should have a song about things being pulled through other things. So I looked up related terms on Wikipedia: capillary, capillary action, wick, and I followed all of the "See Also" links. I wrote down words that interested me from the entries, words like "perfused" and "everted." I looked at pictures of frost flowers (ice formations that are formed as the result of capillary action in plants) and from there I looked up other types of frost: hoarfrost, hard rime and soft rime. I went through my notes from the last few months to see if I could grab words or images (no dice there, this time, though usually this kind of synchronicity does pop up). I wrote a list of words that I liked that day, words like wish and asp and aluminum. I wrote a list of colors that have been mentioned in the songs we have already written for the album, and then a list of colors that have not yet been named. I wrote down this question: Would you draw me through?

Another resource that I tapped was a book that I recently started reading: Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them. There were a surprising number of instances of the term "capillarity."

I also grabbed some phrases from Joe's notes. "It pushed back" and "radiator smell." We have agreed that we can steal words from one another. Don't worry.

We came back to the "Slinkitzer" recording on Thursday, and made some structural decisions about which chord progressions would comprise the verses, choruses, etc. These decisions made, we put an audio file on my iPod and I spent much of Thursday and Friday listening to the song on repeat while trying to organize my lists of words into lyrics.

So far as I can tell, there are no rules for lyric writing. Sometimes the lyrics and melody seem to spring from my mind fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Upon further reflection though, I have to admit that those moments that feel like inspiration are usually the result of months of verbal accumulation - ideas, notes taken, things people have said. Other times, it takes ages for lyrics to sit right in the song. Sometimes I write the whole thing out in sequence on a piece of paper and the words stay that way. Other times I shuffle things around.

For this song, I did a lot of shuffling. To make it easier to switch things around and organize, I used a program called FreeMind, free mind-mapping software that I usually use to outline essays and papers. You can see an image of the song in progress at the top of this post. This song is a lot more wordy than my lyrics usually get, so using this software really helped me to play with/refine meter and phrasing, without wasting tons of paper. I also find that switching up writing media can help me get through blocks, so going from pen & paper to computer can loosen up the ol' word machine.

Finally, after two days of focused work, I had a draft and was ready to sing a scratch vocal (the scratch vocal is a rough performance that is not meant to be kept, but is used as reference for the other parts, and so I don't forget the melody in my head). Performance-wise it was a little bit rough, but all in all I think the song is going to be really strong, and having the vocal melody in place sparked other ideas and has allowed us to move on with the song - this is what we are doing tonight.

For me, melody is almost always the easy part. Words are hard. But for some reason, this is the only thing that I am compelled to do year after year, even when it is difficult, when it feels impossible, when I think I suck, when I think I'm all tapped out and I have sung everything I have to sing. The words are out there. I just have to discover them.

The Process

Sometimes I wonder why I am not a more prolific creative person. After all, I have ideas, drive, and a smattering of discipline.

Today, I believe I have figured it out. It's because my creative process looks like this:



and it works like this:
1. Write a bunch of stuff down.
2. Lose everything.
3. Find some pages, but not of what I'm looking for.
4. Acquire scissors.
5. Cut pages into pieces.
6. Explode them all over the room.


I bet Dickens didn't write all of his novels by cutting up little pieces of paper and exploding them all over his habitat.

Wrote some stuff, made some plans.

Here's what I accomplished this week:

The Soundwalk - I'm not exited about the finished product. Voice-over work is hard! I think I'll set this ambition aside and focus on the other bazillion things I want to do.

Wrote a new chunk of the electricity piece. This bit's about hardware hacking and battery licking.

Started the Twitter diary today.

Will start NaNoWriMo tonight, after I do some studying for tomorrow's midterm. Don't ask me what the novel is going to be about. I have no idea. But you know, the last few years I spent a lot of time thinking about stories, and what do I have to show for it? Not much. So maybe winging it will work out better for me.

Didn't have time to work on music, but I did buy my plane tickets to go to Missouri for a month this winter, so I expect to do some intensive music making during that trip if we can wrangle some studio time.

And of course, the most important thing: I put together a great Halloween costume!

Fall Projects / Internet Presence

So far, I've been using this blog as a platform to share things that interest me, but I have been thinking that this is not the best use of the blog format. Or, rather, that there are more efficient tools that I can use for this purpose: Google Reader, Facebook, etc.

The question is, what is a blog good for? I have a bit of a horror of using this format to talk about myself, or about my feelings - I got that out of my system with my geocities page in high school. Still, this form lends itself to the personal and the informal more easily than anything else.

With these things in mind, I have decided to use this blog to write about my projects. Here are the things that I am working on now, or planning to begin:

1. Music - my solo project. Four songs are currently in the works, and I'll post recordings as soon as I feel confident that I won't embarrass myself! This project is all electronic so far (except for vocals), using Ableton Live and Reason. The music that I've performed or otherwise put out into the world has been made collaboratively, so writing songs by myself is very new and challenging.

2. More music - Listing. In January of this year, my brother Joe and our friend Jonathan and I decided to try to write and record 10 new songs in about 3 weeks. We thought that this was an ambitious, if not impossible, task. After weeks shut away in the studio, we walked away with 9 songs. I call that success. However, some of the songs are more finished than others, so there is talk of reconvening this winter to augment and polish the collection. Hopefully we'll have something ready to release out into the wild in early 2010.

3. Writing - the electricity project. I started writing a piece in the spring about the BENT festival (a gathering of circuit-benders and hackers who, generally speaking, make music with their creations). Its becoming a monster, and now I imagine a sprawling piece about DIY culture, the physics of sound, electricity, and the human body. It might turn out to be a series of essays on these topics.

4. Writing - a Twitter project. Why did I start a Twitter account? It's like Facebook status updates, except that hardly anyone I know uses Twitter, while everyone uses Facebook. I've been trying to think of *something* interesting to do there. So, I'm going to try an experiment: a Twitter diary. Here are the rules: I must update every day. I must use exactly 140 characters. I must try to represent what I have actually done that day, and I have to be honest. I must try to make each entry beautiful.

5. More writing - NaNoWriMo! November is National Novel Writing Month. Every year I try, every year I fail. This time, it will be different.

6. Audio project - Soundwalk. This weekend, I'm producing an audio walking tour of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for a class I'm taking. It's an assignment, but I'm kind of falling in love with the idea of using sound to transform our experience of a place...so depending on how this actually turns out, I may try to continue producing these things.

& Other Stuff - Other preoccupations that are probably in the future: making music videos for Listing songs, short fiction projects, and possibly trying to write something in graphic novel form.