June 2024 Update
I'm still alive. Work has been ongoing on the novel, album, podcast, audiobook. It is now the last week of school (you keep close track when your wife is a teacher). I have too many projects. Staying home this summer, but planning on doing work on the house/property. Don't know when I'll find time for my selfish writing/music projects. Mind is uncooperative and greedy and worried about money and a thousand other things. Seems we have to try so hard just to enjoy the treasures God has given in this life. “I can't go on. I'll go on.”
Writing
I think I am closing in on what could be the last scene(s). It's all very rough still, and it will be awhile before I can show it to anyone, but maybe the end is closer than I think. Had to go back to the notebook and handwriting, feels a lot more approachable to me and is much more convenient. Still plan to bang it out on the typewriter, and then put it all into the computer.
Audiobook
I finally started recording again. I definitely had a mental block after discovering I would have to redo it, but I've gotten over it. It is also hard because I do not have a studio. So I have to utilize time between baby naps when it is quiet enough to record. Might have to try and get up early during the summer to do it.
Music
Wrote/am writing some songs for Lit Songs, and toying with the idea of releasing an EP when I have enough. I say EP because I feel the recording quality is just not studio good, and it would take years and years for me to get into a studio and do enough sessions to record a whole album, not to mention the money... But I think I can achieve DIY audio quality that's good enough to convey the song, and maybe for Bandcamp. Stay tuned.
Podcast
Released a bunch of episodes! Hopefully will find time to record new ones soon.
Reading
Still LOTR, Steinbeck letters, City of God, and To Live in Chinese. Have felt the urge to immerse myself in a fiction book I haven't read before, but then again I am directing that energy towards my writing. Steinbeck's letters have been pretty great. It really humanizes a “great” writer and he is rather sarcastic and really seems like a nice man when he is happy. He has his ups and downs in the process and he does a lot of thinking about the book. It has been a good reminder for me to think more seriously about my writing, because honestly it has been relegated to a droll duty in my mind. Have spent more time dreaming about my guitar rig than thinking about my book this month, and that shames me. Time to start over for this month and the summer. Thank God for His grace that I got anything done in May.
Listening
“I learned how to play Little Wing” is a phrase that no one ever spoke truthfully. There is no learning Little Wing. You can learn the notes but you can't play it like Hendrix, who played it different every time he performed it. Maybe you can get very close to the recording, but then you are simply re-creating, and that intro is one that you have to put your soul into and make your own. It's why Stevie Ray Vaughn's version sounds so different. Also started trying to transcribe a Paul Kossoff solo from Be My Friend and found out that it is not the notes that are hard, it's the way he plays them and his vibrato that is so brutal and yet so precise. Guitar is hard.
Also been listening to the newly released 21 Pilots album Clancy. Really like it. Every time they release a new album I am a bit apprehensive and try not to get my expectations up, but this one has slowly earned its place in my canon. “Oldies Station” is far and away my favorite song, but they are all good, and I think I relate to the album as a whole more than I do to Scaled and Icy, maybe because a lot of the songs seem to touch on aging into adulthood and parenthood. Trench is also one of my favorite albums, so the “WELCOME BACK TO TRENCH” in Overcompensate hits me right in the hype. Stay alive friends.
Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.
Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee: