Contestants, start your engines!

Greetings fearless friends… and hopefully some new ones: this blog is now a Contest Entry, so apparently being read and judged by a panel of experts… (welcome, experts! Enjoy your stay! Don’t jump off of anything I wouldn’t jump off of!)

For other readers, I’ll explain – as part of my ongoing attempt to redesign myself as someone with an ounce of business and marketing savvy, I have bought a book called ‘Music Success In Nine Weeks‘ by one Ariel Hyatt, who runs a prominent music PR firm and is generally regarded as a person from whom one can learn a lot about such things. I have high hopes for this book (rather, for what it can help me accomplish if I put as much of it into practice as I can).

Ariel is now running a contest wherein my fellow entrants and I will blog about our progress through the book, our experiences implementing some of the advice it contains, and so on. Nine blog entries, for the nine major chapters of the book, in nine weeks… Tolkien would be proud.

So here we go. Before I launch into the project, as kind of a Prologue to the main event, let me introduce myself. Since in fact I’ve never done this in these pages before, it probably makes sense to give a bit of background to my quest for Music Success. Read the rest of this entry »

I suspect this is no way to go about writing a book. No, let’s take that one step further: I am absolutely certain that by any normal measure of such things, it’s an insane way to attempt such a thing. Books are written in private, right? You toil away for months or more likely years on end, researching, scribbling out draft after draft… mountains of paper pile up, you rewrite and edit, rewrite and edit some more, all alone (darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there!)… and at the end of it, somehow, is a finished thing, which finally you can unveil to the world – which for some reason is supposed to care. Yes, the final product is public, but the actual writing of books is not a performance art, right?

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I have a piano concert tonight. It’s a solo concert, and it’s also a CD release – for an album that was recorded at another solo concert a few years ago. These events are a little out of the ordinary, and I don’t do them often – but I’ve done a number of them over the past decade and I think it’s worth saying a little bit about them here.

I am fascinated by moments in life when we have to confront fear, rise above it, move beyond it… and in the process learn something about ourselves, our limits, and our ability to surprise ourselves. This is not going to be about physically jumping off of cliffs. I’m not absolutely opposed to doing this, and I’ve jumped off a few in my time – more on this shortly – but generally it’s dangerous and probably a really bad idea unless you’re really sure what you’re doing and that you can do it safely. The fact that people die doing it fairly frequently is sad testimony the fact that it often isn’t as safe as someone thought it was.