My whole life, staying focused has always been a challenge. As long as I’m doing new things, exploring new ideas, doing new tasks, and pursuing creative projects I can keep that in check (usually by multitasking so I’m bouncing back and forth from one thing to another), but it takes work to, you know, work.
So to suddenly get slammed with a fairly big snowstorm that keeps the family home, thereby extending their winter vacation home by another four days, isn’t exactly a boon to focus. Love them, but it’s a small house, and no, I don’t have a dedicated, private office space.
Still, managed to take three or four rough chapter drafts from my next book and chisel them into finished initial drafts yesterday, a big surge of headway I needed to make. Hope to continue the same today and through the weekend. Final manuscript is due to Rowman & Littlefield relatively soon, and I want to start prepping proposals for the NEXT book. It would be great to have a new project in the queue as soon as possible.
Progress is progress.
The day I made that last post on being unplugged for January, I sat down that evening and zoned in on crafting a mix of a recording session I had done a few weeks earlier. Recorded for about four or five hours, producing an hour and a half of m2 material. In sitting down to mix, I had to comb over layers of meandering guitar sounds, improvised pieces that filled the headphones with sound but that didn’t always necessarily work. Such is the nature of making that kind of music.
But by the end of the night, I had a solid 45 minutes or so of material that just might be a new m2 record for 2018.
It feels different than previous m2 work. I used a different method of recording it. Recorded in a different environment. Recorded on different equipment and in different conditions, and using techniques I hadn’t used on previous m2 stuff. It feels different. It feels new. And I think I like how it sounds. There are some drones there you can get lost in, with a lot going on in the mix, different sounds vying for dominance over one another, but doing so in unison. I’ll have to listen a lot more to be sure, but so far it’s promising.
I’ve promised myself a creative 2018. This is a good start.
