Me and My Lists...

It's turned bitter cold outside recently and winter seems in full swing.  My radiators never start hissing until the mid morning hours when I'm just waking up, so it's often chilly in my bedroom.  I guess this is how I know it's winter.  And I'm just thankful that I have radiators to begin with.  I can't even begint to fathom what the city's less fortunate and the hurricane victims are going through. And it's only going to get worse...might even snow again this week.  

Now, Thanksgiving weekend is already a memory and I'm gearing up for a marathon December between all this remixing and mastering I'll be doing.  Then more voice coaching and hopefully, more voice gigs.  Also, Lacy and I are gearing up for the CD release parties which are only a few months away...dates and locations TBA, of course. For more information see Lacy James' website. :)  I plan to have the mastering done before the end of December at which point I will be sending the tracks off to the licensing agency.  My first batch. I won't say much more about Lacy's CD release because that's for her to announce.  This Friday I'm doing some voice over coaching with Sylvia which should be great.  I'm hoping to have a copy of the last gig I did for the young adult novel web ad to show her.  But we'll see. 

On top of all of that, I've already started my end of year reckoning and planning for next year's goals.  Lists of goals like these are great motivators.  I find them to be quite useful.  Part of the process of fabricating next years list of goals had me looking back at what I set out to do this past year and it's always interesting to see how many more I'm checking off as done than I did last year.  It was quite a few things.  Plus, the ones that I didn't check off weren't left undone necessarily, they just didn't turn out to be necessary or they were started but I realized that they were too ambitious for one year.  Things like finding a voice over agent.  In that regard, the lists can be fluid.  Voice over strategies have morphed a bit.  For instance, I found myself planning originally to email bomb a ton of production houses with my demos once I felt proud of them...but I think subconsciously I wasn't ever truly proud of them until I started racking up actual jobs to put on them.  Now that they're filled out with jobs I've actually done vs. random scripts I read in the studio specifically for the demo, I'm a lot prouder of what I'm putting out there.  Plus, without even using the demo to solicit more work in other places besides Voice123, I ended up averaging a gig a month for the last 9 months.  So, at some point along the line, I deemed it unnecessary to focus my efforts on soliciting production houses and instead hatched the plot to take my track record to an agent.  And now, I feel I'm still not ready.

So, using all of that, I fashioned a much more realistic checklist for next year, for both VO and music, to keep me on track and motivate me to bring them all to completion...or just about as close as I can get.  What's important is the trajectory, not necessarily whether or not I hit my target.  I'm always going to be getting closer and closer.

That having been said, and speaking of lists, I'm at a rather satisfying stage with the remix project now.  My list has been refined to the point where all the tasks on there are final tasks.   When these are done, the project is done.  At the start, the list is always, "what to do to get started."  And in my notes each day, I write down what I did, what still needs to be done and anything else that came up.  Each day the list is changing until one day, I can see the handful of tasks that it will take me to finally finishing the thing...whatever the thing is.  And that's where I am for the remix project.  Each track has a few tasks left, such as rerecording a bassline, tweaking the drum mix or just bouncing out individual audio tracks from MIDI instruments.  (Sorry just threw some music technical-ese in there, my bad).

This is how my mind works best and there are probably better ways to do it but it works for me so I stick with it.  Some might choose to not even start until every task is laid out on a very precise to do list, some might not make lists at all.  Honestly, so much goes in to my endeavors that I can't not make to do lists but on the other hand, I also can't box myself in and have to remain fluid and be able to accomplish things in stages. If I sat down and wrote out every single task that needed to be done I'd probably quail at the thought of starting.  And ultimately, when taking on a project like this (or any other of comparable scale), it's impossible to see what all needs to be done until you start doing things.  It's important to be systematic, of course, and figure out the best place to start, because that could make me quail as well, not knowing where to start.

Hehe...quail.  What a funny word.  Anyway, as you can see I'm getting a little loopy. It's time to shut this down and go to bed...as always.  Wish me luck with the lists and completing all of my tasks.  This coming Sunday night, the great Tania Stavreva is having her birthday celebration concert at Vivaldi Cafe in the W. Village and Lacy and I have been invited to play.  Though I get off work at 11pm that night, we will probably be doing so.  Stay tuned for updates on that.  Good night! 

Some real news

I woke up at 8 am this morning. No, that's not the real news. But it is shocking for someone like me who's been working until 4 am consistently for the past 8 months. No, seriously, though, I called Technicolor first thing and left a message with both office and cellular, hoping to talk to them about the job. The job which will determine my next course of action. They called me back eventually and asked me if I could come in on February 23rd. I said yes, of course, and they went on tell me that the details were essentially this: I'm going to be working for a three week period, one week in training and two weeks actually doing the job. There's one other person in the running for the job so I have a 50/50 chance of getting it over the other person, who, I'm assuming, is probably working there now since I wasn't available right away. The pay is decent too. I've already done my budgeting for the next few months based on what I will be making and the good news is I will be able to eat, daily.

Anyhow, this is good news because within hours I've been able to think up a plan for the next few months based on whether things go good or things go not good. What's going to happen now is I'm going to find a room share or a sublet, something short term for the next few months, basically as long as I know I can afford to live up here. If I get hired, I will, at that point, give my notice to the sub lesser and/or roommate and start looking for a studio apartment, once I know I will have steady income. In the meantime, once I get into a sublease or whatever, I will have a good two weeks to get down to Raleigh and get my stuff back up here. Not too bad.

What if I don't get the job with Technicolor, you ask? Tomorrow morning, I'm going to make contact with NY 1 and try to get an interview with them. Hopefully, they will give me more than just the time of day since I am a former Time Warner employee. I'll just have to tell them that I'm not available to work until mid March. This way there's a plan B and I keep my options open.

Excited to have this part figured out. I think tomorrow I'll post pictures of some stuff that I'm seeing everyday just to give you more of an idea what it's like up here. And I think I'll catch a few movies this week so I'll know what the hell I'm talking about when the Oscars roll around. Peace for now.

On Why I moved to NYC and plans for after settling

I wasn't going to post until I had some good news about either job hunting or apartment hunting but I'm wide awake and I just spent about an hour trying to get the damned wireless connection to work on my lap top. I'm actually on my cousin's computer right now, though I should probably try mine out again since what ultimately fixed the problem was resetting the modem and the router (pretty typical). I love computers. I do. I wish everything in life could be fixed by unplugging it and plugging it back in sometimes. Though I do love a challenge. And there's my kick ass segue into the topic of this blog and reason number one in a series of blogs I'm going to call, "Why I moved to New York."

I do indeed love a challenge. I don't think life would be worth living if we didn't challenge ourselves to do things that are out of our comfort zones. Something big, at least once in your life. Never mind that it's exciting too, to go beyond your comfort zone. It's incredibly enriching to challenge yourself and to find out that you can do exactly what someone or other told you that you couldn't do. I moved up here for a couple hundred reasons but the one that sort of tied them all together was the inherent challenge in leaving all familiarity and certainty behind and throwing myself into something that to most seems like a veritable crap-shoot. Living in New York City. It's expensive, there's a lot of people here, there's a lot of people here trying to make it, it's loud, the living accommodations are small, it's cold in the winter. Most people who've said anything about the weather, have told me, jokingly, that I've picked a crazy time to move up here. Meaning, of course, in the dead of winter (ironically, it's actually in the 40s and 50s most of this week). That makes me want to say, "Why would I bother trying to avoid that when it's a fact of life up here?" Never mind the fact that cold weather has never bothered me as much. I'm not going to stand out in the streets in my underwear after all. I grew up knowing how to dress for the weather and, in fact, it's something that I pride myself on. It's something you can't run from up here and if I want to get used to living up here, I might as well take on the worst of it first thing when I arrive in the city.

That having been said, no, it has not been cold here. I'd say it's averaged about 10 degrees cooler than Raleigh. Not too shabby.

Back to what I was talking about, a challenge. If I stayed in NC, where you don't have bitter cold, you don't have a huge crowded city with tiny living accommodations, I'd get bored. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy living there and I won't miss people. I did and I will. But, if I stayed there I'd wonder my entire life what could have been if I had just challenged myself. So that's why I came. A huge "Why not?" was staring me in the face.

On another slightly related topic, it's a strange thing, but, I don't yet feel like I live here (mainly because I don't technically), but I also don't feel like I'm on a visit. I've felt at home on public transit ever since my third or so trip here back in March of last year (this probably comes from a little bit of practice with the Paris metro, too). I have my friends here. I've been talking this up (as most of you know) in my head and to other people as long as I've been dreaming it up. For all intents and purposes, I've been here in my mind since I finished grad school 9 months ago.

I'm assuming once I'm working and I have my own place, then it'll feel real. But right now, I just feel in limbo. It's mildly frustrating but I'm one to take that all in stride these days. I look at it all as a part of the journey and an essential part. If everything were perfect right away, then this really wouldn't feel real. Because, I've spent all this time thinking about it and preparing myself for it, it all just feels like it was supposed to happen exactly like this and I've had no disappointments about it yet. In fact, back on that taking it all in stride thing, I've even been preparing myself for when things don't work out as planned. It's made for a marvelous transition. See my first blog about how I finally came to make the decision about when to move. It was all centered around things not going as planned and me realizing that too much planning could be detrimental to a degree.

At any rate, regardless of how things go or are going, I've caught myself thinking about what steps to take once I am settled, because, transcendent as I can be about the uncertainties that will no doubt characterize these next few weeks, I do see the importance of some plans being laid and those plans working out as planned. So, I've got a couple of things in mind. One, an album of electronic music that I will produce and put up on CD baby and promote through myspace. The idea behind the album will be musique concrete but using rock guitar sounds as source material instead of just any real world sound. But it will be more melodic. I've had a few ideas running through my head. This is why I will eventually need a studio with cool neighbors, because I will eventually need to record said source material. And it might be loud.

Another idea, is to take a few of the musical ideas for concert music that I have floating around and arrange them for a chamber ensemble that will include electric guitar (both distorted and clean guitar). Then I'll submit them to composition festivals and competitions.

All of this requires my own space and 90% of the equipment for it all is still in Raleigh.

Soon, though. Soon. I really should get to bed. And if I end another blog like that, someone please punch me in the face. I do need to get off that overnight shift schedule.