Thor: Love & Thunder has a lot on its mind. It’s not a great movie. I feel I should point that out up front—for some reason, sigh, looking at you internet—but it is a fascinating movie. I love it. My mind keeps wandering back to it, or more specifically, the notion that people don’t like it haunts the misbegotten depths of my mind. I can’t let it go, and I am fixated on one possible reason why the movie gets a bad rap even when I never actually hear this as a reason.
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Suck the marrow out of life. It’s a good quote, vivid, visceral, wild. I don’t even know if I’m remembering it right, but I remember the moment from Dead Poet’s Society. The kids excited, savoring the words, sucking the marrow, and they don’t understand what it means, but it sounds great, sounds full of passion, full of life. They want strong feelings. They desire intensity. They will shake the thunder from the sky.
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Once upon a time, I was very opinionated about the meaning of art. Okay, I used to be opinionated about a lot of things and very passionately opinionated about a select few—like art. Passionately opinionated being the diplomatically polite way to put it. I was young, didn’t know any better. These things happen.
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Death of the Author doesn’t work for me. It’s not even the concept, or what I understand of it, anyway. It’s the presentation—so pretentious, I hate it. It’s like a title in search of a concept. It’s an attempt to sound saucy and controversial. It’s Death of the Author, so let’s go murder us some authors.
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My new novella, The Urban Goatherds, is finally out. It took way longer than it had any reasonable right to take, considering it is only about 150 pages. I mean, this turkey took very close to two years to finish. I could blame someone—naming no names—because the text was pretty much locked way back in May. The illustrations took a long time, but they are absolutely gorgeous.
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For no really sensible or sane reason, I’ve started posting my old Faire Folk of Gideon audiobook on SoundCloud. This is definitely a case of taking leave of my senses. There can be no other explanation. Listening back to the audiobook, it’s downright embarrassing.
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Whelp, I’ve been putting off posting this one to my website because I am exceedingly proud of this little ditty, and I really, really wanted to say something nice about it as part of the update/notification that it had been posted. Turns out I have neither the time nor the mental energy to pen something worthwhile, so we’re going with drivel.
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I don’t know. I really don’t know. On the one hand, I will watch just about anything Sam Raimi directs. On the other hand, everything that’s been done to Wanda. I don’t know where to begin.
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And that’s it. The last original piece of music has finally been uploaded to my website in all of its NotePerformer glory. Naturally, this is one where I can’t really tell a big whopping difference between the old Sibelius recording and the new NotePerformer recording.
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I’m almost done with these—ahem—updated(slash)remastered audio files. It’s a project that’s kept me busy, I guess, uploading files to my website, so now the Violin & Oboe Rhapsody has had its turn. The NotePerformer version is uploaded for all and sundry to ignore in blissful ignorance that it ever happened.
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Seems vaguely silly to refer to this as the first violin vignette since there’s only one and I have absolutely no idea if or when there will ever be another, but yeah, it works for me. The NotePerformer—ummm—performance of the violin vignette is finally getting its upload to my website, and this is another where there isn’t a big difference between the old Sibelius audio and the newfangled NotePerformer audio. The new “performance” seems slightly softer, less harsh, for lack of a better way of putting it.
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So much for putting these out on a schedule, but the Flute & Cello Rhapsody is finally going up on my website in all of its NotePerformer enhanced glory. Funny thing, the old Sibelius audio sounds slightly better. NotePerformer has trouble with the low notes on the cello or flute. It’s hard to tell, but I definitely hear it. Oh well, the stubbornness inside me simply will not let the old recording stand. I have absolutely no idea why.
 [ permafrost ]

The second Oboe Vignette is still one of my favorites. I don’t know what I did, but it just works for me. I love it. As for the audio, there isn’t even a big difference between the old Sibelius performance and the NotePerformer version—NotePerformer is softer, but that may be in my head—but it’s there, small, subtle difference. So the new audio is finally being posted to my website, and it is about time.
 [ permafrost ]

I know I’m more than a little biased, but I think the first Oboe Vignette turned out really well. The NotePerformer audio has been uploaded to my website.
 [ permafrost ]

Definitely not holding to anything resembling a schedule, but the updated audio for the second piano vignette has finally been uploaded to my website. Once upon a time, these audio updates were happening on a weekly basis. With luck, that’ll happen again. Maybe someday.
 [ permafrost ]

It’s a good thing updating the audio for these vignettes and whatnot is happening on a schedule of my own choosing, so it doesn’t really matter when life, the universe, and everything conspire to interrupt that carefully cultivated schedule. So I’ve missed a couple of weeks. Sure, it’s been quietly driving me up the wall, but that’s no big deal. I’ve managed it. The problem would be if I let things slide so long that I simply stopped with the updates. That would be an issue, something to be concerned about, but here we are.
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One can only hope that I have something interesting or informative to say here, again. This may happen at some point in the future, but it’s really not happening. These are the plague years. I was hoping they would be limited to two years, but it’s really starting to look like there will be a year three.
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One of the things I wanted to accomplish with the vignettes was stay far away from solo piano music. I had done a whole bunch of sonatinas, and Sibelius had improved to the point that the fake instruments didn’t sound that horrible. I needed to experiment. I needed to master multiple instruments and orchestration. Everything was way too melody and harmony. I really needed to do something about that.
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The NotePerformer audio of the second string vignette is finally uploaded to my website. Last thing I do before uploading and preparing this update notice is listen to the MP3 just to make sure it sounds okay. Today, I accidentally listed to the old version without realizing it, thought it was fine, and only then discovered I was listening to the wrong one. So I grabbed the new version, listened, and it sounds better. Yay, I guess.
 [ permafrost ]

The first string vignette sounds so much better with NotePerformer than with Sibelius’ built-in playback thing. Sibelius’ playback sounds pretty good, it’s true, but NotePerformer is so much better. Money well spent.
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Listening to the second movement of the Outgrabe for Piano, No. 2, makes me cringe. On very rare occasions, I’m okay with it, but this does not happen very often. It was an experiment. It was definitely an experiment. Listening to it now, all the melody and plodding harmony does not work for me.
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I’ve been dreading this or mortified by this or something because it is finally time to upload the first movement of the remasters second Outgrabe for Piano. It was a swing for the fences, as the saying goes. I had thoughts and ideas, and I sure wanted to try them out, see if I could make them work, ideas about form and design in a post-tonal world. Well, it was worth a shot.
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And that’s it for the piano sonatinas. The third movement of the B-Flat Major sonatina has been posted. I wish I had more to say about it other than it’s much better than the middle movement. Ugh, I’m still not happy with the middle movement.
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So yeah, I’m not going to lie. The second movement of the B-Flat Piano Sonatina isn’t very good. It does what it sets out to do, I guess, managing eight-bar phrases. That’s such an accomplishment, by the way, I should feel so very proud of myself for managing something incredibly straightforward and basic. Anyway, at least it isn’t horrible.
 [ permafrost ]

The—ahem—remastered audio of the Sonatina in B-Flat Major has started going up on my website. This is the last of the sonatinas, and the longest of the bunch. I still felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, which is a really depressing thing to realize after having received a Master of Arts degree in music composition, but that just goes to show how crappy the university program turned out to be. A lot of this has to do with the fact that we were expected to compose Twentieth-century music, which was explained to us as all bleep-bleep and blurp-blurp, so you know, knock yourself out, do whatever, there are no rules. More accurately, the only rule was that we weren’t supposed to follow rules, and tonality was absolutely forbidden.
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The Sonatina in C minor remains far and away my favorite out of the five piano sonatinas, and the third movement is definitely the highlight. I love it so much. It made me happy when I composed it, and the damn thing made me happy just listening to the electric performance today. The third movement has the freaking fuguette in it, which is something I had wanted to do since the beginning of the project.
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And now we are two-thirds of the way through posting the—ahem—remastered Sonatina in C minor to my website. The combo file will stay live until next week when the third movement finally joins the individual exposure club. Ah, the unsung small joys of the plague years.
 [ permafrost ]

I still think the C minor Sonatina is my favorite out of the whole lot of five of them. Sure, they are all so incredibly similar that they are practically interchangeable. The tone and mood are all basically the same. This wasn’t really on purpose. I remain convinced that I was just so happy that I was creating them that this overall joy tore through anything and everything else. Not a lot more to say than that, I guess. This is the first movement. The second and third should follow, and then it’ll be on to the B-Flat Major monstrosity.
 [ permafrost ]

And that’s the Sonatina in A Major remastered and re-posted as individual movements, which means the combo file is going to be dragged kicking and screaming down from the website. I shall break the news to the sonatina as gently as I can manage that nobody cares, but there we are.
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The slow roll out of age-old music continues with the middle movement of the Sonatina in A Major. Like the rest of the piano sonatinas, I have very mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, I am very happy that it exists. It is exactly the kind of thing we were forbidden from doing in composition workshop, or anywhere else in music land, for that matter. On the other hand, it—all my piano sonatinas, for that matter—is just kind of bland. There’s nothing special or even that interesting. The plodding sameness of it all really stands out to my ear, but I try not to worry about such things.
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Next up is the first movement of the A Major Piano Sonatina. It’s okay, not great, not bad, just okay. Still don’t have a lot to blather on about here, which just goes to show how mind-numbingly exhausting the day job remains. I suppose I could copy/paste what I wrote over behind the Patreon power wall or whatever it is called, but then I wouldn’t have a reason to tease people they should go check out what’s behind the paywall. Not that anybody should care what’s behind the curtain, but then I wouldn’t have a reason to tease the tale of how I accidentally created a Patreon creator account. It was an accident, I swear.
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So that’s it for the posting of the Sonatina in F minor as separate movements. All three are up now, and I will be removing the all-in-one file. At some point, I really should start updating the YouTube Videos, but that might have to wait until work-related stress levels decrease and rest levels increase. I mean just look at home boring this update is. If I can’t even write random weirdness here, then I’m nowhere near ready to tackle anything more interesting.
 [ permafrost ]

And now the second movement of my F minor piano sonatina has been uploaded as a separate file to my website. It's a little on the dumb side, I guess, but that was hardly the point. This was exactly the kind of music that should have been required to write in composition workshop as part of learning the craft, but of course not. Doing so would have been regressive or something dumb like that. It’s not like you learn through doing or anything. You have to know how to create basic stuff and understand the building blocks in order to exceed those basic forms, but I digress.
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I was just comparing the Sibelius and NotePerformer audio files of the first movement of the F minor piano sonatina, and this just might be one case where Sibelius sounds better than NotePerformer. Sibelius’ fake piano just sounds warmer than NotePerformer’s fake piano. Otherwise, I can’t really tell a difference between them, so I have half a mind to just go with the old Sibelius version.
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It’s the end of an era, a very dumb and pointless era. The last of the old college-days music has been re-posted to my website. After this, it is back and forward to the piano sonatinas, backward because I already posted the Sonatina in D minor, forward because there’s no more student-days music. Everything after the fugue is all post-college stuff, the crap I composed on nights and weekends while holding down a day job. I would use Charles Ives as a point of comparison, but—you know—he was actually good.
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And now the NotePerformer version of the Outgrabe for Solo Flute has been uploaded to my website, which means we are almost done with the re-posting of the old college stuff. There’s just the fugue, and then the slow march of the piano sonatinas will begin.
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So I’m pretty sure the Outgrabe for Horn, Violin, Viola & Violoncello was the last real-live-actual-musician recording still posted on my website. Well it’s gone now. I have replaced it with the all new, all updated electric performance. Biggest difference I've noticed—and this is a very dumb thing to notice—is that NotePerformer chugged through the score much faster than the real, live musicians. Go figure.
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The NotePerformer version of Somewhere has been uploaded to my website, and I’m getting tired of the “remastered” joke. It’s fine. I’ll think of something knew to write about someday.
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If there is one piece I’ve done that I absolutely hate, it is the Outgrabe for Violin & Double Bass. It’s awful. It’s just awful, and I really should stop saying that. It’s not that bad. I think a lot of the issue comes from the fact it was the first piece I did for graduate-level composition workshop and I was trying to show the faculty that I could play along. I could do their out-of-date version of avant-garde or a close proximity of same.
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The “remastered” electric performance of the Outgrabe for Clarinet and Piano has finally been uploaded to my website. This was far and away my favorite piece to come out of the old college years, and I held on to the original recording for the longest time. The sound quality wasn't great, but it was actual musicians performing at an actual concert.
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The “remastered” Outgrabe for Piano, No. 1, audio has finally been posted to my website. I wish I had more to say about it beyond being happy that one more little thing is done, and I hope that one of these days I actually do something interesting again. These are the plague years, after all, and they have not been kind to creativity. More specifically, the plague years have been exhausting, and I simply do not have the strength or energy to do more. Well, that’s enough whining for one day. Enjoy the music.
 [ permafrost ]

As much as I might wish otherwise, things are not happening on a schedule. It’s a good thing I’m the only person in the universe who cares about this or else people might actually be cross with me.
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And the entire—ahem—remastered Red King Outgrabe has now been posted to my website. I thought I was going to lose another week. I was kept just busy enough that I didn’t think I was going to fit it in and was considering just waiting until I would hopefully have time next weekend, but I didn’t really want to let that happen. Sure, nobody cares, but I don’t want to keep letting things slide. That’s a very dangerous slope, which ends with me scratching my head wondering whatever happened and why I never got anything done. So yeah, Sunday night and I’m working on this when I really should be resting and getting ready for the dreaded day job in the morning. Oh well.
 [ permafrost ]

Well, I suppose the good thing about wholly self-imposed deadlines that absolutely nobody in the known universe cares about other than myself is that it is not a terribly big deal when I miss those deadlines. It remains a thing that I care rather a lot about the self-imposed deadlines. In fact, I probably care too much about the self-imposed deadlines, and I should do something about that.
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The Red King Outgrabe really benefited from NotePerformer. It sounds so much better. The—ahem—remastered audio was posted over on Patreon six months ago and is finally making its debut here. If you want to read a short rant about how things had deteriorated at university, go look over there. I'm pretty sure The Red King is in front of the paywall.
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Well, this year has been a real horrorshow and not in the Clockwork Orange way where horrowshow actually means good, but nobody should be using horrorshow as good because that's just violently morbid and awful. Go read A Clockwork Orange if you want a better understanding of why nobody should use horrorshow to mean good.
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Thanks to that accidental Patreon creator account that absolutely nobody in the known universe cares about I've been uploading updated MP3 versions of my silly little nonsensical compositions there. NotePerformer has been good at kicking Sibelius in the asterisk and producing slightly better sounding performances.
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Revised Outgrabe for Horn, Violin, Viola & Violoncello score uploaded. This was a tricky one. On the one hand, I didn't want to get carried away making changes to the score. On the other, I was convinced I could make it better just by changing slurs. So there are parts with lots of little changes, and there are parts I ignored. End result is something you can listen to on Patreon in November for a price. Also I've been prattling on about my college years over there, so pay the price and learn things, I guess.
 [ direct-link ]

Updated PDF scores for both the Outgrabe for Clarinet & Piano and the Outgrabe for Violin & Double Bass have been uploaded, and I don't think I could have picked a bigger contrast between two back-to-back pieces.
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Technically the scores for both The Red King Outgrabe and the first Outgrabe for Piano were updated and uploaded on Monday, and I fully intended to post a little update about it on Monday, but one thing pushes out another. Next thing I know, it is Thursday, and I haven't done it yet. So here we go. This is the official update that the scores have been updated and posted.
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I suppose we could just chalk it all up to the passing of the years, but at this point I simply do not recall blathering on about Vicarious Empowerment in this space of the occasionally evolving name. It's been a journal. It's been a rant. It's probably had other names. These days, it is simply called updates. Anyway, there was a time that I hit upon the idea of Vicarious Empowerment, which is just a self-important way of saying that I can afford to give other people in the neighborhood of five bucks every once in a while.
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Finally got around to uploading the ever so slightly revised score for Clarinet & Viola Vignette, No. 3.
 [ direct-link ]

I'm not entire sure how I found out about it, but in the middle of all the nonsense going on this year, I finally heard about this thing called NotePerformer. Turns out it's an alternate music playback thing for your music notation software, and it is—well—turns out that it is good. Much better than the built-in music playback thing that comes with Sibelius. Best decision I've made this year was shelling out the money for NotePerformer. Sure, it's been forever and a day since I've managed any new music, but when I do, I am ready.
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After giving this either way too much thought or not nearly enough, I'm regressing the electric versions of my books all the way back down to Kindle Unlimited. I know. I know. This should go the other way. You wait six months—more or less—and then you expand the electric books to include all the big names that will have you. You do not take all of your books across all electric media that'll have you and toss them to the curb.
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Well, it took bloody long enough, but Merriweather’s Guide to the English Language has finally gone live over at Amazon and is available in both dead-tree and Kindle versions. If you’re into that whole Kindle Unlimited thing, it’s available that way, too. The annoying thing about Kindle Unlimited is that the electric version of the book must be exclusive to Amazon. So that’ll last six months to a year depending on when I finally get around to preparing the files for Apple and Barns & Noble.

Now this is a wild example of faulty memory. I was re-watching season 3 of Fargo, which I wrote about quite passionately something like two years ago, and was dumbfounded to discover that I had remembered everything wrong.
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Well, it's been forever and a day, but I've finally updated the website with the current word count for Merriweather's Guide. There's not a lot else to say. It's the curse of getting old—well, older anyway. I simply don't have the time or energy to update the site more.
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Well, it certainly took longer than I ever thought it would, but I've finally finished updating the website. We've upgraded to version six, people, and I'm still not entirely sure how I arrived at that number. I can't trace the version history back past number four, so I've only got my own file naming conventions to rely on for how we got to where we are today, but we're here at last. Version six has arrived.
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I loved the last scene of the last episode of the third season of Fargo, and yes, I’m going to talk about that final scene. I don’t give a damn about spoilers. This has been your warning.
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Well, it's taken me long enough to get around to posting a blurb about it, but the complete String Finger Theatre is finally available again in dead-tree format. The last episode went up back in April, but I just couldn't find the time to post a blurb.
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Stormtroopers are crack shots in Star Wars just like Obi-Wan Kenobi said. They wade through the rebels at the beginning of the movie, taking few losses. Obi-Wan points out specific shots to Luke at the Jawa massacre to prove it wasn’t Sand People. The Stormtroopers want to take everyone alive in Mos Eisley. Even the Star-destroyers could have easily blasted the Millennium Falcon out of the sky, but they don’t. They want those droids. They want to know who’s got those droids and if the data has already been lifted.
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Tourist Hunter has finally been unleashed on an uncaring and wholly unsuspecting public. You can find copies at Amazon.com, and theoretically, anywhere else fine dead-tree books can be sold. Of course, first you have to locate a bookstore. Good luck with that. The one-line summary of Tourist Hunter that doesn't actually tell you anything about the novel goes as follows: Humorous near-future Science Fiction working-glass day-in-the-life novel. I'll give one example of the type of humor we're dealing with. The smartphones everybody uses in the book are so sophisticated and advanced and have had so much functionality crammed into them that they can do everything except make phone calls. This is never directly pointed out. Once or twice, characters do talk about how weird it would be if their phones could handle simultaneous real-time audio communiciations, but that's as close as anybody gets to acknowledging why everybody just sends text messages.

Okay, yeah, it's been a really long time since I posted an update. Just haven't had the motivation. Other things to worry about. I could either work on Tourist Hunter or I could post crap on my website. That's what's known as an easy choice. Speaking of Tourist Hunter, it's done. Believe it or not, I'm just waiting on the cover image, which is taking a lot longer than I thought, but since other people are involved, there's really not much I can do beyond pull at my hair and hope I don't rip it all out.
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So, yeah, the Tourist Hunter moratorium goes slowly with something resembling two months plus where I have to continue to pretend it doesn't exist, and as shouldn't be too hard to guess, this has left me at something of a loss as to what to do with myself. The plan to fill the interim was to dive headfirst back into music, and it was only after I took that leap into the musical deep end that I realized that the swimming pool was still filling with water. Just goes to show how much mental energy had gone into the writing of words. You reach the end, think okay, relax time, and the mind just goes cool, break time, done. And, you discover just how exhausted you were. Even just trying to think about music, sit at the piano, anything, is more taxing than you can possibly imagine.
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Okay, I've finished the first draft of Tourist Hunter, and it is a hell of a lot longer than I thought it would be. Seriously, when I first started, I figured I would be lucky to get fifty thousand words out of this turkey. Maybe, just maybe, it would be as long as Pyrrhic Kingdom, and that was if I was trying really hard. So, I don't know where the hundred thousand and change came from. I even spent the last couple of chapters asking myself why it wasn't over yet. Tourist Hunter had no business being so long even if it was just the first draft.
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So I finally realized that people put a lot of music on Youtube as if it was a music website like Soundcloud, and it occurred to me there's no reason I couldn't do the same thing. You don't need a music video. You just need something for people to look at like cover art or any old thing. You could even do what my old college friend, Dennis Amen, did and use the score. Since it's a video, you could even turn score pages to match. Well, hell, I could do that.

Yeah, I really wish I had something interesting or exciting to put here. I look back at the archive, and there were journal entries all over the place. They carried on for miles, too. I mean, looking back, how the hell did that happen?
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The complete String Finger Theatre is now available in Kindle format. Next on the ridicously time-consuming agenda is to put the works into dead-tree format. Havene't started on that little project yet because I want to time to do something vaguely useful. After all, why in the world would anyone want to pay for a Kindle or dead-tree copy of something they can read for free online?
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There's not a lot I want to say about the season finale of Doctor Who. It's a children's show, I understand that. It's like my one big guilty-pleasure show. I remember loving the hell out of Doctor Who when I was a kid, but trying to watch some of those old episodes now can be downright painful. I do try to check it out occasionally and have discovered that the best way to watch old Doctor Who is in very small doses of no more than one episode per day on non-consecutive days. So, sometimes it surprises me that I still follow the modern Doctor Who. I think it is as much nostalgia as anything else. Also, it can be entertaining. It can be amusing, and the modern show has done a good job of picking actors for the role.
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The Rhapsody for clarinet, viola & piano has been uploaded to the music page. I'm not even going to get into the mixed feelings I have about this one. A good example of my ambivalence is the fact it's been months since the previous rhapsody was posted. These vignettes and rhapsodies are all starting to sound the same to me, and that's a fact that worries me greatly. I did keep busy while ignoring the new rhapsody. It was just with stuff I'm not interested in discussing at this time.

The Rhapsody for violin, oboe & piano has been uploaded to the music page. Once again I've got very mixed feelings about this pieces. It's a good experiment. The entire piece was composed at the computer. I didn't work at the piano once on it. In fact, the whole thing was unplanned. It was supposed to be a simple experiment to test the instrument combination, and I just kept going. The final rhapsody feels very rampling and episodic to me, and there doesn't seem much depth. All of which I figure is pretty much a by-product of how I went about writing it. So, I don't know. Bits I like. Bits I don't like. Good experiment all around.

Violin Vignette, No. 1, has been uploaded to the music page, and I have very mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, I've been meaning to do something a little more experimental, and these vignettes are meant to be experiments. I've been meaning to do something more dissonant and atonal, and those voices have been nagging. They just nag and nag that I haven't been doing enough modern atonally dissonant stuff. On the other hand, bleep and blurb just aren't doing it for me right now. They have their place, and atonal dissonance certainly conveys specific moods, which seems to me something that a lot of modern stuff just doesn't get. Dissonant atonality influences emotion and mood just like anything else in music. So, there's no reason to use atonality for absolutely everything. It has its place just like tonality has its place. I hear the term post-tonal thrown around a lot, and while working on this vignette, being annoyed at it most of the time, I've been teasing myself with the term post-atonal. Yeah, post-atonal just tickles me. I like it.

The Rhapsody for Flute & Cello, No. 1, has been posted to the music page. Finally something just a little longer than the vignettes, which I still love dearly, but there is a time and a place to try different things. This one went through a lot of false starts and ideas that simply sounded terrible, leaving me rather depressed after each failure, before finally hitting upon just the right combination. The second hardest part was coming up with the name. Well, I didn't want to use vignette for something more than two minutes long. So, I needed something, and I went through rather a long list of possibilities before finally settling upon rhapsody. Well, I didn't want to use outgrabe because that has gotten tangled up in a bunch of stylistic requirements. Much more dissonant blah blah. Rhapsody leaves itself open for more possibilities in my head for some reason.

Oboe Vignette, No. 2, has been posted on the music page. This one took a little longer to finish and felt a little more like pulling teeth, but I really like how it turned out. Still debating what to do next.

I'm fond of stories that basically take the world around us and twist it in some way. There's just something really cool about it or maybe it just feeds into the whole notion of more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in philosophy. Sure, we've got a pretty good idea of the shape of things what with science and all of that. Yay, science. But, wouldn't it just be cool if. So, yeah, there's something very escapist and exciting about imagining things being other than what they are in some way or other. Just to pick at one example, the X-Files was a hit for more than one reason, and it's really hard to escape from vampire shows, superhero movies and assorted whatnot these days.
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Finished Oboe Vignette, No. 1, a couple of days ago. Finally have a few minutes to upload it to my website. I can feel the two forces waring in my head. More so for the new vignette I'm working on than this one I just finished. On the one hand, I want to keep experimenting, and I want the music to take the shape it needs. On the other hand, I've got the outrageous forces of acceptable contemporary composition screaming in my head that there simply isn't enough dissonance in these vignettes. Well, I'm not going to add sour notes just for the sake of making it more acceptable, am I? If the texture doesn't fit chromaticism for chromaticism's sake, then I'm simply not going to do it. Simple as that. Still, the voices rage. Oh, well.

Finally broke down and signed up for Sound Cloud, which appears to be a social networking website for sharing music and sounds and noise and stuff. The current plan is to upload the musical vignettes. We shall see if I get around to adding anything else.

These piano vignettes seem to do a really good job of just touching upon the idea. Nothing much to it. Hit the idea and get out. This second piano vignette is also really simple, and I hope I haven't subconsciously just copied something I heard somewhere or other. Anyway, I think this vignette is really cool.

The third vignette for clarinet and viola has actually been done for a few days, but I've been tied up with really stressful stuff at my day job so I just hadn't gotten around to uploading until today. This third vignette is probably the most conventional one that I've done, which nags at me just a tad since I really wanted more of a touch of the experimental, but then I just try to tell myself that experimenting with conventional is perfectly okay. Things are going to stay hyper-stressful at work for at least the next two weeks so I don't expect to make any progress on another vignette for awhile. I'm also trying to psych myself up to do something longer than a vignette, but recent time consuming events have me backing away from that notion. We shall see how things unfold.

The Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary show, The Day of the Doctor, was good. Entertaining. Oh, spoilers, d'uh. And, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before how the term spoilers just grates against my skin, but that is neither here nor there so I'll get on with it already.
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Okay, this is downright spooky. It was only about two weeks ago that I finished the last vignette. I'm going to burn out or something, I'm sure. If nothing else, it's only a matter of time before I become overly self-conscious about how traditional these vignettes are. I mean, they are practically in major and minor keys and everything. Oh, well.

I always remember being told the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as being about split personalities to the point that Dr. Jekyll wouldn't even know what Mr. Hyde had been up to. Even if there was a certain amount of awareness, it always still involved losing control. Mr. Hyde would take over, and there was nothing Dr. Jekyll could do about it. Even when he liked it, he had no control. Kind-of like a drug induced rush, I guess. Dr. Jekyll had to have his fix and damn the consequences. Now, I suppose a lot of these slight differences simply come out of the fact that lots of different people have played with the story and the idea. There have lots of different essays and adaptations and whatnot. The consistently important detail was that Dr Jekyll gave up control to this other person living in his head called Mr. Hyde.
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My most ambitious vignette yet—ambitious in the sense that it actually involves three whole musical instruments—has been uploaded to the music page of my website. It also rivals all previous vignettes in the sense that it is very nearly two minutes long, which to my way of thinking almost but not quite takes it out of vignette territory. I also happen to be feeling particularly pleased and smug about this one so I'm going to let any knocks against it slide.

Piano Vignette, No. 1, has been uploaded. More than the flute vignettes, I think this piano vignette is a better demonstration of the concept of touching upon the idea. This vignette really feels like it could have been longer. In fact, it could have been a lot longer or at least feels like it could have been longer. It just doesn't feel like it could have been longer without being a lot more complicated and involved, which is not what I was going for. It's complicated enough. The first draft was actually a lot more boring and ordinary. There was a serious danger of a boring and repetative accompaniment. I think I managed to avoid that.

I've uploaded a second Flute Vignette to my website. This one took a little longer. I think the first flute vignette was completed in about three days, which either means its not very good or I was just on fire when I composed it. Regardless, it set a bad precedent since the notion stuck in my head that these vignettes are easy. Wrong. This second flute vignette took somewhere between two and three weeks, including one evening where I just stared at the score for about two hours absolutely convinced that it was crap. Not doing anything with it. Just staring. And, occasionally burying my face in my hands. Oh, and groaning. Lots of grumbling and groaning. Anyway, I think it all worked out, and I'm currently rather pleased with myself about the final product.

Blade Runner is one of those movies I liked when I was younger. I mean I used to watch it all the time when it was on cable, and it seemed to be on all the time. Don't know how that happened. It was just on, and I would watch it. Found it fascinating or something. And, it was the old voice-over narration version. It was pan-and-scan, too, but everything was pan-and-scan back in those days. Didn't matter. It was on, and I would watch it. Alternate versions didn't exist yet. In fact, the first time I ever saw Blade Runner in a movie theater was when the first alternate version did the rounds. I used to love this movie. Can't stand it now. Blade Runner is long and boring and pretentious as hell. Don't know what I used to see in it. Don't understand what happened. Age makes fools of us all or something.
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The first new music composition in almost two years has been uploaded to the website. Sure, it's only a new vignette for flute and piano, but I've got to do something. Also, there is just something really appealing about the format. Short little bits of fluff that don't necessarily have to be anything more than what they are. Musical snippets. Musical ideas. Musical flotsam in the wild world.

I noticed something while working on my silly little adaptation of Macbeth. Something kind-of fundamental to the story. Well, the first thing I learned by looking at Wikipedia of all things was that Macbeth was not an original story to Shakespeare. The play itself was an adaptation. Quite possibly based on historical events. At the very least, it was based on well known stories about guys killing other guys for the purpose of becoming king or whatever. What fascinated me the most was that it wasn't always a secret. The guy killing the other guy said he did it because the other guy was crap as leader or something. I'm being vague on details for no good reason. Not the point of this little writing jag.
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Yeah, I'm more than a little surprised that I haven't posted a news blurb or anything about the publication of my new novel Pyrrhic Kingdom. Officially published June 27, 2013; although, I think the Amazon Kindle version is convinced it was published on June 26th, but I think I've got that fixed. I've been slow with the annoucements because the day-job has been busy, and then my computer decided to die a slow and agonizing death. It's still in the middle of its death spiral, and I just hope it holds out until I can purchase a new one next weekend. Didn't really want to do so suddenly, and it's not exactly as if I can afford a new one. But, I must have a computer. Anyway, if you had to describe Pyrrhic Kingdom in two words or less, you could describe it as Cthulhu Macbeth with the understanding that the plot will really kind-of sort-of remind you of Macbeth and with conspiracies, secret societies and ancient horrors from beyond time and space instead of ghosts and a rebellion. Macbeth starts out with a rebellion, remember?

It's been about three months, more-or-less, since I finished the first-draft of my Shakespeare adaption, and I suppose I really should get around to actually calling it by its new name in this here journal. All part of the service, right? If I don't actually refer to it by name, then it's less real, which doesn't entirely make sense unless I do a little more to explain.
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The new website design is finally live. I'm sure there are lots of little bugs and things that still need to be worked out, but there you are. The biggest change and the reason I wanted to redesign the website in the first place is the page is now centered on the screen. I know. I know. Very silly reason for a redesign. I also wanted the text to scale so that you could actually read it on a portable device, but I couldn't quite get that part to work the way I wanted. Or happpy with. Or whatever. Whole process took much longer than planned because this is only one of about six things I try to do with my very precious and limited free time. But, it is done. Yay!

Long ago and far away, the plan was to work on a simple adaptation and on musical vignettes. The day-job was proving to be a serious pain in the ass, devouring far more time and energy than it had any right to be consuming. Needs of the world and all of that bullshit. Keep a roof over your head. Don't starve. Yeah, yeah. Bullshit, like I said.
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Okay, the heavy lifting is done. The first draft of my adaptation of a Shakespeare play is complete. Next stage is tricky, waiting three to six months before starting to edit. Don't think I'll manage six months. I'll be lucky if I can wait three. The thing is it's important to wait. I can't spot my own typos and mistakes if I don't take a break from the text. I'll just edit in my head. The break is important. Also, I'm more likely to notice poorly written bits with a break. Just look at The Etymology of Fire, for example. I think I deleted about a third of the text in the editing stage. Probably an exaggeration. Just felt like a third of the text because I was the one doing serious damage to my own writing. Murdering lots of babies and little darlings and all of that. It was worth it, my opinion. I think Etymology of Fire really flows. Best written of the three. I know. I know. Biased. What can I say?
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