Tuesday, September 5
Starting a new year
A pretty great summer is coming to an end. While I didn't write or edit very much fiction, and the blog postings have been pretty skimpy as you may have noticed, I had two awesome vacations, plus a pretty fun third trip out to Hollywood with my son and father-in-law. We also got a lot of work done in the backyard, and I've been able to keep up a fairly active schedule of running and bike riding and live music.
The big vacations included that very rewarding and emotional week at a theater camp for developmentally disabled people in Washington, and then a personally-fulfilling second week getting the first real music lessons of my life at the Rocky Mountain Fiddle Camp.
Peter Pan: Besides hanging out with my brother's family and my son and doing cool summer vacation things like jumping off a bridge into a river and mountain biking in the Cascades, I got to experience everything it takes to put on a play, and to actually make my stage debut as the Crocodile in Peter Pan. And what a cast! Amazing!
Fiddle Camp was a blast. Taking lessons, going to the nightly dances and concerts plus the total mountain-top, off-grid isolation from the 'real' world and hanging out with the family was plenty of fun. But the best part has been bringing the music down off the mountain.
Writing is a pretty lonely and solitary activity, particularly when you (read: me) don't make much of or any effort to find an audience. So I've been looking for something for a few years now that isn't so lonely but still allows me to communicate what's inside my brain, and I've fooled around a bit with art (or, more accurately, thinking about art) and plucking a guitar and writing songs, because at least with a painting you can show someone what you've been doing alone in your room and they can see it and touch it and take it in and comment in 30 seconds or so, and a song, obviously, can be played in three or four minutes.
It's not like that for writing novels: It takes a very devoted, special kind of person who's willing to read the rough draft of a 300 page novel, which itself is the result of countless hours of my work, and my nature makes it very hard to even ask anyone to take on that reading chore until I'm sure it's ready for the world, and my other (perfectionist) nature makes that very unlikely to ever happen.
But I think I found what I'm looking for with music. I'm no musician -- yet -- but I'm no longer a beginning guitarist either. Now I consider myself a novice. And that's a big difference. At fiddle camp I learned enough to be comfortable with my ability to strum a few key chords in the right way in the right time and now I can sit in with my very talented teen-agers on their fiddles and mandolins and banjos and my wife's cello. Three or four times a week since we got back, in fact, we've been sitting down and jamming, playing songs for an hour together instead of watching television or sitting alone in our bedrooms reading/playing video games. In fact, last night we had some musically-talented friends over and we were able to make music with them. What a treat! What a gift! What a great summer, in other words.
But now, like so many people, I'm tuned into that "fresh-start" attitude thanks to all of the back to school fuss and the energy around the new television season, and the already coolish fall-like mornings here on the Edge of Nowhere.
And so my self-imposed summer writing hiatus is now behind me, and I'm looking forward to a productive final three months of the solar year. Onward!
The big vacations included that very rewarding and emotional week at a theater camp for developmentally disabled people in Washington, and then a personally-fulfilling second week getting the first real music lessons of my life at the Rocky Mountain Fiddle Camp.
Peter Pan: Besides hanging out with my brother's family and my son and doing cool summer vacation things like jumping off a bridge into a river and mountain biking in the Cascades, I got to experience everything it takes to put on a play, and to actually make my stage debut as the Crocodile in Peter Pan. And what a cast! Amazing!
Fiddle Camp was a blast. Taking lessons, going to the nightly dances and concerts plus the total mountain-top, off-grid isolation from the 'real' world and hanging out with the family was plenty of fun. But the best part has been bringing the music down off the mountain.
Writing is a pretty lonely and solitary activity, particularly when you (read: me) don't make much of or any effort to find an audience. So I've been looking for something for a few years now that isn't so lonely but still allows me to communicate what's inside my brain, and I've fooled around a bit with art (or, more accurately, thinking about art) and plucking a guitar and writing songs, because at least with a painting you can show someone what you've been doing alone in your room and they can see it and touch it and take it in and comment in 30 seconds or so, and a song, obviously, can be played in three or four minutes.
It's not like that for writing novels: It takes a very devoted, special kind of person who's willing to read the rough draft of a 300 page novel, which itself is the result of countless hours of my work, and my nature makes it very hard to even ask anyone to take on that reading chore until I'm sure it's ready for the world, and my other (perfectionist) nature makes that very unlikely to ever happen.
But I think I found what I'm looking for with music. I'm no musician -- yet -- but I'm no longer a beginning guitarist either. Now I consider myself a novice. And that's a big difference. At fiddle camp I learned enough to be comfortable with my ability to strum a few key chords in the right way in the right time and now I can sit in with my very talented teen-agers on their fiddles and mandolins and banjos and my wife's cello. Three or four times a week since we got back, in fact, we've been sitting down and jamming, playing songs for an hour together instead of watching television or sitting alone in our bedrooms reading/playing video games. In fact, last night we had some musically-talented friends over and we were able to make music with them. What a treat! What a gift! What a great summer, in other words.
But now, like so many people, I'm tuned into that "fresh-start" attitude thanks to all of the back to school fuss and the energy around the new television season, and the already coolish fall-like mornings here on the Edge of Nowhere.
And so my self-imposed summer writing hiatus is now behind me, and I'm looking forward to a productive final three months of the solar year. Onward!
