Marvel.

Busy weekend. The rehearsal and subsequent beautiful wedding of alaskanmermaid to her true love. Very fabulous. I sang in front of people and didn't melt or pop or anything... I realized today that all of the formal training I've invested in my voice has really been invested directly into my voice. Which is fabulous, I wouldn't take back a minute of it. Particularly the year with Ariella, I made a lot of improvements as a singer and I'm not losing them as fast as I thought I would now that I'm a musical orphan without an instructor again. But I haven't been training as a performer at all and, subsequently, while I'm slowly inching closer to being something more like the singer I want to be, I'm not the performer I want to be. Depending on where I end up, I will definitely be eying that as a specific goal next time I decide to take up vocal instruction.

I'm right now killing a little time before I go rehears with MJ; we got our date and time for the folk festival. January eighteenth, I'm not sure when but she'll give me the paperwork tonight. In theory, I'm supposed to learn to play passable guitar by this point. I can do it. Right? I can >.>...

Chant of the Sibyl still comes along slowly. I'm 81k words in - getting beyond novella at this point - and still hovering closer to the end of the story. Then there's a bunch of stuff I need to add; details, and full passages from Jadany's perspective, about her visions and assorted other things. Oh, and, the war... of course. I should probably address the war. Damn having all this stuff in my head. I have the tiny start of a short story called The Ta'raj Road sitting in my document folder, too... I'm waiting for the names of the characters to brew up and come to me.

Also, my computer is officially, finally repaired. This heralds a variety of things... my return to WoW among them, as well as more dabbling in digital art and possibly learning a little bit of programming (Ruby, Lisp?)

ALSO, Halflit. Earlier this year I started a community for creative writers at www.halflit.net. When things got so crazy this summer, I sortof abandoned it because I simply didn't have the time to nurse it into what it needed to be, but I'm back at it now. Consider this the soft announcement of it being reopened - that is, expect a more specific formal one later. But the point is I'm back at Halflit, and if anyone is interested in joining, putting up a webspace, and participating in the community let me know and we'll talk about getting you set up. I intend for members to be able to have a site to use as an online portfolio or 'in-progress' drawing table or whatever, a community for workshopping and friends, forums to play upon, and access to whatever other tools and fun things I can come up with as this thing grows. I also intend for it to be full of people who are at least a little serious about what they're doing, so that in the future the domain as a whole can start establishing affiliations with small publishers, editors, or whatever. Networking. You know.

So, yes... if anyone is interested... let me know.

That's all for now, lovelies. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and are relaxing your way into the new year. 2008 sucks. 2009 is going to kick its ass.

Whew!

Wow, I was at the studio for a long, long time! Good practice, good therapy... I love MJ. She's a generation ahead of me but otherwise a person of a very similar disposition... she went through a lot of the same things I'm going through when she was my age, reacted to some of them the same way. So it's really nice to know about her path, about the journeys she went through, and it's comforting to know she succeeded and has become this extremely self-actualized, talented, successful woman with a wonderful marriage, career, great kids, and an incredible sense of herself and her own strengths (and weaknesses). Today, driving home, I felt the first glimmer in a long time of the smile that reminds me... that some part of me, deep down underneath all the other bullshit, is looking forward to falling in love again. Now, again, this is an up day. I will lose that, more than likely, underneath the aforementioned bullshit. But it was nice to know that it is there. That I saw the flash of it is a good sign. I am moving forward, and damn anyone who thinks otherwise. All sorts of things are going forward for me.

Speaking of which, we got a lot of very good music done tonight. We worked on the two original pieces we had from last time - Three Fishers, and Thomas and Nancy - with some arrangement stuff, and picked out two more songs (Raglan Road and Lovely on the Water) which we ran through a couple of times so she could learn the melody and I could learn the chords. My guitar is incredibly clumsy still but one of the effects of being treated seriously by a serious professional musician is that I take on the incredible ability to take myself seriously as well, and that makes all the difference. I can do this. I do have the foundation of skill necessary to put this all together. I'm really excited.

For anyone in Anchorage that's interested (expect this information to turn up later as well, particularly given that I'm not sure WHERE it's happening) we'll be performing our 15 minute set (possibly longer, MJ says, if they have cancellations... it's known to happen, so we'll be preparing a couple of other pieces as well... and if nothing else slap them all down in the studio when her husband has some offtime to oversee the recording process) on January 18th at 7 45 wherever the main Folk Festival stuff is happening. Surprisingly, I don't suck substantially more at guitar if I am singing in addition. I still suck, mind you, but the singing doesn't make it unbelievably worse, and doesn't suffer too too much itself for the guitar-failing that accompanies. Always nice to find out that something isn't as bad as you think it is :)