As far as I know we got our first snowfall of the season today. It didn’t last long and I heard that it’s supposed to rain later but it snowed. My usual routine is to put on some black metal, especially Satyricon’s first album, but I didn’t get the chance. Maybe I’ll swing by the beach on my way home and put on the album in the car. It definitely feels like a day for some sort of mood music along those lines. Maybe I should take the opportunity of the mood to go ahead and make some. It is time for me to sit down and work on these Shadows of Immurement ideas that have been looming around in my head. Waiting for the new equipment next month shouldn’t be an excuse. Maybe I’ll re-record the stuff but when one is a one-man band one needs to sit down and hear all of the parts. At least that’s how it works for me.
Today, however, is jogging and writing day, not music day. There will come a time when I need to break the routine and not out of laziness. However, I want to focus on writing right now. To keep the routine of exercise I would sacrifice the writing as opposed to the jogging. So the overall routine stays for the moment. I’ve had enough of my own excuses as well. Last week I brought up the idea of taking a break. That may be a valid point but I feel like I’ve been doing that too much lately without formalizing it. This book isn’t going to get down by itself. Neither is any of the other numerous writing projects I have going on at the moment. If I truly lose the passion for writing I’ll stop. But that hasn’t happened. I should stop acting like it.
I promised not to write any more motivational posts. I think it was a promise. One laziness that I don’t care about having is going back to read older posts. It might be amusing to go back through sometime for ideas but not for little details like this. Anyway, I’m not trying to write this to motivate myself or others. If somebody takes motivation from my blog, then fine. What I’m really doing (aside from coming up with a subject for the day) is to flush out these feelings from my system. To use a cliché, there’s no time like the present. If I want to be a writer I have to be a writer now. If I want to be a musician I have to be a musician now. Maybe I won’t ever make any money on either. I’m going to allow for that. But I won’t know if I don’t try.
Okay, the writing is more likely to make me some money than the music. I think the only time I made money of music was playing background guitar for some event that my sister attended years ago. That would be fun again but I don’t know if I’m good enough at that sort of thing. That might be another excuse but as it’s not something I particularly care about doing I’m not worried about that one. I want to push ahead with Shadows of Immurement, which I know is not going to be commercially successful. I did have one moment of motivation this weekend. I picked up the new album by Ihsahn (“Das Seelenbrechen”). It sounded like he was doing a lot of things that I wanted to do with S.o.I. I started thinking along the lines that I usually do when somebody puts out an album that blows me away. I started thinking that maybe I should give up music because I’ll never match that level of composition, performance, and production.
Then I turned that thinking around. Instead of taking some great work of art as a means to beat myself up over being not so good I should use it as a source of inspiration. In other words, instead of saying “I can’t be as good as this so I’ll quit” I started thinking “If he can do it, then why can’t I?” I’m not talking about directly copying his style. He did what I wanted to do with that sort of atmosphere and experimentation. I started thinking in terms of the fact that this makes me thing it’s achievable.
I’m not going to gush about how great the album is here. I intend on reviewing it soon as a separate blog post. Right now I don’t have time. I have other writing to do.
Ragged Good Looks 