You own the song already | beginner guitar for ADHDs

You own the song already. You've been singing it for so long, mentally. You've been performing it, mentally, for an audience of you and your multitudes. You own the song but you can't play it yet. There are too many bass-walks and hammer-ons. There are upstrums. Soon as you get past the first couple measures … Continue reading You own the song already | beginner guitar for ADHDs →

You Can’t Love Your Systems Too Much

Systems are nice. In the beginning, they're just about as complex as two sticks strung together and stuck in the mud. Then you add logic (the code or story kind, it doesn't matter) until eventually the logic becomes functional, i.e. it depends on input, and there are your subsystems/subplots. Next up are flags to track … Continue reading You Can’t Love Your Systems Too Much →

When Are You Good To Go?

You mull over the notes -- you've been jotting them down for years. You fly through troves of PDFs in the interest of research. You've got characters, more or less, and themes, more so. Enough ideas to cut to fill a trilogy. Dreams are dangerous things. There comes a time when the research leaves you … Continue reading When Are You Good To Go? →

What To Write About When You Don’t Know What To Write About

I often find myself wanting to send out something to the world that I don't know what it is. A shiny little wisdom nugget, Eliott Pepper style, perhaps. The feeling is there, but not the content. I give it a couple minutes but it doesn't form, so I let it go. Then I think about … Continue reading What To Write About When You Don’t Know What To Write About →

Freedom Isn’t An Absence

It's not enough to quit your job. It's not enough to quit abusive relationships. It's not even enough to quit smoking. Cast off your fetters if you can, but it's only the yang of negative freedom. Creating an opening for the Master to grow his next form. Listening about free-for-all artist flats in Spain and … Continue reading Freedom Isn’t An Absence →

In Praise of the Imperative

The imperative mood gets a bad rap. “Turn off the lights” comes off impolite, lacking the interrogative curtsy of “could you turn off the lights?” Append “comma please” to the latter and you get gentility, append it to the former and you get an angry schoolteacher. But when we build familiarity with someone we tend … Continue reading In Praise of the Imperative →

Phantom Timezones

"It’s like a sickness where I just want to prove to everyone I can do it,” he said. “I’m going to show you I can be number one at both. Watch me.” That's the Wall Street Journal on day-jobbers moonlighting as aspiring performers, so it's probably become a thing. These corporate office workers are making … Continue reading Phantom Timezones →