sci-fi author, beatmaker

Tag: creative process

Personal Update, Track Download, Upcoming Posts

Momu-vs-U2

Happy 4th of July! For you international readers, here’s a handy guide to the holiday and other Americanisms. I will be celebrating the holiday by participating in a secret tournament, the results of which I shall report upon later.

I have exactly ten minutes to write this post, so I’m going with bullet points:

  • Momu is rereleasing a bootleg we did a few years back. Click on the picture above to direct link to the mp3, or go to the Momu Download page. Momu’s new album The Mission is available on iTunes (and everywhere else), with our track “Google Bus” being the clear favorite. The “Dub Pack” remixes of “Sixth & Mission” can be previewed here. Please take a second to Like us if you want to keep up with Momu releases.
  • June was “Only New Music Month” — an experiment I did with Never Knows aka Marc Kate of the Why We Listen podcast. I’ll write a post about the experiment soon — in short it was not that difficult and fantastically rewarding. I would recommend it for everyone, especially if you feel in a musical rut.
  • Some progress in fiction writing. Finished 4th draft of my science fiction novel The Sky Woman and 2nd draft of its sequel The Guardian. I’ll be writing and submitting short fiction for the remainder of the year. If you know (or are personally) an agent or publisher who appreciates science fiction, I would love to send you my work.
  • Future posts will include a hair regrowth update, how to invest a lump sum (following up on this post), and more about refining systems for creative work.

Stay hydrated, unburnt, and very much alive this weekend, my friends and readers!

Radical Responsibility and the Creative Process

I'm starting a new company called "BoozeSnap."

I’m starting a new company called “BoozeSnap.”

Yesterday morning I showed up at my writing desk not quite ready to work. I was in a foul mood, a little tired and lazy, and feeling distracted. Not just feeling distracted but actively looking for distractions (which, on the internet, are not hard to find).

After an hour or two of wasting time and wallowing in my bad mood, I figured out (for the eleven-hundredth time) that I had nobody to blame for my mental state but myself. I could have said no thank you to the 18-year-old Lagavulin my friend brought back from Scotland and poured freely at the D&D game. I could have attended one decadent social event instead of two. I could have eaten better, exercised more, and gone to bed earlier.

Radical Responsibility is a form of self-empowerment. To me the phrase means looking for solutions and possibilities instead of excuses, and never passing the buck. It means being ready, brave, and confident. It means exercising my free will (and rejecting fate, powerlessness, and inertia).

Of course, having an ideal and living an ideal are not the same. But the point of having an ideal is to stop pounding your head against the wall before you hurt yourself.

So … I acknowledged to myself and my family that I was in a terrible head-space (I had kind of been taking it out on them up to that point). I sat down and meditated for five minutes. I turned off the wifi on my laptop, opened my working document, reviewed my notes, started writing, and kept writing until I had met my daily quota.

Immediately my mood lifted. I read the work and felt excited by it. 27 days in a row working on my current novel (“don’t break the chain” in full effect). There’s no better reminder that emotions don’t have to control you than pushing through and doing the work anyway.

But There’s a Better Way …

Ideally, I shouldn’t have to expend so much willpower to get rolling. I wasn’t ready but I could have been ready. Artists can choose to be ready physically by being reasonably rested and fed (but not overfed — less is usually more when it comes to food and creative productivity). We can be ready emotionally by not getting entangled in other people’s drama (Polish saying: “not my circus, not my monkeys”), by avoiding disputes and the need to always be right. We can be ready with an abundance of ideas by paying attention to the subconscious mind, by meditating, and by consuming brilliant work by artists we admire. If depression is holding us back we can do something about it. If we don’t have enough time or a fancy working space we can fit in bits of work here and there; we can create a distraction-free zone in some little nook.

We could make an excuse for not being ready, but do we want to? Why not just be ready when it’s time to work?

The Perfect Excuse Guy

When I was in my early twenties I had a shitty temp job at a warehouse packing boxes. I also had a few techno and house tracks signed and published (one with a major label) and I was working on music about twenty hours a week. There was a guy at the warehouse, probably in his thirties, who was interested in electronic music and frequently asked me questions about how to get into it. I told him my story: I had saved up money to buy a keyboard, figured out how to plug it into my computer, taught myself MIDI sequencing, sent demos to labels, and so forth.

Anything I told this guy, he had a perfect answer for why he couldn’t do it himself. A keyboard was too expensive (I had saved over a year before buying mine). He didn’t have time because of his job (I was currently working the same job and producing music nights and weekends). I would try to explain to him how he could get around the obstacles he was setting up for himself, but he always had an answer ready. I would give up trying to convince him, but then he would start asking me about music production again. He clearly wanted to get into it himself. He wanted me to talk him into it! I tried, but the excuse part of his mind always won out, and finally I just refused to talk about making beats with that guy.

A different guy from the warehouse was a DJ. He heard I was producing tracks and asked if he could come over and check out my home studio. I said yes and we had a great production session — we exchanged quite a bit of knowledge in just a few hours. It didn’t turn into an official collaboration, but it left me wondering why the first guy never asked to check out my studio and see what it was all about (I had done the same thing with Josh Davis aka DJ Shadow a few years earlier when we both worked at Steve’s Pizza in Davis, California — Josh showed me his four-track + turntables recording setup which was an eye-opener for me at the time in terms of ways to make music).

I want to be the opposite of the Perfect Excuse Guy. I want to be able to produce and create even when I have shitty tools, no time, not enough money, no great ideas, inadequate skills, and a lack of natural genius. Because I just jump in and start. And then keep going. And then get better. And then keep going. That’s the guy I want to be, forever, no matter the field or the game.

So what’s your story? Are you ready to be radically responsible for your own mental state and creative output?

Tap Your Potential by Going Deeper Into Your Comfort Zone

The annoying comfort zone graphic.

The annoying graphic above has been showing up in my social feeds a lot lately. Why is it annoying? For one, it makes no sense. Why is being tired, depressed, and fearful in the comfort zone? Why can’t I be comfortable, and also wealthy, confident, and passionate?

I understand the idea that the graphic is (unsuccessfully) trying to communicate, which is that if we are never willing to leave our comfort zone, we will miss out on opportunities that require a certain amount of social or emotional risk-taking. But there is bizarre anti-logic inherent in the idea that we should always strive to push outside of our comfort zone.

For example, the other day I was standing in line with my wife and daughter at Cactus Taqueria on College Avenue. Between the front of the line and the counter there’s a space of about five feet that people usually keep clear. My wife, who was really hungry and in a hurry to order, stepped into the “in-between space” when we reached the front of the line. My inclination, on the other hand, is to wait until a cashier is actually available before stepping forward. As a mental experiment in “moving outside of my comfort zone,” I stepped into the space as well, and felt awkward until it was actually our turn to order.

Letting Your Motivation Find You

Intrinsic motivation flows from the subconscious.

All good things must come to an end.

In my case, it’s a two week vacation during which I did not travel, but instead watched Portlandia, played Skyrim, finished the Song of Fire and Ice series, visited friends, ate and drank too much, got along well with my family, and let my brain totally uncoil.

Intrinsic motivation fascinates me. I was curious to see what work (if any) would pull me back, engage my mind, and get me up early and ready to go. It’s not that I don’t have certain tasks I have to do (everyone does — even the 1%), but at least 60% of my working hours are consumed with tasks that I pull out of thin air (writing, making music, etc.).

Why spend all this time and energy trying to create stuff?

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