Creative: Personal Update

A lot has happened over the past few weeks that's kept me from writing as much as I'd have liked and I found myself without a topic this week that I can post about, so it's time for a personal update...

Just an FYI: I'm out of the country for a week, starting today, so I'll probably miss a post due to lack of internet.

I've been confirmed for Nerdapalooza as the band Random Encounter. We also hit our Kickstarter goal, we finished editing the songs for the new album, reviewed changes to the mix, sent the songs off to mastering, did a photo shoot for the album "art", formatted all the text/credits, set up album reviews/interviews, and arranged the set list for the album release show of Let Me Tell You a Story. We should be advertising the show a lot more (Free Show: Sept 21st, The Social in Orlando FL) next week, and I've already spent hours practicing in preparation for it. My performance accordion (Titan) is even in the shop for a tune up while I head out of town for the week. I'll be with the band every weekend through the end of October for a show or practice and I'll probably touch up the paint because we have a lot of big shows ahead of us.

Art by the amazing Jaime Kittens

I've been confirmed for Nerdapalooza as the band Careless Juja and put together a 9 piece live band for Careless Juja from, well... scratch. Juja and I are also finalizing the arrangement of our set list for that, and arranging music for 9 instruments is really much more tough than I'd envisioned. I spent 6 hours arranging less than 2 minutes of music and it was a lot of fun, despite the difficulty spike of arranging for 9 instruments possibly exceeding my abilities. All thoughts of the next Careless Juja album are at a dead stop until after I'm comfortable performing all the songs for our first and only show. Oh, we also had a really cool new logo/image designed by Jaime Torraco in honor of this get together!

My other half-dozen recording projects are also on a complete hold due to a lack of availability on my end, and on the ends of the people I'd like to collaborate with. It's just a busy season it seems, which is sort of sad because I have more artistic resources than I have completed music at present, though I know exactly what work I need to accomplish... I just need more time.

The comic has reached Issue 12 (of 17), page 20 (of 26) of the storyboard stage this week, and thanks to a random idea I had, we've undergone a few changes that should speed up our production process drastically once we get to sketching/inking. We also solidified a sketch style to use once we're past story boarding, and received a number of professional reviews. The feedback here has been informative and extremely helpful.

Picture from the local Pirate Festival

In the weekly Dungeons and Dragons (Pathfinder) game I'm running, the party is nearing the part of the game I'd equate to the 3rd disc of Final Fantasy VII (the side quest disc). Having escaped the lands of eternal darkness with a three legged war dog (i'm not sure where the dog came from), they're about to complete a story arc and encounter some epic things. Last week they narrowly escaped a Caspian water trap, a room full of mimics, a dozen-strong phalanx of hobgoblins, and a single city guardsman with a skewed sense of justice who rolled nothing but critically successful dice rolls. I'm thinking of writing a post about their misadventures because I've found them vastly amusing, but am not sure if it's something that would interest you guys.

I can officially use my right hand at 100% efficiency again (after a few years of limited use). I only just recognized this fact a few weeks ago while playing with my little nephew, and while it caught me completely off guard it's something I will never take for granted again. On the topic of the injury (the product of a foolish bout), I've been reading a lot of HEMA articles, longingly, and after following the life/tumblr of one particularly inspirational sword fighter I finally feel driven to return to fighting. Still in fear that my right hand is prone to being injured easily, I'm going to start fighting as a left-handed swordsman. This is contrary to everything I've learned and will set me back because I need to unlearn a lot of muscle memory I "know." However, the first step is to get into fair physical shape, so I've worked my way up to 300 sit ups a night. After I start introducing push ups and pull ups into the mix for a month I'll take a few weeks to re-master footwork, then I'm going to start training with a sword again.

I got to Floor 30 in Torchlight, Mission 7 in Fire Emblem: Awakening, and the 5th stage of Banjo Kazooie (Freezeeasy Peak). I want to start Thief 2 or continue through Dishonored, or Mass Effect, but there's not enough time to concurrently play more than 3 games and my friends keep telling me to finish Torchlight so we can co-op Torchlight 2.

As for work, I'll be out of the county for a week... So that will probably be the subject of next week's post. I won't have any internet access I'm told, because I'll be deep in the forests of Central America.