So I am considering trying NaNoWriMo this year. I don't know. I do not expect to get a full novel out of it. What I expect to get out of it is more focus. I tend to be all over the place all the time. I am thinking that it would give me a month of forcing myself to focus on one project.

What I want to accomplish:

I want to get more script writing done. I want to get something good enough to produce.

I want to get enough songs written and perfected to record an album.

I want to write enough short stories to make my own anthology. Maybe getting some submitted somewhere.

I want to get a stop mo video good enough I feel confident submitting it to film festivals.

I don't want TOO much. :P This stupid needing an income to love thing is stifling. It takes time away from my creative pursuits and it doesn't even give me enough to live and do what I want.

But if I do decide to do NaNoWriMo, though it will force me to put my other projects aside for a bit, it may produce something. I mean, even if it isn't a novel, it could be ideas for toehr writing projects. Or something that isn't good enough for a novel, but great for a stop mo short.

I have no idea how to start. But here goes nothing.

So though I do not have a good camera yet, I decided to do some playing around. I purchased Pinnacle Studio a while back, and I haven't had much of a chance to learn how to use it properly. It is frustrating as fuck. You have no control of the FPS, unless you have video already and it is already at the FPS you want. Importing is a crap shoot. And the explorted video does not  look the same as the in app rendering, so what you export may not be what you were going for. My guess is these issues are specific to the typ of things I am trying to do. Stop mo is not the same as regular video ro consumer grade slide shows. Still, I am about ready to throw my computer out the window.

I used my iPad. As I can no longer use my iPad stand, I didn't expect it to look perfect. And it wasn't. It kept refocusing, the white balance refused to stay locked, and as I can't set the FPS to the same as what I shot it at, it is jerky.

Conclusion.....new camera, new software. I have a pirated version of Dragon Motion. The newest version is around $200. In order to get what I need for better looking video, I will need $700+ for a camera, $200+ for the software, another $200+ for additional lighting and supplies to make a better lighting rig. Cause clamping to chairs is not working. I need rigging to clamp the lights to. And maybe some LED lights would be nice too, cause working under those lights is very, very warm.

Getting good equipment has been the bane of my existance since I started learning this crap.

When I was at Sasquan I went to a panel on crowd funding. That would be awesome, but I need to at least have the minimal to be able to make good plea videos before I can expect anyone to give money. I feel like I am in a very frustrating catch-22. I need to win the lottery. I swear. A lot.

Until now, that is.  This year I did a concert and some panels at the Worldcon. Which necessitated the pilgramage back to my hometown.

A lot has changed. I arrived a day early so I could take a day to visit old haunts, etc. I didn't actually do that, though. The old Spokane fire placards are gone. They may be somewhere, but the ones I knew about are gone. I got so lost, as the landscape has changed so much, that I could not find the Garbage Goat or the Giant Butterfly. I thought it was by the Flour Mill, but I failed to find it. It may be gone, but teh intertubes says it is still there, so I probably am misremembering where it was. When I was a kid, it was just a frame. Originally it was draped in fabric, I believe. I know the goat is still there, I just couldn't find it.

Milliways is gone. When I lived in Spokane, there was a coffee shack called Milliways, that was on the ourskirts of town, on the west side. That boundary line changed so often, I found that name HILARIOUS. But alas, Milliways is no more. It is an ex coffee kiosk. It is not pining for the fjords. This made me sad, so I walked back to my hotel through Riverfront Park, and grabbed myself a fake banana flavored shave ice. That, at least, was still there.

The rest of the con was so smokey and I had such a hard time with breathing and my joints that I didn't bother to try finding anything else, or even really excursioning beyond con grounds.

But this has got me thinking. Spokane has changed...a lot. And so have I. I used to love that town. The reason I left was my divorce, and needing to get my head back on straight. Going back, I realize I have kind of outgrown it. Or at least the idea of it.

Spokane was once home. It was what I knew of the world. I used to think it had everything. That it was a giant multicultural microcosm of what the outside world was like.

Living in a different town, seeing what I have seen, having done what I have done, having met the people I have met.....all that has changed my view. My world view, what I am aware of, how I understand things....it has all broadened greatly in the last 13 years. I don't know if it is just that I have gotten older and I myself have matured. Or maybe it is the different mix of people and circumstances I have encountered. Or maybe it is the lack of safety net. Or maybe the lack of emotional toxicity in which I used to dwell when I lived there. Or maybe it is a mixture of all of the above.

Spokane now feels very restricting. I realize it may be the narrow world view of the people I used to have around me when I lived there. But I tend to feel that Spokane itself is narrow minded and judgemental. That is a town where people are easily ostracized. Where being different meant you were mentally deficient or a very bad person.

When I was a kid, Skinheads were everywhere in Spokane. The Hayden Lake Aryan Nations compound was not far, and as such anyone with a bald head and tattoos was seen as a scarey threat. As a kid, I saw some bad shit go down from those people...bald or full haired. I was raised in a very conservative part of town. We were taught by parents, teachers, etc, that anyone with a tattoo or a shaved head was bad and would hurt us. If we saw that we should run. And if we chose to alter our appearance in those respects, it meant that no matter what our actions were, we were bad people who didn't deserve to be part of society. Many a time I overheard adults saying things to the effect of  "Poor Mrs. so-n-so. Her daughter has cut a star in the side of her hair. What a hooligan. You won't catch my child looking like that." 

As an adult, I have learned better. I have several tatoos. My hair is bright blue, fading to a violet purple. I can just hear my mother's friends saying "Oh poor Eleanor's mom. What did she do wrong?" And I hear my mother, who otherwise didn't care about me, yelling at me for shaming her. This is an etirely imagined scenario, but one that played out in different forms over and over during my childhood.

That....that is what Spokane represents to me. And that is why it maybe feels a size or two too small now. Knee jerk reactions, judgemental ostracizing, caring what people think about you based on people you associate with......that has no place in my world anymore. I still struggle with removing that completely from my subconscious, but I am aware of the destructiveness of that kind of attitude. My self worth is not based on how people think of how I look, or what other people think about what I do for a living or how well I perform. And I work hard to not fall into the rut of pidgeon-holing people who seem to fit a particular pidgoen-hole. I work hard at not jumping to a negative conclusion when I see negative behavior. I have become very good at telling myself "it does not effect me in any way, why do I care?"

I still feel my world few is inadequate. It has expanded greatly, but I can't help but feel that world travelling, living in another city for a while, mixing with a new group of people, might help me expand it even more. Wasn't it Mark Twain who is reported to have said "World travel is fatal to prejudice"?

Well, enough of my rambling. Next post back to creative pursuits....

So this year I was able to attend Sasquan, this year's Worldcon. I and a few Eugenites did a concert. It was only 30 minutes, and it was on Thursday, so most people weren't even there yet....

Anyway, concert went well. Usually at cons you get a riser in a conferance room for a stage. There we had a REAL LIVE STAGE STAGE!!! That was probably one of the best things to happen to me in years. Let me explain...

My mother was a performer and music teacher and vocal coach, etc etc etc. I started getting up on stage when I was 3 years old, singing Practice Makes Perfect from the Christian kids song album Welcome To Agape Land, with a cardboard keyboard slung around my neck. And from then until I was 20, it never stopped. I played cello and piano, I was in choirs and musicals and talent shows. I never had stage fright ever. I used to love the stage. LOVE IT.

There is a certain high you get when you and the people on stage with you are in sync and rocking it, and the audience has caught that energy and amplified it and flung it back at you. It is the BEST high ever.

When I was married, the bastard filled my head with soundtracks like "what makes you think people want to hear that" and "if you have to practice then you aren't very good, are you". 8 years of that, and for some reason stage fright started creeping in. I wasn't able to get that high, because I wasn't able to relax and enjoy being on stage any more. I was petrified that everyone in the audience was thinking what my ex voiced on a regular basis. Every mistep on my part petrified me then, and instead of continuing on like it didn't happen, I would break down in tears and not able to do anything. Sometimes I couldn't even leave the stage. But I worked on it, and worked on it, and slowly I have been getting back to where I was. Up till now, I haven't been able to completely get back to that comfort on stage I used to have.

At this con, I did. Being on a real stage, with a mic and lights and amphitheater style seating....it was like a switch was flipped, and none of the last 20 years happened. I relaxed. I enjoyed myself. I had FUN! I felt the change in the audience when I sang Big Blue Box. And it was EXHILERATING!!!! I NEED more. The stage has turned into a Siren, and I am unable to resist her song. I get excited just thinking back on that performance. I know it wasn't perfect. But it was transformative.

It also helped that when we were doing mic check, after I sang Rose, Rose, someone if the first row said "Oh...she's a singer." That made me feel good. Cause I AM a singer. My voice is not opera level, but it is not a bad singing voice, when I can breathe and don't think too much about what I am doing wrong. When I was on that stage, I felt everything relax, and my voice sounded the best it has in years. And it just corroborated what I have felt all along....my brain gets in my way.

I wish I had a video fo that performance. It would have been nice to see it from the audience point of view.

But....maybe not. Maybe it is best that I remember this performance as it is. If I watched video of it, I would start tearing it apart and anylizing it. What could I have done better? What should I do differently next time? And that would maybe erase all the feel goods I have about it.

I just....I can't help feeling that if I can just hold onto that feeling until my next performance, I will be OK. That maybe be magical thinking, but I really, really, really just want to hold on to that. Hard and tightly. And carry it on stage with me everytime I perform, no matter what kind of stage it is.