PSA: Moved

Not that anyone's been here in awhile, least of all me, but in the spirit of good-if-tardy housekeeping I feel I should inform y'all that I've centralized everything in one place. You can now find me at Adsartha's Useful Notes, with blog and links to other badass people and the requisite tongue-in-cheek bio.

Week Three: The Ashplant

I am going to apologize for this once. Then we are never going to speak of it again. Capisce? Good.

I suck at learning reels by sight reading them. I am so, so sorry you'll have one of these inflicted on you every few weeks (the sections in this book go jigs, slip jigs, reels, hornpipes, polkas, airs & waltzes, and the ever-popular miscellaneous). Truth be told, I'm not much looking forward to the hornpipes or polkas, either. As a classically trained musician, the lilting rhythm that is not at all implied on the paper by the cut time is painfully difficult to learn, and it's what convinced me that I had to learn tunes by ear as well as by written notes. It's much easier to pick up the rhythm in the complex meters, because the notes are already begging me to turn them into a dance.

(When I was doing ballroom dance, my favorites were waltz, tango, and jitterbug. This somehow seems not to have translated into as much of a feel for 4/4 and cut time in playing as I would like.)

I also ended up with a recording of last week's tune that, while not clean the whole way through (and oh, for the day that I manage one of those for you guys), has about as strong a start and finish to it as I could hope off a week's worth of practice. This tune turned out to be a really great example of pitch migration: what was on the page in front of me was up a full fourth from what most people played, yet the notes stayed in the same key. If you're mildly confused but think that must have made for a lot of cognitive dissonance, you are 100% correct.

Enjoy. (My humiliation.) I promise to be practicing my ass off starting tomorrow morning; tonight is for digging out different written versions over on The Session and looking for their recommended recordings on Spotify.

Your Comfort Zone Sucks

So here's the thing: comfort zones are bullshit. Comfort zone is a nice pretty lie of a phrase we use to convince ourselves that it's okay to work within our current limits, that being hurt by stretching for more is the worst thing ever. That writing or playing or composing (or performing any other act of creation you care to specify) should all be done within the scope of "what you know." What all of that really means is that you're staying small, and scared, and refusing to act.

But! You say. If I act then I'll be forced to keep acting. To follow through on my plans. I might, god forbid, have standards to live up to then.

Okay. Don't do anything, then.

Now you've got the self-hatred of not having done anything on top of the self-hatred spawned by making shit in the first place. I mean, assuming you're one of those people who stares at everything they've just done and whimpers that it could be so much better. If you're not, I don't want to hear from you: either you're wrong and I hate you, or worse, you're right and I hate you. Either way, I plan to use your guts in a very personal, very long anatomy lesson.

(Or you could be lying to me and/or yourself. If you need to lie about that shit, I mostly feel sorry for you. Because pity is what you hate most.)

I'm scared of what I'm doing all the fucking time. I was scared of putting up the short story today for the weekday murders (for those of you not familiar, @EvilGalProds contracted them out to @saalon while she was off-grid), because I have all kinds of voices about how I'm not a real writer. (Not the way I am a musician.) I'm scared of doing the recordings every week. I'm not a real musician. (I'm not getting paid. I don't have a band. I've never finished writing a song, never mind that I first started trying to write songs a month ago.) I'm scared of the lesson I've got with a new fiddle teacher on Monday, because she's won fiddle contests and has an album out and knows way more than me and is totally going to tell me this is a worthless endeavor. (One of these things is almost certainly a lie. I like to leave a little room for people to disappoint me, after all.) (Bonus points for spotting the reference.) I'm fucking terrified of going to Swannanoa Gathering for Celtic Week because I'll be old and outdated and everyone else will be better than me. I'm scared that this blog post is going to just rehash shit other people have said better and more convincingly.

But I'm doing all these things anyway. Half the things my mind throws up as roadblocks are depression and anxiety lies; the other half are things that might be true but I'll never, ever know if I don't try.

My fiddle teacher told me something a few lessons ago that changed the way I look at these things. She said, the performers who have no shame, who just let the bow fly over the strings and what happens, happens, and it all sounds glorious? Look at their body language. They're not hunching. Their chest is open, their head is up, and no matter how much they may be moving with the music, they're grounded in it. It may be an innate quality and not something I can learn - but I can learn to fake it by mimicking the body language.

I've broken out of a lot of comfort zones this year. I don't plan to stop, because for all that I piss and moan about doing it, for all that I swear at the people who are back there shoving me out into the limelight, I love it. I like myself a lot better now than I did three months ago. I like the direction my life is going. I could never have predicted any of this would happen, and I never would have done any of it if I hadn't stared my fears in the face, pulled my chin up and my shoulders back, and said a hearty fuck you.

What Do You Say?

[Note: follows directly from this.]

Ash started without Eve, who slipped inside and took up position in the corner. The latest subject hadn't been on the persons of interest watchlist; he'd come in to demand his father back. All bluster and swagger and no backup. Alan'd confirmed that hours ago. Meantime, the subject cooled off in one of their conference rooms, rather than an interrogation room proper. It befitted his pretensions at being a respectable businessman, and he didn't need to know that they considered him more of a loose cannon than his predecessor. Ash shoved a hand through short red hair, not incidentally exposing the tips of pointed ears.

The blond man's eyes widened. "You're -"

She smirked across the table at him. "I am." Folding her arms, she leaned back. "What gives you the idea you can waltz in here and make demands?"

"Do you have any idea who I am?" He leaned forward, trying to get into her space, beefy forearms pressed into the particleboard. The boss hadn't said to give him one of the good conference rooms.

It was a good thing they were used to the hard plastic chairs. Ash didn't shift a muscle on hers, suppressing even the eyeroll that was her natural inclination. Eve stepped forward to lay the subject's dossier on the table. Redacted, but sufficient for their purposes. "We know all about you."

"We know you cheated on your wife. We know about the children. We know about the bar fights, the murders, the animal abuse, would you like me to go on?"

The man stood, trying for intimidation by sheer bulk. "I was within my rights! They were prepared to harm -"

Neither woman flinched, though Eve tensed, ready to move if the idiot reached out.

"Sit. Down." Ash lost all her cool amusement, letting her hands fall into her lap. The man sat, slowly, eyes narrowing in reassessment. Too little, too late. "Your father didn't give us anything, but you could still help his case if you gave us a name." No, he couldn't; if Eve was in here then the interrogation downstairs was a lost cause. The son didn't catch the lie. His father would have, were he still alive to catch anybody's lies.

"We're not asking for much, here." Eve came around to the side table and poured them all water into clear plastic cups. "Just one piece of information." Her turn to smile, all teeth and false cheer.

One meaty hand knocked the cup onto the floor. "I will give you nothing until I see my father."

Ash shrugged, unbuttoning the cuff on her left sleeve. "That can be arranged." She reached across the table, as if to beckon or lead the subject out.

"Good. I demand to see him in -"

The ouroboros tattooed around the elf's wrist stopped devouring its tail, shifted under her skin and became three-dimensional as it sank its fangs into the blond's hand.

The sisters-in-law watched the poison take full effect. Eve muttered something under her breath in Russian; the older woman's reply sounded amused. Gross motor function ceased in a matter of minutes, though death would take some hours yet.

"Lunch?"

"Love to."

To: Sam Connor <sconnor@[redacted]>

CC: Peter Torkarov <ptorkar@[redacted]>, Thomas Marlowe <tmarlow@[redacted]>, Daifyn Ifans <difans@[redacted]>, Alan Donnelly <adonnel@[redacted]>

Date: 3/28/2013

Re: Threat eliminated

Subject's attempt at rescue/revenge forestalled. Subject did not indicate any knowledge of his father's dealings, and current data reveals connection to be unlikely, though entire family's preference for Nordic-based aliases is noted and filed for future reference. Recommend precautionary measures be taken in the event either subject's known associates attempt similar action. Time of death: 23:55 Thurs March 28.

AD, EM

Week Two: The Cock and the Hen

Also known as, the week I got hit by bots. Betcha anything. No, I'm not making these titles up. Yes, half of them are like this. ENJOY. And know that I have either heard or made all the jokes already.

So first off we have the revisit to Battering Ram, and then we have this week's tune, as in the post title. One of these weeks I'll get to the point where recording doesn't scare me shitless, but that's not this week either. In the meantime I will apparently be blogging about doing things that scare you and meantime doing those things, because the last four days have been weird. Intense and awesome and exhilarating and terrifying all at once, and that's not even counting the Great Big Sea concert which was, in fact, all I said it would be.

The short version, and there will be a long version here sometime next week, is that I'm going to Swannanoa Gathering this year for Celtic week. I am also admittedly going because it involves getting to see my braintwin and co-blogger for a good chunk of time before/after the music festival, and it'll have been over three years at that point and we're due. But I cannot contain my bouncing over MARTIN HAYES and LIZ KNOWLES and LIZ CARROLL and holy hell, you guys, I can take CLASSES from one of them. Plus Irish myth and folklore. Plus some kind of vocal class, or possibly tinwhistle, I haven't settled on that one yet. But, y'know. Long version. Later, when I've done all my organization.

For now, you'll have to make do with these recordings.

Manning the Workshop

Most of you who read me have probably already read this post on punching our fears in the face. In a more literal mental sense than perhaps most people think of. So, alright, I'm one of those people for whom running subroutines with names and faces and particular skillsets of their own also helps. As if you couldn't have guessed.

The other thing I (we) do, which is a lot more foundational for me, is having a mindscape. Some people call it a memory palace, other people call it your power focus or your center or what-the-fuck-ever. I like mindscape, because I grew up on a steady diet of mythology and folklore, and what it is, essentially, is me playing Fisher Queen. I have a manor house, because I imprinted on Narnia and L'Engle and Weyrs and other such sprawling complexes which may or may not bear any resemblance to architectural feasibility. (Kitty has a Tower, a White Tower against a certain someone else's Dark Tower, because she imprinted on King.) Then there's the lands around, because when I was a little girl I wanted a lot of land, both from the horse-crazy phase (which I grew out of) and the sheer pleasure of being in the relative middle of nowhere (which I did not). Also I gave myself fire lizards, because fuck you MY mindscape, that's why.

(It probably says several things about me that I went for the empathic carnivores that are more intimidating than they look. I leave parsing the subject as an exercise for the reader.)

So, then, let's play with the land of metaphor! The lands are mostly there to amuse me, though there's a set of burial mounds (look, I grew up within spitting distance of a set of Late Woodland mounds, I imprinted on those heavily) which serve as the mental place I keep bad memories. Not quite like having a nightmare realm, more of a place where I can shut things away unless I'm needing to bring them out for some reason or another. Then we get into the manor house itself for interesting bits of metaphor - there is, as you would expect, a massive fucking library. Because I need my reference material, and you didn't think I kept all those pop culture allusions sorted without some kind of help, did you? Especially around Yuletide, when I have to haul out my reference material and edit however many stories Kitty ends up pinch-hitting this year.

Up on the top floor, though, is my Workshop, which gets a capital letter because tradition. (Also known as its origins have been lost to the dim dark haze of memory.) It has turret guns with which I and whichever subroutines are running can shoot down brainweasels and other distractions. Like the urge I'm having right now to tab over to Twitter and find out who said what this time. (Bang!) The Workshop's also sectioned off into smaller chunks; I keep the editing workshop separate from the music workshop because they require very, very different forms of attention for me. The editing workshop, as you might expect, has all my grammar and narrative tools laid out; there's the mallet of Wrong POV and the chisel of Clarify Your Action and the brush of Let Me Just Polish Up That Typo For You. Among other things, of course, but that does for a sampling of recently used tools. I grew up with family members who did woodworking, imprinted on archaeology early and often, and only came to fiber crafts later on. Besides which, in a lot of respects editing is like an archaeological expedition, to find the bones of a writer's story and help to fix up the rest of the structure so that it looks like a story ought. Sometimes that means you learn that the story's bones look like a whole different animal once you get it excavated, but usually it's putting the vertebrae in their proper order and fixing the reversed phalanges. I did mention the archaeological imprinting, right?

You may have noticed I think a lot in metaphor, or at least I'm less shy about saying so than a lot of people. (I may be less shy about a lot than a lot of people. This continues to boggle me. If you guessed I was the shy kid at school, you are 100% right.) At any rate, the music workshop is even more metaphorical and, I would say, close to synaesthetic in nature, at least as compared to the editing workshop. Moreover, parts of it are relatively new in conception. I've always played music, but I've never approached it in as structured a manner as I am now. The muscle memory section is old, and is hard to put into words even metaphorically - you know how you know your way around your home, right up until you (or somebody else) moves a chair? Like that, applied to technique. Those of you who play an instrument, dance, do martial arts, or anything else that requires a specific form of body awareness know how hard this can be to describe to laypeople. Then there's the repertoire section, aka that part where I learn other people's music. This also has some archeological tools in place; getting to the bones of a tune is a crucial part of learning a primarily aural (and oral) tradition. The sight-reading module looks like nothing so much as a microscope, whereas the ear training module is a pair of giant noise-canceling headphones - I hate wearing them IRL but I appreciate the increased focus the metaphor demands. And the newest part, the songwriting part, is one part writing toolkit to one part raw emotional core to one part music theory. Theory falls under the same very general kind of pattern recognition that narrative and grammar patterns do, which I find alternately helpful and frustrating. Most of this takes the form of blobs of color, often but not always yarn-based; sometimes when I have a particular image in mind it's worked more in cross stitch where every piece is slow and laborious to come together, but it makes a glorious final image. As I do more songwriting, no doubt this part of the workshop will firm up its metaphors and imagery.

I do a lot of work in my head, due to my various preferred forms of expression. It's only fair to me that I keep a tidy - if not logical - workplace. This isn't the only tool in my kit; I'm as likely to use fiddle practice as a form of meditation and to-do lists as a form of structure as anything more internal, but it's a damn powerful one. And now that I have straightened out my headspace for the afternoon by writing this post, I get to go make dinner! This is actually a fairly common thing for me, the internal sorting intentionally combined with external action, so that I'm neither too stuck in my head nor too prone to acting without thinking. While I cook dinner, no doubt my subroutines will be working on sorting out the lyrics I finished drafting two days ago, assimilating the version of this week's tune I solidified earlier today, and arranging my weekend schedule. And whether it's this evening or a few days from now, I will inevitably be astonished at how much I get done by sheer virtue of having a well-tended mindscape.

Week One: The Battering Ram

Let it never be said that I didn't do the shit I promised. I got a working sound system up and running on Thursday, and I recorded and wrote this on Friday. You, of course, are seeing it Sunday, because I'm out of town and I love being able to schedule shit ahead of time. I have no shame about giving myself the extra couple days to work on the tune for the week, either, since I am going to be out of town.

Great Big Sea is the band that got me back into playing music, and specifically into playing fiddle. And they've been together for twenty years, and they're doing a tour for the first time in several of those years, so it's time and more than time for me to go see them live. (Again.) If they do a meet-and-greet after, you bet I'll be telling them what they've done for me.

In the meantime, and without further dithering: The Battering Ram. Look, I managed not to swear! It was a jig, that's why, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Sekrit Project: Revealed!

I've been hinting on and off about this for awhile now, and getting recording equipment, and yadda yadda making preparations. And then I went and worked out melody lines for a couple of songs instead of writing this post, which is a pretty good indication that I'm procrastinating due to sulking over technical difficulties. (We'll get to that in a bit.) So, fuck that, here it is! I'm gonna do 52 weeks of fiddle, learn 52 tunes, and you all get to come along for the ride because I'm recording this shit and putting it up on SoundCloud.

That's the what. The whys and hows are a little more complex, but not by much. Let's start with the whys! Most of you are aware I'm a long-time musician, but what you may not be aware of is that I have twenty years of classical violin training under me. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, I know, why the hell is this chick playing fiddle instead? Because it's what I want to do. Because I was, frankly, never going to be a good enough classical musician to make a full-time job out of it with a symphony orchestra. Because I don't play well with the backstage politics on those anyway. But mostly, mostly that very first one: it's what I want to be doing.

However (you knew that was coming, right?), there are problems. Classical music has a fairly easy to discover, fairly standard repertoire for solo instrument, followed by a similarly standard repertoire for ensembles of various flavors. (Ask me how I feel about the Borodin string quartet and you will be treated to five minutes of rapturous squee.) Fiddle music is a lot harder to find that for; I have somewhere in the range of 5-10 books of tunes and while there are a good couple dozen that overlap between any two books... well, see the restrictions there. Any two books. The best way, of course, is to go out and listen to infinite recordings and live music and learn from the living tradition, but that can be both difficult and expensive. And, too, for an introvert like me there's the hidden cost to consider of dealing with people nonstop if I'm taking lessons, going to sessions, going to concerts, etc. It can be hard to hit the right balance.

Classical music also trains you to perfectionism even if you're not already prone to it. I was, just in case that hasn't been made abundantly clear already. The trap I fall into with fiddle music is playing my current repertoire over and over and over again to keep it fresh and under my fingers, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, it prevents me from learning new tunes.

So I needed a kick in the ass. I've been doing public accountability in a variety of forms for years now; most prominently with language learning, where I post my German lessons every weekday morning on my personal journal. Why the hell not do something similar with learning fiddle tunes? It won't be every weekday - but now we're getting into the hows.

I do not yet have a working recording system setup. The equipment I originally ordered isn't playing nice with Windows, Audacity, or both, and a question in to the Audacity forum has yielded jackshit. I don't, as a result, have an actual launch date, but I really wanted it to be this weekend, because what better time to launch this kind of a project than on St Paddy's Day? Still, the second I do get the equipment working I plan to start the ball moving with more than a long-winded blog post.

The intent: record a new fiddle tune every week, sight-reading out of one of my books. First take, no matter what comes out or how slow I take it or how much I swear on the recording. (There will be probably be swearing on the recordings. You have due warning.) The week after the first recording for a tune, re-record it, having spent the week hunting down recordings and practicing that tune. Probably not just that tune, but devoting focused practice time every day. Thus, the first week of this project you get one tune; all subsequent weeks you get two, last week's and the current week's. Rinse and repeat 52 times or until I get bored, whichever happens second.

You are all, of course, welcome to join me in this madcap adventure through reels and jigs, airs and waltzes. If you play, do your own recording! If you have a recording you think I should listen to, tell me. If you have a specific tune you want me to learn, tell me that, too, though I reserve the right to give you side-eye for Orange Blossom Special and similar. When I get a firm launch date on the project itself, I assure you you will be able to hear me without benefit of internet connection.

Work Is Love Made Visible

And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge;
and all urge is blind save when there is knowledge;
and all knowledge is vain save when there is work;
and all work is empty save when there is love;

--Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

I didn't want to write this post. It's been a long, raw week, and I'm not sure how much I want to go walking naked down the virtual street this weekend on top of it. Plus, frankly, this feels like some combination of bragging, showing my privilege, and no-shit-Sherlock moments. Which is how I know I needed to write it anyway, because those are the brainweasels talking. The ones that want me to say oh, this is nothing, you should see what Kitty does with more demands on her time, you should see what I think I could do if I were living up to my full potential, you should see what people with more limitations get done and how much more amazing they are than I am. What you've been building on for the past four years is nothing. And I know at least half of that is bullshit, especially the last one.

In other words: fuck you, brainweasels, I ate you and turned you into an introduction. Because that's one of the insidious things about doing this work; I end up with a mantra of "this is just what I do" so that I avoid caterpillaring myself. (We're all familiar with this, yes? The one where someone asks how do you move all those legs at once, and then you go OH FUCK and topple over.) But the dark side of avoiding that problem is the one where I forget that this is something that took a lot of work to get to, and I shouldn't minimize it.

So, we've established that I haven't had a 9-5 job in four years and change. The financial specifics of how I managed that are on the one hand hugely important (savings, luck, a partner who chooses to support me) and on the other hand not really the point. The point is this:

That's a random day from last week, and it's one of the easier days, frankly. Nor is it quite as regimented as it looks; that section of time for German also includes running vocab exercises on Memrise, acquiring breakfast, and writing up a quick post to go along with the public accountability post for German.
The half hour break is so I can actually shower sometime ever, and the second one is because lunch is important and I'll forget to eat until 1 or so if I don't put the free time in. Okay, sometimes I forget to eat until 1 or so anyway, but if I'm having a good day and sticking pretty close to the schedule, that break is where it should be. The slots you see as Haven 1x01 are the variable ones (which reminds me that after I finish this up I need to go toss some scheduling in for the week ahead), which may be blog work for Unspooling Fiction, website content, paid work, or blog posts here. Basically, those are my sitting down and writing times, though in the future they may become my sitting down and songwriting times, since I'm slowly beginning to believe that not only is that a thing I want to do, it's a thing I'm capable of doing.

And that looks pretty full, right? Scary-organized. But the secret for me is to have a lot of tasks I can cycle through that use my brain in different ways, and each of them helps me cycle up to the next task on the list. You may have noticed I can be a little over-analytical; the music gives me a chance to put that aside and the Unspooling Fiction work gives me an outlet for the analysis that doesn't result in never-ending cycles of self-doubt and inaction.

It wasn't easy to get here. I've been at these routines in some form or fashion for the better part of eighteen months now, and this is still the ideal, not what happens nine days out of ten. The chances of work slopping into the evenings are pretty high. Sometimes the practicing feels perfunctory and unproductive, the writing feels obvious and cliched, there's this fog over my brain and nothing works. I hate like hell that I'm not bringing reliable income into the household and have to convince myself each week that I am contributing. Sometimes each day. There is, always, the specter of "get a real job!" to fight off; if you've watched Amanda Fucking Palmer's TED talk this week you know exactly the one I mean. And I came to it late, late enough that I wonder if it's not too late on the bad days.

But what terrifies me more is the notion of never playing another note again. So I do my PT and I write lyrics and blog posts and, soon, I'll tell you all about a project I have to demonstrate that there is no such thing as too late. There's only getting up every day and doing the work I was meant for, and letting everyone else decide if that's something they want to be a part of.

And when you work with love, you bind yourself to yourself, and to each other...

The Four Important Questions

Possibly not the ones you're thinking of. Kitty and I took it into our heads to translate a certain set of questions, and I give you the results of the languages I speak! In order from most to least fluent; you can find the rest of the languages over here.

Qui êtes vous? Qu'est-ce que vous voulez? Où allez vous? Pourquoi êtes vous ici?
¿Quién es Ud.? ¿Qué quiere Ud.? ¿Dónde va Ud? ¿Por qué está Ud. aquí?
Wer sind Sie? Wie wollen Sie? Wo gehen Sie? Warum sind Sie hier?

It's possible you've correctly identified them by now (and yes, normally in Spanish I'd cut out the Ud. but the sequence it comes from is highly formal), but just in case: Who are you? What do you want? Where are you going? Why are you here?

We may be B5 nerds around here, but I take those questions about as seriously as I do anything. Because they're important. Singing Meatloaf at the top of my lungs and bopping around the living aside, you could argue they're the only important questions. It helps that I imprinted on B5, not when it first came out, but instead at a vulnerable transition stage of my life. (Namely, college.) Babylon 5 was made for watching when you're hanging out, being liminal, as many transitions and changes are contained within its story arc.

I don't talk about it much, because frankly I have asked and answered these questions more times than I care to count, and it gets more personal and less intended for public consumption each time. But I go through it as a process somewhere between every week and every year. You should be able to look at my actions and see the answer, between this and Twitter and personal journal, but I and a few friends started up a group to support each other just over four years ago. (We called it Courtesan School, because we're like that.) I don't think any of us realized it at the time, but what it's done at least for me is give me a weekly to monthly point at which I check back with a small group that knows me well, and see if I'm staying true to those answers. 

Oh, it's more structured and less wibbly-wobbly New Age talk than it sounds. Am I remembering to exercise? Am I doing my languages? Am I making progress, however miniscule on my various stated goals and projects? Have I developed new ones? Have I run into roadblocks? Having a group to sit down and hash these things out in front of is really useful, even if people are busy and stressed and not up for much input. The simple act of public accountability works. Pretty soon I'm going to be taking that to a wider scale, which is, I think, part of what scares me shitless about it, wondering what if I fail in front of a bunch of people who don't know me nearly as well as my girls. (This is silly. I know the answer: pick up and do it again. Try again, fail better.) More to the point, the act of setting aside some time to reflect lets me match actions to self-image and see where I'm doing well and where I'm falling down.

That's one of the sneaky things about the questions. They don't just demand words, they demand that you act on those words, or you're doing nothing but lying to yourself. And it doesn't much matter if it turns out that you have high standards, your brain chemistry is fucked, or both: this is hard fucking work. Unending, as it turns out. But I didn't sign up for easy. I signed up for worthwhile. I just hope someone out there's going to agree with my definition of worthwhile.

Sometimes, though, it's just good to dork out and remember certain truths.

"The universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice." -G'Kar

In Which I'm Skewed (But We Knew That)

Last night I was sitting around with the husband and L, watching Return of the King. Like you do when you're giant nerds who don't quite have the time to pull an all-weekend marathon of the trilogy, so you spread it out over about a month.

Says I on Twitter, I don't need to annoy people by picking up my fiddle to learn the Rohan theme. Says Eric, but you will anyway! Then Kiki tagged in, and I was pretty well doomed. I didn't right then, but when we broke for dinner I hauled it out, swore at Spotify until it gave me the right track, and proceeded to learn it off by ear in about two minutes flat.

Put like that, it sounds really impressive. I know that C and L's jaws dropped a fair ways, and I tried to blow it off. Oh, it's an easy key. (It is.) Oh, it's basically a fiddle tune, it's beautiful but not complex. (Also true.) Oh, I've been working on this for awhile. (Most true.) But I simply couldn't view it as anything special. That's just what I do now; I hear something playing that I want to learn, I pick my instrument up, I figure out what key it's in. Once I get that part settled, the rest is easy, or at least easier.

It'd be nice to say that this just happened, that it's some kind of inherent skill. That'd be easy, right? Just one of those things that I just so happen to be good at. The truth is a lot murkier and a lot more fraught with false starts, with delays and confusion and declarations that I'm not actually any good at this and I should give up.

You see, I learned to read music about the same time I learned to read English. Maybe a year or two later, but still well within the normal developmental stage you'd expect a toddler to be able to read. (I was a precocious little shit. That may be the wrong verb tense.) At any rate, due to all kinds of factors including under-exposure to non-classical music, I never ended up developing my ear. This is a fatal flaw, so far as any traditional fiddle community is concerned, so when I decided I was going to shift over a couple years ago it became crucial to figure out how to fix it.

Figuring it out took awhile, and a couple attempts at forming bands, and finally a chance meeting drove me to find a site for ear training. (Specifically, an ex's now-ex-boyfriend. Out of such small things are new goals made and met.) I've been using Teoria for a good six months now, through PT for carpal tunnel and through lessons that got me using Audacity to pick apart sound files so that I could learn new tunes. Twice a day, five days a week, for no more than half an hour at a stretch. I use it as a break between longer stretches of work, frankly, and don't think about it too hard.

So: somewhere in there, even though I didn't believe I was taking it seriously, I learned. I learned to pick out melodies and rhythms and key signatures by ear, and that's pretty fucking awesome. I listen to a lot of music, too, and I'm sure that helps. But I've been hiding it away, doing it all on my own and not even showing my awesome to my husband, and it's about time I stopped that shit. This week, I'm going to work on learning some Martin Hayes, work on the various LotR fiddle tunes when I need a break, and try not to be antsy about getting my recording equipment in and set up. (Though the fact that I'm alternating impatience with terror might help balance that last out.) In the meantime, I did perform a week ago, and I have the recording uploaded right here.

Second Verse

Hey, look! I have a blog. Another blog, since technically I've been running Unspooling Fiction for the better part of six months with my co-conspirator, braintwin, sister-in-arms, whatever you want to call her. I have no idea where that time went, nor how that became as successful as it did, but since I'm endeavoring to be a real grown-up professional something or another, I got my very own blog.

If you want to get really specific, I had a blog over on WordPress that I just killed, because I'd rather work with the Blogger interface and, frankly, the handle I was using was too restrictive. I don't want to pretend like I'm not doing half a dozen things at once at all times. Unlike Kitty, I'm not engaging in the unspoken authorial contract of Having A Blog; instead I'm engaging in the unspoken very busy person contract of maintaining an online presence. But my path to get here has been long, twisty, arduous, and I in no way promise that here will be the same place tomorrow that it is as I type. I rather hope it won't.

Going back some ways, I went to college and got an English degree, and now everyone is either laughing or nodding in sympathy. I didn't get it because I expected to make money off it; I got it because I loved the subject. I adore ripping texts apart and understanding them in new ways. (If you want to see me fall over laughing, just tell me with a straight face that I'm interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.) This did not lead to work in my field. You're all very surprised, I can tell. I have a jar with a surprised face for that; I keep it on my desk.

What it led to was a short series of jobs in fairly dead-end occupations, followed by the loss of my last "real" job a week before the market crashed in '08. (For "real," see 9-5 with benefits. There are reasons I put scare quotes around the term.) I did what I was supposed to for a good year, eighteen months after that. I applied for unemployment, then I applied for jobs. Job after job after job, looking for temp work or temp to hire or anything at all that wanted an over-educated liberal arts major. Eventually, I applied for state healthcare and foodstamps. Throughout it all, I was very lucky to have both savings and a partner who was working in a more lucrative field. But several things kept niggling at the back of my mind as I did this: crafts, writing, and music. I hated the process of applying for two jobs every week even if they were crap jobs or ones I was patently unqualified for, just to fulfill the unemployment requirements. I hated not being able to dive into freelancing as seriously as I might have, because too much and all my benefits would disappear and I'd have to start the whole process again. I loathed having to devote hours every month to ensuring that the benefits were there, since they were one of the few things keeping us from falling back on parental handouts.

Once I eliminated all the piles of bureaucratic bullshit from my life, I got a chance to start again. I spent awhile looking into Etsy and cross stitch, only to determine that the kind of cross stitch I did would be undercut by cheap knockoffs that flood the site. I sat down and wrote a novel, at least half to prove I could, and dropped the second one when I realized that I don't love writing. I love talking about writing, and I love analyzing other people's writing, but that's not the same thing. (Some people find this weird. I find them weird, so it all works out.) Then I fell back in love with music, and I haven't looked back since.

Right now I pay the bills through some arcane conglomeration of proofreading, editing, and translation on the rare occasions I can get it. It's not my first love, but I know the chances of making money off music, and I know I've got another year or more of work to build up enough of a fiddle repertoire to make a go with that. Which you all get to watch me sweat through! I have no idea what's going to happen or where I'm going from here, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

In Which I Blather About Process

It's been pointed out that I should maybe, possibly, talk a little about how I do what I do as far as editing goes. The short version is, I've been reading other people's writing for a very long time now, and I have a good idea about two things: what I like, and what works. I even know how to separate the two, though it's always nice when I get to work with the former. That's not a talent most people have. I can also sit down with something that's not working and list 3-5 ways to fix it, which is generally more helpful than "here's my one true way." The chances that you're coming to me for fiction editing are pretty high. There is no One True Way. There's ways that work, ways that don't, ways that lead you to a story that's not the one you thought you were writing, and ways that may be beyond your current technical skill level. Just for a few.

How I edit is, in at least one sense, very much like how I write and translate. Though it's possible for me to work on the laptop (in fact, I'm doing so right now), I prefer to do the bulk of my work at the desktop. As you can see, I've got most things to hand, and in the event that I need my foreign language dictionaries they're a hop away in the filing cabinet. (Yes, I have a filing cabinet full of language and music books. What? This isn't normal? I ran out of bookshelf space.) Squirt bottle of chastisement for when the cat decides attacking his reflection is the best way to break my concentration, assorted musical instruments when I'm chewing over a knotty problem, various things to keep warm with, external hard drive, and all the ibuprofen and Tums you can shake a stick at. I try to keep it warm enough that I'm not shivering, cool enough that I'm not sweating, and the music at a volume suitable to my mood. I take micro-breaks where I surf the internet, reply to chats or emails, and so on at completely unpredictable intervals. Longer breaks come around once every hour or two, where I make sure to stand up and stretch and do a couple rounds of PT exercises.

I usually work best in one hour blocks of time anyway, spaced out throughout the day and swapping one set of tasks for another. Ideally, I swap editing/writing/translating for something physical, be it music practice or eating a meal or doing some quick housework. Unlike a lot of people, I don't have specific times of the day I am "most" productive. My most productive times are when I plant my ass in the chair and declare I'm accomplishing something, and I do that at least twice a day, five days a week. Because breaks and regular meals are important too! Because I'm a musician by training, I tend to think of this as 'playing the rests.' Editing work occupies my analytical brain and gives my body a chance to rest; music occupies my body and my instincts (and, sometimes, a different side of analysis). Translation calls on both instincts and analysis, especially if I'm not going for a word-for-word but a more freeform translation, making it arguably the most difficult of the three. Regardless of what I'm doing, the important part is that I get to engage all my faculties each day, as well as taking short knitting or cross stitch or reading breaks, depending on what part of me feels most depleted.

Whenever I get a new work, I do an initial read-through in reader-brain. This is markedly different from editor brain, and it lets me figure out if the writer has succeeded in whatever they set out to do. Am I entertained? Am I informed? Am I moved? I make a note of it, usually for my own personal use, and go on to the second read-through. Assuming I'm doing a full round of edits on it, I start by addressing the overall structure. Weak points get shored up, places where I feel the writing has strayed get marked off, and I make a quick sketch of the outline of the piece for the benefit of the writer. (If the writer worked from an outline, it's always fascinating to know how closely these match.) For fiction, I will take special note of guns on the mantel. Then I send it all back to the writer and we get to engage in either real time or asynchronous discussion of the edits. Once the structure is hammered into something closer to a final draft, I work on grammar fixes, typos, and line edits. Sometimes a line edit will lead to revisiting the structural edits, but more often they sand the rough edges off an author's natural voice, playing to their strengths. For example, Kitty has a very noir, spare writing style for a great deal of her work. This makes finding the exact word tricky but ultimately more rewarding than using five words where one would do.

Over the years, I've read lots and lots and many blog posts over How To Be Self-Employed, but the one thing that the most successful people have in common is that they show up. Whatever it is that I'm aiming to do, I have to be there for it, and being there can be as simple as walking away from the computer and picking up my instrument or as complex as sitting and working on edits while using of the internet/books to fact-check things and not getting distracted. It's a tricky balance, to be sure, and there are days when I absolutely don't wanna. Those are the days I curl up with hot cocoa or promise myself a cold beer after finishing a certain amount of work. It's not just a good idea to reward yourself, it's vital when you're self-employed. But that's a whole other blog post.

Pattern Slurping

One of my favorite aspects of learning languages is learning their history. I'm a history and anthropology nerd, I was a couple classes away from my anthro minor in college and if the history department had had anyone focusing on areas that I was actually interested in I would have easily attempted a double-major. (This would have gotten tricky. English and history both qualify under the 'humanities' section at my alma mater, and we were sledgehammered into taking a wide breadth of social sciences and hard sciences by the credit requirements. But I would have done it, dammit.) So it was an absolute revelation in my ability to learn new languages when one of my English profs told me about the Great Vowel Shift. The wiki article on it's not bad, though frankly the academic debates of it don't much matter for the purposes of this post.

What does matter is that I learned consciously in my early 20s something that I'd known subconsciously, through years of French as well as training as a singer. English had a vowel shift over the course of some several centuries, and that vowel shift only got more pronounced (pun semi-intended) as American English and British English drifted apart. By contrast, the Romance languages retained quite a lot of the a = ah, e = ay, i = ee, o = oh, and u = oo sounds. Not always with perfect consistency, but it gave me a hell of a template to map new Romance languages onto. I like templates, so long as I know they're only templates!

...this plus learning French first is, however, probably why my Spanish sounds Italian-accented. Oops. At least my consonants are, through deliberate practice, not European. Latin American Spanish is far, far more useful, practical, and frankly? A lot easier than the nuances of Iberian Spanish. Just like whenever I get around to Portuguese I plan to learn Brazilian as opposed to Continental.

On the downside, this means I had to toss out the template when I got around to German, and I have no template whatsoever when it comes to non-Indo-European languages. These languages, I have to form my own templates as I go. And I suppose I should explain; I don't mean a literal template either on my hard drive or in my gdocs or anything else, I mean the mental mapping I do in order to organize my brain. I tend to think in metaphor a lot, and it shows in the language choices I make as well as the ways in which I process learning new skills.

(We don't talk about the metaphorical workshop wherein I store my musical knowledge. That way lies madness, or at best confusion.)

Humans are a pattern-seeking species as a whole, so it's not surprising that this lives at the top of my toolkit. If you speak multiple languages, what patterns and templates do you use to keep your communication skills fresh?

Being an introduction of sorts

I suppose the first and most sensible place to begin is an introduction and some explanation of how I got to this point. What a quaint and shocking notion, etc. Some of you reading this will likely know me from my work over on Unspooling Fiction; others of you may know me more professionally or not at all. Regardless, I needed a place to drop all my linguistics and editing geek babbling, and since that's nominally what I do for a living (when I have the clients), this blog was born.

At the moment, I speak about three and a half languages: English, Spanish, French, and German. I learned bits and pieces of Spanish in some summer program when I was very small, and retained a few odds and ends until I came back to study it independently as an adult. (This made for a great deal of swearing when I discovered the alphabet had changed meantime. Give me back ch and rr! Hmph.) French I picked up from the end of middle school straight through high school, and was one of only two students in my class to complete French 5. I think I was the only one to try taking the AP exam, for all the good that did me since I lacked motivation as well as opportunity for lots of different conversational partners with varying accents. My primary teacher had a strong Parisian accent, somewhat distilled from years of dealing with high school students, and I had maybe a semester of time around a Quebecoise student teacher. Since that time I've gotten better about seeking out a variety of French media, but it's still not easy.

German I've been working on for about a year now, and it's both easier and more difficult than the Romance languages, depending on what aspect of them I'm dealing with. The list of languages to learn is as long as my arm and ever-growing, but imminent projects include Arabic, Russian, the rest of the Romance languages (though probably only a drive-by attempt at Romanian), Japanese, and Mandarin. Assuming I can find good classes on some of those, of course, since I may be stubborn and driven, but I'm not going to set myself up to fail at learning a language by not finding a native speaker (ideally) to learn from.

Things in my toolkit include Memrise, for vocab and alphabets; Project Gutenberg for various texts in their original language (Dumas père and fils are both on my to-read list); and an assortment of hard-copy textbooks, dictionaries, and verb dictionaries. On top of that, I have the kind of ridiculous English vocabulary that stems from a lifelong liberal arts education and a brain that is pattern-seeking in the extreme. This often results in hilarity as I either try to jam things in patterns that don't work, find a pattern that makes sense to my brain that nobody else understands, or look at a word and recognize its Latin roots and the ending being used and never need to look it up again.

I never said it wasn't a usefully skewed brain.

Since I get reminded that I'm skewed in this direction on a regular basis, though, I figure other people might be amused to watch the process of learning a new language (or three) and the ultimate results. Plus, I get a way to organize my thoughts on any given aspect and maybe have some no-shit-Sherlock moments. I like those moments.

I also edit. I edit a lot. Sometimes I have this urge to talk about common mistakes people make, sometimes I feel like banging the drum about the ways the English language is changing as a result of the internet (and whether or not I approve of all those ways it's going to keep changing), and sometimes I just need to fling up my hands and go WRITERS HOW DO THEY WORK.
I'm told the answer is to give them chocolate, but I have my doubts.