whew! busy day!

Today was a stressful day, the culmination of about three days of feverish editing work on a comprehensive technical editing assignment. I feel satisfied that I took the material in a fruitful direction; I don't believe I went too far with my edits, although I may have skated close to the edge here and there.

I both love and hate comprehensive editing.

The worst part of the process is when I'm confronted with a pile of baffling prose that doesn't seem to hang together, and I look at it in horror and think, "What the hell is this?!"

For me, the analytical brain work is the hardest part.

Once I have the piece figured out and I know what to do, the rest is just details and it usually flows.

[Digression: I just had a massive deja vu while writing this piece. My time in Seattle so far has been marked by regular and strong deja vu experiences. I don't really know what it means, but I have long suspected this experience is the universe's way of telling me on the right track and where I'm supposed to be in this life. I sure hope so. It does feel nice to be learning again and making new leaps of understanding in my studies.]

I wound up staying up way too late last night in the computer lab at the undergraduate library. I took a break to blow off steam, began studying Illustrator, Photoshop, HTML, and Flash, and I didn't stop until it was almost 4AM.

I also find myself taking great joy lately in drawing and working with visual material. At one time, I wanted to be a comic book artist, and now I find myself sketching in my notebooks and playing around with Illusrator at every opportunity. I once took formal art lessons in my pre-teens, and it might be nice to dust those skills off again and make something useful out of it.

Maybe I can get around to some regular guitar practice again, too. I'm still playing, and working on useful bits, but my engagement with it is not at a boil like I wish for.

Also, two days ago I picked up Andrea Stolpe's Popular Lyric Writing—10 Steps to Effective Storytelling. The author submitted a manuscript to Writer's Digest Books while I was there, but it didn't work out for WD to pick the book up, which disappointed me. What I saw was eye-opening, and she points out how outer detail and more abstract emotional statements in lyrics have a definite relationship. Her ideas intuitively felt right and true, and I've been waiting for the book to come out for months now.

Finally.

It looks like Tuning the Air will be performing a run at Fremont Abbey. It's going to be a massive challenge to bring this space to life, but it's a promising space and community on so many levels.

There was a funny moment when the performance team ran through a test circulation. JB hit some flat notes here and there; when I looked at her, she shrugged as if to say, "Yeah, I'm out of tune. So what?"