arrange • compose • conduct
Once you’ve done two, it’s easy to write a third. I’m back in my mischief, pre-writing posts and giving myself future vacations. Part of that is that I’m having an increasing number of weekends when I’m offline, so I need to be planning ahead. Part of it is I have […]
Sometimes, you need to wait till the end to start. Often when I write, I write a clear summation of the idea at the end. Then – at least half the time – I cut and paste it to the very beginning. Part is clarity: I like to start with […]
What are you trying to get better at? What are the stakes you’ll have when you’re good and how can you lower those stakes now? I got good at writing by lowering the stakes. If I had sat down at my computer and said, “I’m going to write an essay […]
Don’t worry, there’ll be another one along any minute. Sometimes I write my post by typing a title, with as little conscious thought as possible. It’s just something I’ve noticed, or feel in that moment. A little pause to think. And then I start to express what I feel about […]
How do you know it’s your passion? I have written music at every hour of the day and night. I have the times I gravitate towards in 2023, but 2013 me used different parts of the day, and 2003 me was frantically writing a thesis and arrangements for class – […]
I wrote and published every day in 2022, with my streak now standing at just over eight uninterrupted years. (I last missed a day in November, 2014.) This year, I wrote a little over 66,000 words – 5,500 per month, or around 180 per day. In the midst of that, […]
I decided to write daily on my website in the early fall of 2014. The last day I missed publishing was November 3, 2014, making today my eighth anniversary of an unbroken streak of writing. At this point, I’m closing in on a 3,000 day streak and have written over […]
My primary strategy for solving my beloved Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest is asking the question, “What’s weird?” What’s unexpected, different, or unusual? What stands out from the background? Because very often, that’s part of the secondary puzzle I have to solve. I approach composing and arranging in much the […]
I have given myself an extra 30-60 minutes a day this month by pre-writing all my posts. I hope I’ve been combining it with a summer “social media sabbatical” to find more time to do the things I want to prioritize this summer. That includes: More family time – playing […]
Over the years, I’ve learned the value – and some tricks – to collaborating with local news. Maybe your town, too, has a local weekly newspaper; it can be one of your best sources of publicity and advocacy for your choir! Over the last 15 years, I’ve provided as many […]