Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku
It's that time of year again, time to confess my failures and gloat in my successes and to look forward to the year ahead.
I managed one of the four parts of my 2013 New Year resolution. In retrospect, five gigs seems less ambitious than it did after 2012, a very fallow year in which Vaccination split up and the Sweet Smelling Swampies played only one gig and that was Miranda's fourth of July party.
The rest of my resolutions met with varying degrees of failure:
I wrote only 40% of my novel Urban Armageddon and worse, so far I've had no response from the agent I sent it to, Becky Thomas, at Fox Mason. I'm going to have a good think about it before I send it to anyone else (Hmmm, I just tried to link to fox mason's website and it seems to be down);
I began rehearsing with a new band provisionally called the Band of Malcontents, but that band, for various reasons never made it to the gigging stage. Later I got together with John Giltrow and Dave Paton, formerly of the Pennebakers to form e-Cog Zero. We don't have enough songs for an album yet. So far we have four originals and two traditional songs (ie so old they're out of copyright) plus one orignal we've written but not yet rehearsed properly. We need another four songs, which I'm writing at the moment, so I guess we're 60% of the way to having an album's worth of material;
I haven't even begun learning Polish (I got the title of this blog from a phrasebook, not from my head). On the other hand, I've been practicing my Italian and brushed up on my very rusty Romany. Still, 0%.
In other news, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer early in 2013 and have spent most of the year as a cancer patient. Within the next couple of months, I will become a cancer SURVIVOR. I am blogging the experience of radiotherapy/radiation treatment here.
What of next year.
I resolve to...
I managed one of the four parts of my 2013 New Year resolution. In retrospect, five gigs seems less ambitious than it did after 2012, a very fallow year in which Vaccination split up and the Sweet Smelling Swampies played only one gig and that was Miranda's fourth of July party.
The rest of my resolutions met with varying degrees of failure:
I wrote only 40% of my novel Urban Armageddon and worse, so far I've had no response from the agent I sent it to, Becky Thomas, at Fox Mason. I'm going to have a good think about it before I send it to anyone else (Hmmm, I just tried to link to fox mason's website and it seems to be down);
I began rehearsing with a new band provisionally called the Band of Malcontents, but that band, for various reasons never made it to the gigging stage. Later I got together with John Giltrow and Dave Paton, formerly of the Pennebakers to form e-Cog Zero. We don't have enough songs for an album yet. So far we have four originals and two traditional songs (ie so old they're out of copyright) plus one orignal we've written but not yet rehearsed properly. We need another four songs, which I'm writing at the moment, so I guess we're 60% of the way to having an album's worth of material;
I haven't even begun learning Polish (I got the title of this blog from a phrasebook, not from my head). On the other hand, I've been practicing my Italian and brushed up on my very rusty Romany. Still, 0%.
In other news, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer early in 2013 and have spent most of the year as a cancer patient. Within the next couple of months, I will become a cancer SURVIVOR. I am blogging the experience of radiotherapy/radiation treatment here.
What of next year.
I resolve to...
- Finish "Urban Armageddon" and find a publisher.
- Record and release the album "Powerful Animal" by e-Cog Zero
- Organize and play in the First Tottenham Festival of Musical Legerdemain (details later, ether here or in my other blog, "Storming the Charts").
- Write my second novel "The Shadow Project", and plot some ideas on alternative history for later projects.
- Consolidate my existing linguistic knowledge by producing a major "loom of language" in order to improve my confidence in the languages where I am less than fluent (but more than completely ignorant).
- Perform at least ten London gigs and five gigs outside London with E-Cog Zero.
- Perform at least six spoken word gigs including at least three in places other than Tottenham Chances.
Goodness... SEVEN???? I'm a greedy bastard, that's for sure.
posted by ur.alcuin@googlemail.com at 11:45 AM
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