Small-Scale Practice

One of my aims for next year is to post something online regularly. I don't just mean a tweet or a Facebook status. I mean a video, or a poem (or a piece of poem), a short story, a blog post, an article, an interview - something that adds some sort of value. If I could, I'd do it every day. And so, that's what I'm trying to do from this week on.

Monday saw the first part of a poem go online. Entitled The Winter Folk, it's my run up to Christmas poem. You can read the first part here: http://paragraverse.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/the-winter-folk-part-1/

Tuesday featured a video, uploaded to my YouTube channel. I'm normally adverse to posting my videos on my Facebook page, so if you're reading this you're seeing something I wouldn't have otherwise shared with you.

Wednesday saw part two of The Winter Folk go online, and automatically so. I made the decision from day one that I wouldn't have to worry about when I posted the poem. ParagraVerse would sort it all out for me. I just needed to share the link later in the day. Thankfully, the site has a few subscribers already, so they'll receive it without my having to do anything.

And today, I have a blog post. Friday will see part three of The Winter Folk. Saturday, who knows. It depends on how my time gets divided between now and then. The important thing is, I'm keeping up with my schedule of posting online.

Obviously, it won't be this easy when I'm doing it all the time. I won't always have a twelve-mini-part poem to post online, because it won't always be the run up to Christmas. I can, however, begin sticking to a posting schedule that isn't too difficult to main, by writing regularly. If I wanted to, I could make a proper schedule for when things roll out properly. I already know that I'd like articles up on Saturdays, poems on Tuesdays, and short stories on Fridays. But that doesn't say much about the rest of the week.

Essentially, though, keeping up posting online is relatively easy when you take a page out of Alex Day's book: create a lot of content in one day, and schedule it for release over a number of days and weeks without your having to be there. That's the kind of intention I have, simply because I find that the reason I don't do something is because I couldn't get to my laptop to type it up.

However, I can share from my tablet or my phone. I don't need to worry about typing something like a blog post or an article on them when they're already written and just going live at a particular time. I can still be there to respond to people's comments, or tweet about something else entirely, without having to concern myself with the practicalities of how and when I'll be able to write something on a given day. When I have Drama or work, that challenge becomes ever more difficult to address, and the end result is that I avoid posting anything online at all.

So, I'm starting small. I have The Winter Folk on schedule to publish, and this very blog post will be set up to post, even though I'll probably be at my laptop when it goes live anyway. Why? Because it means I don't have to stop doing what I was doing to write (or even just publish) a blog post that I could have easily written before and just didn't because it wasn't the right day. I plan on writing for an hour or so every day, no matter what, but I already know when that'll become impractical. On days like that, at least I won't have to concern myself with whether or not I'm producing enough regularly. Scheduling might be the key to keeping up regular posting. We'll see how it works out this month - my busiest in the bookshop - before rolling it out officially in January.

The Inaugural FUFDay

Today, I faced my fears.

Well, not all of them. FUFDay - Face Up to Fear Day - is going to be a weekly thing, for me. I have items on the list I'd drawn up that I just didn't have time to complete. I reckon if I hadn't had to go get a hair cut, I might have achieved something. I blame the hairdresser for changing their student offer ('cause there's no way I'm spending €25 on a haircut that could cost me €9.)

Delays aside, I got to work.

Now, two of the three things I did are sort of personal. They're the sort of personal I can announce if/when I know more about them. We'll put it this way: it took some forcing to get myself to do them. In one case, I've never done it before. In another, it's been over a year since I've done anything close to it...and I did a lot more of it than ever before. (Hurray for vagueness, right?) In both cases, your finding out will be based on the results of my actions today. If I've been successful, you'll know.

Anyway, in less vague terms, I posted five poems on YouTube today. That's more than doubled the amount of poem-videos I have on my channel.

These videos, as a sort of easing-myself-into-it decision, are about five YouTube channels (totalling seven YouTubers). Well, I say "about"... I mean they've been inspired by them, in some cases speak to them directly to them, but they're not biographical works.

The first video features the poem Young Hopeful, quote-unquote about Carrie Hope Fletcher. As these videos were posted in order of writing, I suppose I ought to explain why I wrote it. Problem is, I can't. I just got an idea for the poem, the words happened, and it was somewhat about Carrie, but not quite.

With WOTO up next, I even broke their name for the poem; rather than making reference to the World of the Orange, my poem is called Contented Content of the World of Orange. It's almost the same thing. Not almost enough. However, I didn't write the poem to get everything right. I wrote it to capture some of the fun of the duo behind the channel, Brad and Liam. If they see it, maybe they'll like it.

The third poem, If, Like, is more addressed to Charlie McDonnell than about him. It was also the first poem I wrote because I wanted to write a poem about a YouTuber, and not because I had a video on my mind. Charlie was also the first YouTuber I watched that I've stuck with since finding his channel, which I think is fun.

In an attempt to continue writing about my favourite YouTubers, I came to Alex Day. Unfortunately, many of Alex's videos have been about Twilight or sex. He's also vlogged about a lot of other things, but the one thing that always pops up again is his music. With that in mind, I wrote the poem, The Day, utilizing as many titles of his songs as I could. I'm fairly happy with the result.

The final poem was probably the hardest to write, because I wasn't sure what to say at all. A Home in Nerdfighteria is a semi-fictional address to some of the recurring jokes in the vlogbrothers videos made by John and Hank Green. I did my best with what my memory could pull out on the spot.

Now, the reason these poems were part of FUFDay: the audience.

Not only do I get nervous getting on stage, I mumble on camera. In the editing process, I also became aware of how many times I said "um" and "eh". And all these worries weren't even to do with the poems. What if people hear them and don't like them? What if people think it's incredibly, ridiculously weird to have written the poems, and think I should just get off the Internet forever?

Okay, that last one was a joke. But what if the people about whom they were written (or who I had in mind when I was writing them) don't like them? And I don't mean just not liking them. I mean disliking them. Actively. That would suck.

Can we play the Make the YouTuber Find the Thing game and see what happens, though?

Fear Facing Prep

Yesterday, I mentioned the idea of doing a Face Up To Fear Day this Thursday. The basic idea was to do a few different things that I've been putting off for one reason or another that could summarily be called Fear. I've been afraid to put myself and my work on the line, and I've decided to put an end to that.

So, Thursday is going to be my inaugural Face Up To Fear Day. It might be a weekly thing.

Because it's such a personal thing, I'm not going to be listing everything I'll be doing on Thursday as part of this. However, one thing I have no trouble mentioning is that I'll be releasing a series of videos. I've been writing poems every day this month, as I'm sure you know, and a few of these have been about some of my favourite YouTubers.

The idea behind that is that I've been avoiding doing recordings of poems for a while. This is possibly because they've been so personal in a lot of cases, and while I don't plan on keeping those poems a secret forever and ever, I don't think I have the guts to put them out in the world myself just yet.

So, that's my compromise, and it's an example I can work with.

I drew up a list of everything I need to do to actually face up to that fear of putting some work out there, focusing on something that isn't so personal it'll terrify me if people hear me reading it. This list included:

- Write at least one more poem.
- Type up the poems.
- Memorise the poems - or enough of them at a time - for recording.
- Edit the videos.
- Release, and create a playlist.

Since I've been announcing the poems on Twitter as I've been writing them, I can reveal that the YouTubers who have poems written about them are, in order of writing:

- Carrie Hope Fletcher
- The World of Orange (WOTO)
- Charlie McDonnell
- Alex Day
- John and Hank Green (the vlogbrothers)

I consider this Volume 1 of The YouTuber Poems.

I'm not presuming them to be brilliant poems, though I'm happy with what I managed to do with a few of them, and I very much doubt any of the seven people above (two in WOTO) will ever see the videos. However, if they do, and/or if people enjoy them, I'll take that as a positive sign and work on writing poems about some of my other favourites.

I have a few other items on the list for Thursday, which will require putting myself out of my comfort zone. And that's the point. I've been hiding behind this safety net, and I want to get out of it, to get into the world and to start experiencing something new and exciting. I can't do that if I hide behind fear all the time.

On Thursday night, I'll go over how everything went with the day (and I'll embed the videos here). This'll be a fun day, I think, if not a little bit terrifying in parts.

Options

John Green once said in a video blog that the older we get and the more decisions we are required to make (where to go to college, what to major in, where we work, etc.) the less options we have in life. In some ways, this is true. I studied English and Religion, and with no practical experience in construction it would be hazzardous for me to build a house, whereas a Science major who doesn't read or consider the spiritual dimension of life at all (even for other people) wouldn't be suitable to enter a classroom to teach either of my chosen subjects (with which I have a teaching qualification...almost... you get the point!)

However, John's brother Hank is but one person who demonstrably created new options for himself. His main field of work, before the Brotherhood 2.0 project, was in ecology. (That's simplifying it.) A few years later, he's a multi-album, sell-out-touring musician (with his own record company, too, DFTBA Records), who runs a major video conference every year (Vid-Con), helped produce a web-series (The Lizzie Bennett Diaries) and runs a number of smaller, but still significant, projects, including a business that sells 2-D Glasses. His choice way back in his teens? To study Science. Hank also considers the greater questions in life, but he's a teaching qualification away from having his own classroom, even for Science, but that doesn't stop him running Sci-Show and co-running Crash Course on YouTube.

But what about someone without a college qualification? Of the people I'm familiar with online, Alex Day - another YouTuber - shows that you don't need to have a degree to make something of yourself. He's a college dropout turned Top-40 musician. (I don't think he liked the course very much, though his one-time membership in Mensa suggests he was more than capable of actually completing it.) He also releases albums with DFTBA Records, along with t-shirts, but released his singles solo. He also has a card game (made with his cousin) called Sopio, and runs Life Scouts.

Do our choices limit our options? Not necessarily. Day and the Green Brothers (John being a former hospital chaplain, among other things, before finding fame and fortune through vlogbrothers and his New York Times Bestselling novels - enough to live on with his wife, son, dog, and a second child on the way) show clearly that their choices in their teenage years didn't stop them following through on their dreams and ambitions. Is it possible for everybody else?

Let's look at it in my case. Technically speaking, I'll be qualified to teach. However, a degree in English also allows for me to work comfortably in a number of different fields, including publishing and journalism. I made the decision to write as much as possible when I was fourteen years old, and that hasn't limited anything I've done in life. Far from it. If anything, I've given myself more options, especially coming to the end of my college years.

But I also have an interest in business. I read about it as much as I can, when I'm not working on essays or studying for exams. I have a business plan in the works (a project I've mentioned before in more vague terms that is becoming less of a secret with certain people, but still very much private), something that has only been affected by one formal choice in my life - to study Business at Leaving Cert level - but is otherwise based upon my own interests.

What's most significant about this, for people who might feel they are limited by what they studied formally, is that something I did privately, out of my own interest, that was in no way connected to my formal education, is now affecting my life in a postive way. Just as Alex liked card games, John loved writing and Hank enjoyed music and videos, my personal interests are impacting on the options I have in life, opening them up, rather than limiting what I can do in life.

Something Dave Lordan mentioned at yesterday's workshop comes to mind as I write this, too: it's not the builders, the electricians or the plumbers he knows who are finding work, but the writers, the artists and the musicians. Working in the Arts is an option, now, more so than ever before, and especially in Ireland.

My recommendation, though, is to learn something about business and marketing if you want to make something of yourself in the arts. (I have an interest in them, and so began reading about them before making the realisation that it was actually beneficial in being a writer.) It's possible to do something without knowing much about business, but it's much, much easier to actually have control over your life when you know how others do - this going beyond mind-set, and into actual practices. There's also the advantage of being reminded of some important factors, like who you will deal with in being an artist (in many cases, retailers, publishers and the media) and how you present yourself to these people; how forecast your money, and the reminder to pay taxes on what you earn (in some countries there's an exemption, or a reduced rate - check with your tax office!); thinking about how to work in the long-term (for businesses, making changes or releasing products); and a whole lot else (especially in terms of marketing) that can make drastic and sometimes necessary changes to how to work as an artist.

Do you need a professional qualification to run a business? No.

Do you need a professional qualification to work as an artist? No.

Both are things you can pick up yourself if it suits you. You already have options in your life, based on your previous choices. Most of the time, as John Green rightly said, your decisions reduce the number of options available to you. However, that doesn't mean there aren't many decisions you can make that will do the opposite. Consider your hobbies, your current job, your current situation in life (married? kids? pets?) and the courses and books available to you, and tell me you have no more options. For most, it's simply a matter of making one more decision.

Review - The World is Mine (I Don't Know Anything)

I think a lot of people will look at this and think ‘What?’ Okay, crash course in Alex Day. He’s this guy on YouTube called nerimon, or Alex, or ‘Hey you from London, yeah you, singing boy reading Twilight.’ Alex is part of a generation of Super Nerds. I mean that in the nice way. Super Nerds are awesome.

Okay, so Alex plays music. You with me so far? He plays music on YouTube. Okay, I know what you’re thinking – lots of people do that. Except, and here’s the fun part, these two Super Nerds, Alan Lastufka and Hank Green, set up a record company called DFTBA Records, and they signed Alex and many other cool people. This is Alex’s second album with them, The World is Mine (I Don’t Know Anything). So, now that you have the crash course in Alex Day and how he came to be on my blog, let’s begin!

What’s so special about this album?

In short? I think it’s how it came about. And the songs are ridiculously catchy, especially Georgia, The Time of Your Life and the title track The World is Mine (I Don’t Know Anything). And many others... or all of them. And, like Elbow, Alex Day sings with his own accent. He tried, before, to sing in the sort of American-commercial way, but he didn’t like it. He could do it, but he chose not to.

What’s it most like?

I would say his first album, but that’s not true. He did what Muse and many other bands do and created a new type of sound for his next album than what his listeners were used to. However, there’s common ground between this and his first album, Parrot Stories – the songs are pretty much all about love. Bless. He doesn’t claim for the idea of singing about girls to be original, but I like how he does it. Sort of a melancholy in some songs, but an enormous amount of energy in others (like Georgia).

Is this album really recommended?

If you can get past the fact that it’s not a commercial act, that it’s not made in the same way commercial albums are, and therefore doesn’t have the same sort of sound as commercial albums by much better known bands, then yes, this album is recommended. But if you have an attitude about music that restricts the growth of indie artists (not Indie the genre, but indie as in without a massive company behind them), then you may not be able to see The World is Mine (I Don’t Know Anything) as an album worth your time, because you’ll have attached a distaste to it before you’ve given it a shot. In short: your prejudice will get the better of you.

If you can get past your prejudices about certain types of music, then you will like this album. You’ll at least like it. As in, you might not love it like I do. But that’s okay, if you give it a shot first. I can almost promise you’ll find something you like on the album. Almost. I have to take into account that different people have different tastes. This is what Alex Day calls his “dance” album – really it’s called that because it has a lot of electrically produced sounds in it, it’s generally fast and it’s very much the sort of album you want to move about to. It’s a fun album to listen to, and I never get sick of it.

What next, then?

Well, Alex Day has another album and an EP that I’ve listened to a number of times, and he’s in two bands – Chameleon Circuit and Sons of Admirals, whose work I’ll be reviewing soon, too. Watch this space, because the DFTBA artists need backing to help them keep doing what they do best.