Back in 2000 I attended the British Juggling Convention, and I took along a digital camera, and I put a few hundred images on my website. My website grew into one of the most popular juggling website over the next three years, for many non-photography related reasons, but it started by posting convention photos.

I kept this up until 2003 when, due to an animation I made going viral, my web server crashed and never recovered. I stopped taking so many photos, and writing up long reviews about conventions, and concentrated on my new job as a professional juggler.

Then, in 2007 because I was traveling so much, I bought a DSLR camera to document all the places I visited. My photography skills slowly improved, until I actually considered myself to be a pretty decent photographer, rather than just one of the first jugglers with a digital camera, a website, and lots of free time.

In 2009 I decided to make daily photo blog posts from the EJC. I did this because unlike previous years, I had no official organizing duties, and wanted a goal to fulfill for the convention. I got a good reaction on my blog, and was very proud of the photos I captured.

However, taking photos of people juggling isn’t something I’d practiced much, as I was far more used to photographing animals, cities, landscapes, interesting local people and other travel subjects. I had more practice by photo blogging at the Sundance Turkish Juggling Festival 2009, and worked out better work flows, to get images from my camera to the internet more quickly.

Up until this spring, I just posted my photos on my blog. The point of my blog is to post everything I create or do, including music, videos, photography, writing, reading, philosophizing, etc. It gives me a lot of control over presentation, but isn’t well suited for people to respond. Leaving comments on a blog isn’t hard, but I must admit it’s something I very rarely do.

Then I was invited to photograph the House Of Intrika fashion show at the Berlin Juggling Convention this year. Lots of my friends took part so instead of just posting the photos on my blog, I put them on Facebook too. The response, compared to an average blog post, was overwhelming. In two days I had well over 200 comments and “likes”, and dozens of people involved, or who had friends involved, added me as a friend.

So this year, at the EJC in Finland, even though I had to organize six shows in six days, I decided to carry my camera with me as much as possible. Along with two revelations, one technical and one philosophical, I suddenly enjoyed taking photos during shows, rather than hating and avoiding it. Trying to strike a balance between taking great photographs and simply documenting what is happening is difficult, but I expect it to get easier as I continue to get better at effortlessly capturing magical moments.

I posted the resulting photos to my blog and Facebook every night, and once again I got an amazing response. I could hardly keep up with all the commenting and liking and photo tagging, as hundreds came in every day. Also, by the end of the convention, I had hundreds of new Facebook friends.

Another result, or at least an indicator that I’m getting better at photography, is that four juggling magazines have asked permission to use my photographs in their articles or as front cover images. Pretty cool!

Thanks for reading, and thanks for coming along with me on this journey.

Finally, a thumbnail of every photo is posted below. Only these thumbnails link to the full size files, not the other images on my blog or Facebook. If you see a photo on facebook or the blog posts you like, find it here to download the original. Alternatively, here is the entire list of every photo.

All photos are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. That means you can use the photos for non-commercial reasons, as long as you give me credit and link back to this website. For any other use, email me.

On Facebook:
EJC 2010 day 0 – setting up the festival site.
EJC 2010 day 1 – Saturday 24th July
EJC 2010 day 2 – Sunday 25th July – Opening Show, Marco and Wes
EJC 2010 day 3 – Monday 26th July
EJC 2010 day 4 – Open stage show and Compagnie Ea Eo
EJC 2010 day 5 – Wednesday 28th July
EJC 2010 day 6 – Thursday 29th July
EJC 2010 day 7 – Friday 30th July
EJC 2010 day 8 – Gala Show

On my blog:
EJC 2010 day 0 – setting up the festival site.
EJC 2010 day 1 – Saturday 24th July
EJC 2010 day 2 – Sunday 25th July – Opening Show, Marco and Wes
EJC 2010 day 3 – Monday 26th July
EJC 2010 day 4 – Open stage show and Compagnie Ea Eo
EJC 2010 day 5 – Wednesday 28th July
EJC 2010 day 6 – Thursday 29th July
EJC 2010 day 7 – Friday 30th July
EJC 2010 day 8 – Gala Show

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Edit: I think youtube converted the bitrate of the music in this video badly, and the sound suffers. Next time I’ll upload a 41,000 video instead of a 48,000 video.

In my list of 50 goals and plans for 2010 I wrote “6.1 Write an album’s-worth of new songs and record them by the end of the year” which I’m interpreting as one song per month.

On Thursday night I started writing this song, and came up with the chords and melody. I had no clue what the song would be about, so I filled in a few lines with “The chorus is the inverse of the verse” and “The middle eight at first seems unique.” Then I went to sleep, and woke up on Friday with the thought, “I’m going to write the entire song about itself.”

So I did. I named it “This”, probably the most self-referential name for anything, with the subtitle “new song for May”, which it also is, and is also a line in the song too.

I decided to record this one properly, instead of just playing it on the guitar or piano. Because it’s a song about writing a pop song, I went for a quite modern pop production, with full auto-tune and dance beats. It took about 3 hours on Friday evening, when I could have been doing something more important, but I really like the end result. Maybe I’ll actually write some real words for the song, but I doubt it.

And today I went for yet another cycle around the old airport, so thought I might as well include a 2050m bike ride video as the official music video.

Enjoy!

Many people are talking about privacy issues on Facebook, and I agree with most of their points. I’m not unhappy with Facebook or any privacy issues, because I’ve always considered everything I do or say or put online to be 100% public immediately. I’ve always used my own name when signing up to any internet service, so whatever I do can alway be tied back to me.

But then again, I don’t have a real job, so have no work colleges or employers to find out about my strange hobbies. Nor do I have children, so I don’t have any worries in that direction.

Anyway, there’s been a lot talk about controlling the privacy of each update, photo or comment someone posts on Facebook. Controlling who can or may or will see that post is impossible, and Facebook switched the default from “Only friends can see this” to “Everyone can see this.” No wonder it is confusing.

There have been various discussions about alternatives to Facebook, including the crowd-funded Diaspora. On TWiT, a pundit talked about controlling who sees what in a hypothetical social website by using ever widening circles of trust. On one extreme there is “everyone” and at the other extreme is “Just my closest friends.” In between would be “other friends”, “work people,” and maybe “stranger I met in a bar, made my friend, but can’t work out how to unfired them.”

While this is a simple idea, I think it is slightly too simple to be useful. What I’d like to see is “Social Venn.”

The idea is that each time you click a “Submit” or “Post” button, a window opens with a colorful Venn Diagram. Who can see the post depends on where you click the diagram.

The above image is what my Social Venn would look like based on the groups I put my contacts into on Facebook. To be clear, those not in the Friends segment aren’t people who I don’t consider friends, but if I wanted to send out a message about something personal, I’m not sure if the listeners to my podcast are the right target.

So, you see this diagram, and click the parts of the graph who you want to see what post. Not just one part, but two or three or four parts.

Alternatively, you can “Select All” and then (maybe) right click to pick which sections of your Social Venn will not, nor ever, see what you post. A post might go to all of your closest friends, but even if one of your work colleges is your closest friend, if you say “Not for work people” they’ll never see that post, even if it goes to all your other friends and they are discussing it among themselves like mad.

That’s my idea.

Making and displaying the Social Venn would be a fun and simple coding project, though not one I’m particularly interested in doing myself. The idea is actually one Facebook could implement, as it uses tagging and not folders to organize friends. If Facebook or Diaspora want to pay me to consult on their platforms, I’d be happy to take your money.

Or maybe this could be tied into a third party program or service, and aggregate your posts out to Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. I’d love to have this kind of control over my social internetting. If you are working on something like this, I’d be happy to take your money too.

I’m home in Berlin, and I’m pretty busy. I’ll upload some photos and videos and podcasts this week, but for now here’s a photo me in one of my natural states.

It’s an experiment with a new podcast format. I post photos of where I’ve been and what I’ve seen, but talk about it in an mp3 file. The two may or may not refer to each other closely, depending on what there is to talk about compared to what to see. This may or may not work, but at the moment the only plan is to see if it’s a good link between my various hobbies — podcasting, photography, travel, blogging, etc.

The podcast feed is: LATW RSS

I’ll schedule the next episodes to go live automagically once a day over the next few weeks. And even if you don’t want to listen to the podcast, each post will have loads of nice photos to look at (which is the reason I’ve not been posting many photos to the blog either).

Last year’s travels in 4 minutes:

1 – Work and travel:
1.1 – Keep working on cruise ships, though structuring the my time away better than last year to maximize time in Berlin/with friends/doing my own thing.
1.2 – I already know I’ll be visiting, on various cruises, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, India, and Dubai for the first time, along with a few other places. I may be going to Antarctica again too.
1.3 – On top of work travel, spend some frequent flier points and travel home from various gigs independently. In this way I hope to spend a week in New Zealand, and a week in Japan.
1.4 – Release my International Juggler 2009 video, the one I’ve been working on for the last year, which features me juggling in every country/place I visited.
1.5 – Shoot, edit, and release International Juggler 2010, a similar video as above, of all the places I visit in 2010. I have some ideas about how to make this different/better than the 2009 video, but I don’t need to think about that too much for the next few weeks.
1.6 – Go to Poland. I live really close, but have never been. What’s up with that?
1.7 – Go to the Berlin, British, and European juggling conventions. And a convention in September/October too. Maybe the Turkish again, maybe another.
1.8 – Spend four to six weeks in New York. I’ve visited the city for a few weeks, but I want to get to know the city better. I hear so many people from there talk about it, and I want to experience it all first hand.
1.9 – Maybe, if I can sort the dates right, I might go to DragonCon, to nerd out with the scifi and podcasting geeks.

2 – Juggling:
2.1 – Keep improving my solo shows and performing skills.
2.2 – Work on my Room show project, a juggling theater show. I plan to have all the set building work complete by March, and 20-30 minutes complete by May.
2.3 – Perform a short version of the Room Show at the Berlin Juggling Convention in June.
2.4 – Have an hour show finished by October, and put on a series of shows in my own home for invited audiences.
2.5 – Finish other juggling routines I’m working on at the moment.
2.6 – Run the British Young Juggler of the Year show for the sixth year. Also do a series of online workshops for those taking part, in attempt to raise the quality of the acts. Nobody has won a Gold Award yet!
2.7 – I’m in charge of the Open Stages at the EJC in Finland. That means seven or eight nights of zero stress and easy work as my superior organization skills result in everything running smoothly, and every night’s show rocking. Or so I hope.
2.8 – Generally rock out playing combat.
2.9 – Beat Jochen in the final of a Fight Night 3 Club Combat tournament. I’ve won a tournament we both entered before, but I wasn’t the one to knock him out.
2.10 – Release some more Juggling Podcasts.
2.11 – Release some interesting juggling videos on YouTube (I have a few good ideas).
2.12 – Juggle 9 clubs for 19 passes each with Pola.
2.13 – Also, depending other work commitments, I might enter Britain’s Got Talent. If I do have the time, the final decider will be the question “Will this cause me any stress at all?” At the moment I have very little stress in my life, by design, so I might as well keep it that way.

3 – Writing:
3.1 – Keep writing for this blog.
3.2 – Finish editing and release (and decide on final titles for) on my two works-in-progress novels: Combat Story and Monster Story. Completion dates: January and March.
3.3 – Have another run at Human Danger (working title), the novel I began but didn’t complete in 2009. I have a feeling this will be a longer-term project than just this year though.
3.4 – Research, outline, and write another novel I’m giving the working title “Arc of Life.” It’ll be a fantasy novel set in a world of strange creatures and magic. My fiction writing style at the moment is very much a “just get on with the plot” kind of thing, which means a lot is packed into a very small package. This works well for near-future science fiction thrillers. Writing fantasy set in a strange new world with a completely different history and landscape than our own will hopefully force me to concentrate more on descriptive scene-setting writing, rather than character, dialogue, and action.
3.5 – Start work on the final novel in the Minding Tomorrow world.
3.6 – Do an audio recording of one of my novels. As long as I keep my novels short, this could be a good way to get more readers/listeners. I’d need to buy a new microphone though.

4 – Podcasting:
4.1 – Keep reading science fiction novels and reviewing them for the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast. I also plan to review any fantasy novels I read.
4.2 – Be a guest on other podcasts. I know I’ll be back on the SFFaudio podcast at some point.
4.3 – Doing some more Juggling Podcasts. I really miss the interviews I did with other jugglers.
4.4 – I’m thinking of starting a new podcast about traveling. I enjoy posting photos here on the blog, but I see and do lots of things that I never write about here. For example, I have a lot to say about a place like Punta Arenas, but it’s not the kind of thing that would work as a blog post. I’m thinking of doing a trip-by-trip podcast, or just saving up enough observations and stories and experiences to fill 45 minutes, and releasing it whenever.
4.5 – If I’m going to do this, I’m going to buy a portable mp3 recorder with a mic attachment, so I can record easily while hiking across a city or up a hill.
4.6 – Thinking about that last point, what I should actually do is see if my iPhone would work just as well, as then I need to carry one less gadget.

5 – Photography:
5.1 – I have no plans for my photography. It’s the only hobby I have which has no performance aspect at all (I even podcast about my reading), so there is no pressure to do anything at all. I’ll just keep carrying my camera, and keep improving my skills and artistry.
5.2 – But I will try to keep posting photos to my blog.
5.3 – And I’m going to buy a new zoom lens, because the autofocus on my current (really shitty) zoom lens is broken.
5.4 – And I’ll probably buy another two or three camera bags.

6 – Music:
6.1 – Write an album’s-worth of new songs and record them by the end of the year.
6.2 – Write the music for Room.
6.3 – Buy a five string bass guitar and learn to rock.

7 – Other goals:
7.1 – Get better at speaking German. I plan to hire a personal tutor, as regular classes don’t work with my schedule.
7.2 – Try to spend a few hours a week in the gym whenever I’m on a cruise ship. I spend way more time than that in the bars, and in the jacuzzis, and eating, and other unhealthy things. A few hours in the gym will help me keep my fitness levels up.
7.3 – Spend more time with friends.
7.4 – Make new friends.
7.5 – Have sex.
7.6 – Maybe buy a new laptop. This macbook has served me well for almost two years, but I’m doing more and more music and video and photo editing, and it’s struggling a bit. I think I’ll buy a full spec 13″ MacBook Pro, and upgrade to a solid state hard drive for super quick load times.

8 – Consumption of entertainment:
8.1 – Catch up with Dexter.
8.2 – Watch more than the first episode of Battlestar Galactica. I’ve had the season 1 box set in my cabin(s) for the past eight weeks, and haven’t watched a single episode.
8.3 – Play more Natural Selection and, if it is ever released, Natural Selection 2. I might need more memory for my PC though.

I think that’s about it! The most important things to me out of all these are continued success with my job and the Room show. Unfortunately these two are at odds, as one requires me to travel, and the other requires me to be in Berlin.

Or maybe, looking at it glass full, the two goals create a balance, so when I’m not doing one, I should be working on the other.

Or maybe, if I work hard enough, the Room show can become my job by the end of the year, and then I don’t have to worry. So, if I have nothing to show for the Room project by April, you have permission to slap me hard.

And so, after making a list of all I’ve accomplished in 2009, and seeing how long it is, I’m very proud of my productivity for the year.

In the Win Column.

Work and travel:
- Got a lot better at performing. I got some really good compliments from people who saw me perform my show on a cruise ship back in 2007, and now again in 2009, and they said I’d really improved. This makes me feel good.
- Earned more money than I’ve been able to spend.
- Visited about 45 countries and territories, including many countries I’ve never visited before 2009. For example, I’d never visited Africa before 2009, and now I’ve been to Tanzania, Kenya, Morocco, and Egypt.
- Had really good summer trip to France, Spain, and Portugal.
- Did some good shows at street show festivals in Germany and Austria.
- Made an awesome video of me juggling in all the above countries, a video I’ll be releasing in January. I’ll release this very soon.
- Attended TAMLondon.
- And of course, while it isn’t a “productivity” or “accomplishment” thing, I’ve met loads of people along the way and made many new friends.

Juggling:
- Playing lots of combat.
- Did no performing or hosting at the Berlin convention. This was the plan, and I managed it for the first time in five years.
- Organized the British Young Juggler of the Year competition for the fifth year in the row.
- Hosted a good show at the EJC.
- After wanting to go for the past three years, I finally got to the Sundance Turkish Juggling Festival. I performed my full show, exactly the same as I normally do it for non-jugglers, and it went down really well. This means a lot to me, as I never want to make juggling acts for anyone else but me, and if I enjoy it, I think both juggling and non-juggling audiences should like it too.
- Created four new juggling routines and acts. Most importantly, these acts use juggling equipment I already carry in my case. This means I’m progressively taking less equipment for more minutes of material.
- Released loads of videos on YouTube, including magnet juggling, air bounces, squeeze catches, act videos, and more. Also I released a few 10 minute workshop videos about juggling.

Writing:
- Started yet another blog, and kept posting without many breaks.
- Released my first novel “Minding Tomorrow” online for free, as an eBook. I got loads of great feedback about it.
- Completed two other novels, though I’m still editing both of them. I should release them both over the next few months.
- Started writing a third novel, and while I didn’t complete it, I did learn a lot.
- Wrote a load of articles and workshops for the Kaskade magazine.
- After a year of reading, thinking, and studying, wrote my first Higher Biblical Criticism essay.

Reading and podcasting:
- Read about 40 novels.
- Reviewed all but one or two of those novels for the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast.
- Joined other podcasts as a guest, including the Friday Night Party Line, The Sofanauts, and SFFaudio. This is always a lot of fun, and I’d like to do more in the future.

Photography:
- This has become much more of a hobby for me in the past year, and I’m becoming more and more impressed with the images I’m capturing.
- I kept a photo blog at the EJC and the Turkish Juggling Festival, both of which I really enjoyed.
- I’ve had quite a few images picked for the sosauce.com photo of the day.

Music:
- Wrote six or seven songs.
- Recorded four music tracks.
- Bought a new guitar.
- Performed my very first solo singing and guitar playing set.

In the Fail Column.

- Back injury put me out of action for two months at the start of the year.
- Getting dumped by my girlfriend in August.
- Only having gay men hit on me since I’ve been single.
- Spending too much time away from Berlin, which means I don’t see as much of my friends as I’d like, and the projects I work on at home suffer.
- Not improving much with my German speaking skills, even though I can carry off simple conversations.
- Not progressing very far with my Room Project, a new juggling theater show that has been in the works for two years now.
- Not winning the Fight Night 3 Club Combat Tournaments at either the Berlin or European juggling conventions. I lost to Jochen in the final both times.
- After winning the 3 club combat in the official EJC games in 2008, I only came third in 2009. Come to think of it, I might have won the BJC games combat, but can’t remember.
- New Years Resolution: learning to touch type. I didn’t do this. I find the hand position on my laptop too difficult, as I end up resting them on the mouse pad. And also there’s this really hot spot under the heel of my left hand…

Also, left over from mine and Pola’s “10 Personal Juggling Goals for 2009″ list that we did in the end of 2008 Juggling Podcast, here are some that we failed:
- 9 clubs, 18 passes each.
- Motion tracking routines. I worked on this a bit, but the return on investment probably isn’t very high.
- Host shows together.
- Perform on cruise ships together.
- More Juggling Podcasts.

Meanwhile, in 2009, I’ve been enjoying:
- The computer game Natural Selection.
- The TV show Dexter.
- Watching Tennis and American Football.
- The following podcasts (in alphabetical order): Astronomy Cast, The Bible Geek, The Bugle, Collings and Herrin, Fighting Talk, Filmspotting, gadget, GeekNights, The Good Atheist, In Our Time, Little Atoms, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo, More or Less, Norman Centuries, Point of Inquiry, Richard Herring’s As It Occurs to me, Science Fiction and Politics, SFFaudio, The Skeptic’s Guide, Skeptoid, The Sofanauts, This Week in Google, This Week in Photography, and Writing Excuses. I listened to other podcasts, but not every episode, and not regularly.

So that’s my showing for 2009! Tomorrow I’ll post my goals and plans for 2010 and the years ahead.

Although I’m sure I’ll post again before the new year.

My show is isn’t really choreographed that tightly and the tricks I attempt normally depend on the crowd, conditions, and how confident I’m feeling. How did you go about constructing your diabolo act? A list of tricks you know you wanted to get in or just trying to think what would look smooth?

I wrote the following reply (and see the original post for a few more insights):

Hi Marky J,

I was planning on writing up some workshops for those taking part in next year’s BYJOTY show, with a view to improving the standard of acts and awarding the first ever Gold Award. You asking this was a good motivation to get something about diabolo routines out there. Thanks for the inspiration!

Luke B’s Guide to Creating a Diabolo Routine:

The biggest secret in any kind of professional/successful juggling/diabolo routine is noticeable variation. So many routines I’ve seen go at a single pace, with long stretches of tediously similar tricks.

I created my act by doing (very roughly) the following:

- I wrote down a list of TYPES of tricks. Do it yourself; you’ll get something like this…
high throws (with something underneath)
diabolo circling a body part
knots
grinds
suicides
diabolo movement tricks
stupid tricks
vertax
etc.

- Within each category, write down ten tricks you can do simply, ten times in a row, without drops or tangles. If they are tricks you invented yourself, so much the better.

- From each of those ten tricks, discard seven, leaving the three most interesting. They should each be different enough so that when you do all three in a row, an unknowledgeable audience will be able to see three distinct techniques. And yet, as they are the same type, they obviously fit together in a natural way.

- Put the sets of tricks in an interesting order.

*stop* A bit (a lot, actually) about ordering tricks in routines:

- Each prop has an “essence”, a natural state in which it falls.
Clubs do single flips in the air.
Balls travel in simple paths.
Rings fly sideways to the audience.
Diabolos spin and move in a plane.
More importantly, diabolos are NOT tied to the string like yo-yos.
- When beginning a routine, you must first establish this essence with your audience.
Eg: With clubs, don’t start with reverse spins or flat throws.
More pertinent Eg: With a diabolo, make sure you do some THROWS near the start of the routine. Get the damn thing OFF THE STRING!
- Also, dramatic tension is created when an object is airborne, or in a motion that isn’t assured to land perfectly and safely. This is why juggling is intrinsically interesting to watch, and club swinging isn’t (sorry club swingers).
- Work progressively from the “home sate” of a prop to ever more different and extreme states.
- Each new set of skills should introduce a new concept or element. My routine goes like this:
Diabolo not attached to string (throw from hand)
Diabolo can move side to side, up and down, and in circles.
Can leave the string (throws).
Can be bounced on the string up high.
Can do stuff low to the ground too (I even say this when doing a “talky” show).
I can do it standing sideways (ok, not that interesting)
Round a body part (leg is really visible, and I keep this up for the first applause of the act).
Turn in circle.
OH s**t I LET GO OF THE STICK!
Pause for applause.
Cats cradle.
Pirouette
double pirouette.
Stick grind.
Two handed whip catch (used to make a point about having my arms crossed, but audiences didn’t get it, so now I move on quickly).
Pause for applause.
Ok… I can do stupid stuff using my mouth.
String around neck (done kneeling down for added height variation).
Magic knot.
Long setup with a wait… what’s coming next?
Blind behind the back one handed whip catch! On the F**KING MUSIC TOO!

Ok, that was a big trick. And how did it end? With the diabolo STOPPED and MOTIONLESS. This is the first time I’ve REALLY broken away from the essence of the diabolo. This is a VERY clear sign to the audience that they should be clapping around about now, because there is nothing else for them to be doing. The diabolo is no longer the center of attention, there’s only me, on stage, and I’m lapping it up.

Right… now in my talking version of this routine I say “Two more styles of one diabolo to finish” and go on to do:
One handed diabolo (infinite suicide stuff after a setup)
Oh, to make it really clear I’m only using one hand I take off my hat with the spare hand. If people weren’t clapping already, they do when I show them this. Why? It’s not any more difficult… but if you can guess why, you’re already starting to understand performing.
“Drunken style diabolo” (otherwise known as vertex)
Again I end right on the music. Ending a section or the routine on a musical cue is more important than doing any single trick to a musical cue.

*End bit about ordering tricks!*

- So, now you have a loooong list of tricks, maybe 30 or 35. Doing all of them will take maybe five minutes, and you want your first routine to last, at most, 3 minutes.

- Do all the tricks in order. You’ll naturally find some nice transitions between the different skills.

- Don’t make all the transitions TOO smooth. At some points break, let the audience understand that what is coming next is going to be new and different.

- If you drop on a trick more than twice in row, remove it from the routine.

- If a trick is taking too long and you don’t find it different/impressive enough, remove it from the routine.

- Keep removing tricks from the routine until each different style of trick is expressed as clearly and as cleanly as you can possibly show it.

Ok, at this point you’re really starting to get somewhere! Want to go further?

- Find a piece of music that has some clearly audible changes along the way (selecting suitable music is a whole post in itself).

- Play the track on repeat.

- Run through the routine over and over, and you’ll soon find yourself matching the different parts of the music up to the different sections in your routine.

- To make things fit better, swap around the sections, or extend some tricks.

- Whatever you do, make sure you get your first round of applause NO LATER than 45 seconds into the routine, and no earlier than maybe 30 seconds. Do this by repeating a trick until you get them to clap, or stopping (completely stopping, as in; catch the diabolo in your hand) after a trick that looks different from everything that has gone before.

- Make sure the last trick is easy pleasy lemon squeezy. You should already have removed any hard tricks from the routine, but dropping on that last catch is über-embarrassing. By “hard” I mean hard for YOU. They can be the most technically advanced tricks in the world ever to be performed on stage ever (the opposite of my show) but dropping with a one diabolo routine is unforgivable (saying that, I did drop the last time I performed this routine, but had a spare out of my prop case within two seconds).

That’s it for now! Maybe that’s a lot to think about, but I go through a similar process with every juggling routine I make now, and it serves me very well indeed.

There is, of course, a huge amount more I could say about routining, but I’ll save those for future posts.