I hope you can see the map above. On this new work trip I get to visit quite a few new places. Faroe Islands, Greenland and Newfoundland. I hope I have chance to see and do some interesting things. In Iceland I hope to re-visit that very ashy volcano. Other things I want to achieve:
- Good photos.
- Get some videos of me juggling in amazing places.
- Write a song for June.
- Continue writing my novel.
- Get round to writing blog posts that include the photos I took in Istanbul, Croatia, Montenegro, Venice, St. Tropez, Pisa, Olympia and… um… I think that’s it.
- Record a review of a book I finished TWO WEEKS ago.

I think that’s it.

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!

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.

Here is the song from “April” — meaning I didn’t write a song in April, and I’m now catching up. I wrote this song last night, and recorded it just this afternoon. I’ve not played the guitar much, due to being away all of April, and my fingers now hurt quite a bit.

The song is called Work It Out Yourself, and was inspired by someone on the internet asking how me to do something quite simple. It made me think of the XKCD “Tech Support Cheat Sheet” comic.

So I wrote a song, not about computers specifically, but about the idea of doing the work yourself, so next time you have the same problem you’ll just know what to do.

The song is less than a day old, so I’m sure it will change and improve over time. Maybe, with a bit more practice, I’ll even be able to sing it properly.

I actually listened to all the music in my library again last November and December, not sorted in any way, I just made sure I listened to everything within a month.

Over the past few weeks I did something similar, and finished this morning. I listened to my iTunes music library, sorted by track length. I had a lot fun, certainly more than the previous times I’ve listened, as I’ve deleted all the duplicates, and got rid of lots of music I actually didn’t like.

At the end of my post about this last year I said: “I think I’ll now do it again, but sort by track length. I’ll start with the longest tracks, and end up with the shortest.” I forgot I wrote that though, and started with the shortest.

Some notes:
- The first track was a 5 second piece of silence which I use in my show.
- The last track ran 12:44, Slow Movement from the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack.
- Lots of short tracks are used on albums as filler bits between other tracks.
- Indie bands often have a minute long piece of music on an album.
- Sound track music can be any length. The final ten tracks were all sound track pieces or classical music.
- Techno, drum and bass, and other electronic music hardly showed up until I got to 5 minute-long tracks.
- Final tracks of albums are often artificially long, with a few minutes of silence before a “hidden” track.
- This method of sorting created a far more random mix that sorting by track name.

I don’t think I have much else to say about it. It’s just a fun project, and I recommend you do something similar. Album by album is good, but this way different tracks stand out.

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.

Here is the song from March. It’s called Out of Reach and Out of Sight.

It’s been a slow burner, as far as writing is concerned, and I don’t consider it quite finished as yet. I had the music composed by the end of March, and had the feel for the lyrics, but I hit a wall. I had lots of inspiration on different topics, but none fit this music. The current lyrics are about a secret relationship, but as it sometimes takes me years to finish the lyrics of a song, it might not stay that way.

I recorded it now because I’m leaving this ship tomorrow, going home, and then taking all of May off work. That means I’ll be back to the guitar, and have no easy access to a piano. I wrote the February song on a piano, then recorded it with a guitar. This time I wanted to capture how the song sounds in my head when I wrote it.

Actually, in my head there are drums and bass too. And someone better at singing than I am. And a better pianist too.

Maybe I should start a band.

I went back and numbered my goals and plans for 2010, just so I can keep track of them better.

“6.1 – Write an album’s-worth of new songs and record them by the end of the year.”

I take 6.1 to mean a new song every month. Here’s a song I wrote in February. I wrote it on a piano on the last cruise I did, and relearned it again on my guitar this morning. It’s called “Memory/Confusion”, and is about the dual set of memories you take from a past relationship, how the good and the bad become more and more distant from each other over time. Each memory floats further and further to the extremes, until the entire relationship is split into black and white, with two different stories running parallel in your mind. One story is the bad, and leads to the breakup. The other story is the good, and leads to a hypothetical perfect future together.

The truth, of course, falls somewhere in the middle.

Tonight something else happened for the first time:
4. A link shows up on the bottom of the video saying “Buy this track on iTunes.”

And I bought an entire album. Yeah, the first time I’ve ever been able to buy music within two clicks of a mouse from Youtube, I did so.

Generally any time I listen to music, if there was a “buy it now” option, which will get it onto my iPod within two clicks, I’d be an easy, easy, easy target. Why doesn’t the record industry understand this?

This is the culmination of 12 months of traveling and juggling. The see the page on my website that explains pretty much everything about the video.

This is a song I started writing on a beach in Ireland, back in 2006. I only just finished it today. One of my goals for 2010 is to write and record an album’s worth of songs, so to get myself into the project I decided to actually finish writing this one.

Here are some lyrics:
Watching the sun go down
Pretend there’s no one else around
Sitting Hand in hand
Pushing toes into the sand

And the birds skip out of reach
As the waves break on the beach
And the wind is blowing free
And sun kisses the sea

And there’s a whisper, hardly heard
It’s wonderful
Wonderful

A reflection in the eye
Of the sun at the edge of the sky
The blanket keeps the cold at bay
It’s the perfect way to end the day

As the sun dips out of sight
And the evening turns to night
And the clouds part overhead
And the stars shine down instead

And there’s a whisper, hardly heard,
It’s wonderful

Walking home now in the moonlight
There’s no hurry as the night’s sublime
Shooting star seen close to midnight
Make a wish, and make it good
Make it right
Make it count this time

Time is on your side
Time, time is on your side

And then finally fall asleep
And the dream is good to keep
And the dawn begins to break
And two lovers stir and wake

And there’s a whisper, hardly heard
you’re wonderful.

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.