The Fredösphere

Blogging is light as I prepare to lead my website to a new server, one with a decent amount of disk space.  (Thanks to my friend Jeremy for letting me squat on his territory.) It appears that Comcast will stop hardening its heart and let me go, now that the Angel of Death has taken the first-born of every Comcast family.  Or maybe it was the frogs, or the rivers of blood -- but in any case, I've done bumping my head against the 20-meg limit that Comcast imposes on this website they gave me free (with the purchase of a cable modem, of course).  Maybe I should of known better, but I never guessed a collection of mere html files could grow so big after three years.

One very nice benefit of moving is that my domain, fredosphere.com, will at last persist in the navigation bar at the top of your browser after the redirect, so when you change your bookmarks, it will be (I hope) the one and only time you'll ever need to do it.

I should also mention the other reason I am not blogging so much lately.  I have spent a lot of time lately completing my first serious forray in fiction writing.  It seems the prose bladder inside my mind is emptied when I work on my story, leaving nothing for this site. One topic I would like to consider here relates to the motivation I am feeling for my new artistic outlet.  Is it the thrill of the new? Are the tools for cranking out prose (keyboard, word processor) better developed than those for creating music manuscript?  Or -- frightening though it may be to consider it -- did I miss my calling by pursuing music composition? All I can say is, I find writing a story to be about ten times easier than writing a choral piece.

There are lots of possible reasons.  I write choral music with plenty of counterpoint. Maybe I would have an easier time if I wrote songs for soloist and piano.  (But I don't want to.)  Maybe I make things unnecessarily complex emotionally with my music; I do know I am weirdly free of aspirations to greatness in my story writing.  (I'd be happy to be labeled a pulp sci-fi author.)  Maybe I'm not a natural musician; certainly, reading a book is fun for me, but practicing an instrument (or -shudder!- performing) is work I tend to avoid.  Again, maybe there are too few composers to justify the development of good music-editing tools (or maybe I haven't found them).  Maybe I'm not as experienced criticising prose as I am music, and I'm living in a fool's paradise.  Or maybe -- just maybe -- those who can, compose, and those who can't, write prose.  (And I am finding out I am numbered among the can'ters.)  I do know that, after 90 minutes of writing prose late at night, I feel like I'm just getting started; after about 45 minutes of composing, I'm looking for excuses to quit.

This situation is disturbing.

Labels: Composer, Creativity