If Chiptune Chaos is teaching me anything, it’s that I’m not particularly knowledgeable about music. I thought I knew a fair bit, or at least enough to be getting along with, but it turns out that I’m finding it much harder than I expected to work out what’s likely to work without just laying it all out and seeing what it sounds like. I’ve been reading up, during my slow periods at work, on various aspects of music theory; I think I’d like to do something a bit more jazzy, a bit more deliberate in terms of what chords I’m using and so on. The result, hopefully, will be something a bit better; ‘chaos’ has kind of been the operative word in my musical style so far.

Meanwhile, I’m having trouble getting motivated enough to do much of anything. Depression and a general existential malaise will do that, unfortunately. I’m enjoying doing Let’s Watch Tenga Toppa Gurren Lagann, but knowing that I really need to do the write-up as soon as I’ve watched the episode makes it kind of tricky to find a convenient time to start watching. I did try making notes as I was watching, so I’d be able to write it up later, but it ended up taking about twice as long to get through the episode because of how often I was pausing to jot something down – what with it being in Japanese, I can’t look away to write and still be able to understand what’s going on, so I have to pause each time I’m scribbling.

Due to the aforementioned lack of motivation, I’m conscious that I haven’t put out anything on here in a few days, which is longer than I wanted to go because I’m aware that I risk losing momentum and just giving up if I start letting myself take breaks. I’ll just have to make myself bloody do it.

Similarly, I need to start taking that stance with Stargirl, which I’ve got a self-imposed (well, fiancée-imposed) deadline of Easter to have the revised second draft finished by. I’m about 40,000 words into the edit, and the first draft was around 70,000, so it should be possible, but I’m concerned that the way things are going, it might end up being significantly longer. Plus, I just… well, haven’t made anything happen as far as movement on that for a while.

The long and short of it all, then, is basically that I JUST NEED TO MAKE MYSELF GET SHIZ DONE. More on that situation as it unfolds.