Showing posts with label publishing deal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing deal. Show all posts

Wednesday, 9 May 2012

All quiet on the Central Eastern front


The sunshine has come back to Prague!  Hurrah!  I have felt all the better for it, after a confusing and challenging whistlestop London visit where the weather was predictably dull.  I am so grateful for sunshine and warm weather these days, as though my life depends on it, as there seems to be a very quiet 'calm before the storm' theme developing in my life now that I'm back from the epic road trip.

I'm deliberating many things and trying to work out where to start.  First and foremost, I need responses to my ads for offering Skype meetings for anyone with a music career that needs bolstering.  Secondly, I'm trying to pitch article ideas to magazines and am getting stuck in a chicken and egg situation as to who to approach first where an interview is involved.  Thirdly, I'm wondering if I should sign this momentous publishing deal that would last twelve years (that's why it's momentous, not because of the money they're offering of course!) because if they sit on it and do nothing for twelve years, that's my music career well and truly finished and nailed in its coffin with a Black and Decker power drill.

I am imploring the universe like never before because something has GOT TO CHANGE and significantly so, because I have done the work of researching new things, taking new actions, freeing up time for new and better work and now, comes that deafening silence of the wait to see if this time it will be different.  Gabby Bernstein, a spiritual guru type, but not as annoying as some of the usual crowd, said,

"Those who are certain of the outcome can afford to wait and can afford to wait without anxiety."

So I shall not worry and fret.  I shall take the steps I need to take and then switch off my insistent brain and do something I enjoy instead.  I am watching my world get smaller around me here in Prague, as my realisation that I cannot live here forever finally dawns on me, coupled with the realisation that I cannot return to London either and I stand alone in my little waiting room because I don't know what else is left to do.  I felt that emptiness and pang of being "cut-off" here again today and was going to (dangerous though it was) flick through a few magazines in the bookshop I always go to just to maybe cheer myself up, only to find that the magazine section no longer exists and the magazine racks have been simplified and put right behind the cashier desks now.  

So there will be no more taking magazines up to the cafe to read and then put back because I can't afford them.  It's like a strict school mistress has decreed this terribly naughty behaviour a nasty habit that must be eradicated.  I know I want to move to the next level and stop wasting money on overpriced imported magazines or magazine subscriptions that never arrive because of my remote and foreign address and get myself an iPad and a subscription to the online versions of my favourite publications, but I'm waiting to see if that can even be possible within this year.  Have I risked too much by whittling my accounts down to nothing due to going on this road trip?  Have I been too trusting that new actions will yield new results?

I honestly don't know the answers.  I don't feel anxious because I am sure that I have done the best I could, and I wouldn't have done things any differently given a second chance on the last few months' activities, but there is a sadness, a loneliness, indeed a questioning of my relevance to the world while in this waiting room-type silence.  I can only keep going and feel that sadness (instead of frantically trying to do something about it) and hope that something better really is just around the corner.

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

I'm back!


The routine has fallen out of this blog - of that I am acutely aware - but I am going through a whole host of changes and hope to bring that to this blog in due course, so for now, please accept my apologies and see this site as a 'site under re-construction' deal in the meantime.  It is not that I have lost interest in writing, rather that other interests and necessities (such as earning money) have been tugging at my shirt hem like a three year old needing urgent attention.  

First and foremost, I've been adjusting to being back in Prague, then had a flying visit to London which threw me in terms of climate and didn't help get me back to a sensible sleep pattern.  (Not to mention all this airport stress getting too much.  Though I got a rather nice kind of over-clothes-massage from the security woman in San Francisco.  She said I'd been randomly selected for it and it was, "My lucky day".  The architect stared at this potentially arousing intimate pat-down as she reached around my back to check I wasn't storing a bomb under my bra fastener and, when finished asked me, "did you enjoy that?!"  But most people are finding all these airport checks and restrictions less than amusing: see this )

And now Prague time beckons because all my meet-ees who didn't want to start back immediately due to a couple of Bank Holiday days here that meant everyone took time off, are now booked in and I am down to my last 500 crowns in all Christendom until I get paid and have thus taken to eating sweet corn out of a tin mixed with mayonnaise as my evening meal.  And I'm worn out from the trying to squeeze in an important couple of meetings while in London and slept longer this morning as a result.  So I'm still thrown as to what time zone I'm on and will somehow have to manage to get up and leave the house at 7.30am tomorrow for my first meeting!  Phew!

The good news is, there are positive things afoot, from the spectre of a bit of freelance writing (that will materialise, won't it?) to a possible music publishing deal which is waiting to be assessed by the MU that I've had to re-join in order to access their free "Contract advisory service" which could threaten to send me overdrawn if I don't get some Skype meet-ees in London or a substantial article payment in £s soon.  So I'm on the edge of the platform again financially, but the memory of San Francisco sunshine and palm trees is keeping me optimistic.  For now.

In the meantime, I hope to make the necessary changes to this blog in due course, as well as fill you in on the rest of the road trip experience as and when I can.  And when I get my new website page up and running, you'll be the first to know!  Just for now, I'll introduce the first change:  henceforth the architect shall be known as my cowboy, purely because of the acquisition of this hat:

I can't prove to you how brilliantly it suits him with a photo of him in the hat because it would break his anonymity, but take it from me, all who've seen him in it attest to the fact that he was surely born to be a cowboy!