Guaranteed to never go platinum

I can't believe I'm actually trying to write a song.

At the suggestion of Timm, the drummer in Mary's band, I'm trying my hand at a musical composition. For bass guitar and taiko drums. At least, that's the intention; I have no idea what the result will be, haha.

The trick, of course, is that a full-fledged, fully-realized song doesn't just pop out of your head the way Athene popped out of Zeus' (his headaches must have been Olympus-sized....). Unless you're really lucky. So for the past two evenings, in the manner prescribed in a textbook for writing poetry, I've jotted down a drum pattern idea here, a bass riff there. An idea for a sort of call-and-response section between the bass & one or more drums. Just getting stuff down on paper, that kind of thing. Eventually, jamming on some of these riffs might inspire even better ideas.

One of the points the author of the poetry-writing book makes is that one develops a daily routine, a habit of writing. Even if a day's results aren't worth keeping, it's worth it to keep doing it. So it seems with the music-writing. I'm sure this applies to painting or drawing, anything creative...but painting is a laborious, time-consuming process for me. I'm ridiculously deliberate, and hate rushing, so it takes ages to finish anything. I'd rather set aside at least a full hour for painting, after sketching out the general concept, just to get a sort of color framework in place.

I've had a keen interest in art for a number of years, but it wasn't until I enrolled in an introductory course at Cambridge College that I seriously put brush to paper (since we were rank beginners, Prof. Callahan had us buy heavyweight-paper art pads, and we used chalk, charcoal, and acrylic paint). I absolutely loved that course, but I haven't completed many paintings since then. : ( But when can I find the time if I'm playing bass, playing taiko, writing a song, and maintaining a blog? [insert a somewhat resigned shrug here]