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Posts Tagged with “passion”

4. May 2012
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Focus

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Over the past sev­eral months one small word has occu­pied much of my atten­tion: focus. It’s been echo­ing in my mind, fol­low­ing my every thought, some­times with a gen­tle smile, other times with a scold­ing expres­sion. It cer­tainly is one of those lit­tle words with a big atti­tude — once it has become part of your con­scious­ness it’s impos­si­ble to ignore. And that is a good thing, a very good thing indeed.

When I think of my child­hood school days, par­tic­u­larly 5th and 6th grade (which used to be called Ori­en­tierungsstufe in Ger­many, from the word ori­en­ta­tion, as kids are eval­u­ated for future edu­ca­tion, at least that was the intent) one thing stands out in my report card: Thorsten is often absent minded, eas­ily dis­tracted and tends to dis­tract other chil­dren. My teach­ers had a dif­fi­cult time rec­on­cil­ing my over­all behav­ior with my learn­ing poten­tial, not­ing a quite pro­nounced dis­crep­ancy: I tended to be an A– stu­dent in music, arts, writ­ing and math­e­mat­ics, if I could focus long enough. How­ever, I was also diag­nosed as being hyper­ac­tive — usu­ally referred to nowa­days as ADHD (though this post will not be about any clin­i­cal condition).

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25. August 2011
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Knowledge and Interdependence

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Of what ben­e­fit is knowl­edge? That depends on how well one is able to apply it. We can cer­tainly know a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean we are always able, or even will­ing, to prop­erly apply that knowl­edge when called upon. We may know that eat­ing cer­tain foods can trig­ger aller­gic reac­tions but if we are not moti­vated to act upon that knowl­edge we still eat them — and suf­fer the consequences.

In order for knowl­edge to be truly valu­able it has to become part of our moti­va­tion. It has to trickle down from the brain to the heart, so to speak. Only then will we react in accor­dance with that knowledge.

I real­ized this myself once more. There are things I’ve posted in the past talk­ing about what inspires and moti­vates me to write, only to walk away and return to my writer’s block state of mind. We all tend to some­times look in all the wrong places, maybe because it seems to be eas­ier over there, or we don’t really believe what we know to be true or achiev­able. I’ve known since child­hood that the one and only thing that truly inspires me and moti­vates me to write, more pre­cisely write sto­ries, is music. I know that I learned walk­ing by music, my father turn­ing the bal­ance knob on his stereo and lit­tle me fol­low­ing “the sound of music” from one speaker to the other (they stood sev­eral feet apart). I know my mother was and still is a clas­si­cal music expert and she exposed me to the greats of old from an early child­hood on. I’ve been list­ing to them ever since I can think. And as I grew older I didn’t sim­ply buy music and let it play in the back­ground, no, I sat down, 12/13 years old, and delib­er­ately lis­tened to a whole album, mak­ing out all the nuances while all the while dream­ing, trav­el­ing off to far away fan­tas­tic lands. Van­ge­lis, Jean Michel Jarre, Kitaro, Tan­ger­ine Dream, John Williams, Jerry Gold­smith — all of them and many more have taken me on some truly fan­tas­tic journeys.

But it’s not just lis­ten­ing, it’s also very much play­ing myself. While I don’t mas­ter any par­tic­u­lar instru­ment, I can play a bit piano and flute and cer­tainly key­board, I truly enjoy play­ing with sounds and melodies (I am able to read notes though). I’ve been “com­pos­ing” for years, decades at this point in my life. And with that music came the sto­ries: the title theme to a Sci Fi epic I once wanted to write, lit­tle parts for a fan­tas­ti­cal musi­cal, pieces of music for spy thrillers. And then, one day, it took on much more con­crete forms.

In 2006 I’ve pub­lished “Infil­tra­tor — A Music­novel”. It’s a nine track album, a sound­track to an imag­i­nary futur­is­tic thriller. The music inspired the story. None of the tracks were cre­ated delib­er­ately, they were all a result of the music sim­ply com­ing to me. And as I cre­ated track after track I began see­ing a pat­tern and ulti­mately arranged it all into a story of a spe­cial agent uncov­er­ing a devi­ous threat. I cre­ated an out­line of each track’s events. And then I got curi­ous. I signed up with var­i­ous indie music sites and ser­vices pro­mot­ing the album (which I actu­ally made avail­able as a self-published CD). I got good air­play on col­lege radio and even a few local radio sta­tions, had two of my tracks included on a com­pi­la­tion CD in Asia and even made 3rd place in the dance cat­e­gory in the 14th Bill­board World Song­writ­ing Con­test a few years back. I felt truly con­nected to the one thing that inspires me the most. And then I aban­doned it.

It wasn’t because I was afraid of any­thing, the feed­back I had received was extremely pos­i­tive, I’ve had the founder of world famous Ger­man elec­tron­ica group Tan­ger­ine Dream com­mend­ing me on my bud­ding music. I received a very pos­i­tive review by a web­site ded­i­cated to sound­tracks only — quite a feat since “Infil­tra­tor” isn’t truly a sound­track. No, it cer­tainly wasn’t fear. I sim­ply felt over­whelmed, not with suc­cess, it was mod­er­ate, but with the shear amount of work involved in pro­mot­ing my music. I had joined many web­sites, includ­ing the infa­mous MySpace, made some nice con­tacts but ulti­mately felt dis­il­lu­sioned. I came up with the term “Lemon­ade Stand Syn­drome” or LSS for short. What is LSS? Imag­ine two kids sell­ing lemon­ade but doing it where no one can find them. After a while they start sell­ing it to each other. Even­tu­ally all the lemon­ade is gone and the same buck has been passed back and forth. Very dis­ap­point­ing, not to men­tion dev­as­tat­ing to their hum­ble busi­ness. On every site I joined the result was the same: we were all musi­cians look­ing for expo­sure and sim­ply becom­ing each oth­ers’ “fans” with­out ever accom­plish­ing the rea­son for join­ing in the first place — find­ing our audi­ence (aside from the pos­i­tive effect of mak­ing some friends with like minded musi­cians). More than that, all of these sites charge musi­cians to use their ser­vices, most of them being rather use­less truth be told. Thus I closed account after account until I felt like I had never made much progress.

I am cer­tainly not one to be eas­ily dis­cour­aged. But this felt dif­fer­ent. I began to think that being inde­pen­dent was not such a good idea after all. In addi­tion I’ve always been rather shy about my own work, while I can be very sup­port­ive of other people’s work, and all this self pro­mo­tion felt sim­ply odd, des­per­ate in a sense.

The rea­son I am talk­ing about this expe­ri­ence is that I know there are many cre­atives out there who share sim­i­lar feel­ings. Some­times we set out explor­ing, won­der­ing what might be around the next cor­ner, only to find our­selves in an envi­ron­ment that’s not excit­ing at all any­more and we may have to back track and find the path we were orig­i­nally on. The promise of the web is inde­pen­dence from estab­lished struc­tures, like pub­lish­ers, by seem­ingly empow­er­ing us to do it all on our own. And that’s where it gets dif­fi­cult. Because we can’t do it all on our own. The more time we spend on pro­mot­ing our­selves the less time we have to be cre­ative. There is lim­ited time each day and the more time I spend on one task the less I have to spend on another. We are, indeed, not inde­pen­dent at all, we depend on oth­ers. We need peo­ple to do the things we sim­ply don’t have the time or energy to do. We need sup­port. We even need endorse­ment. It feels great to be writ­ten about on the web but it feels even bet­ter to be men­tioned in or on a respected mag­a­zine or site or to be rec­om­mended by a favorite artist of ours.

To recap briefly and to con­nect the dots back to the begin­ning of the post, need­ing to apply knowl­edge for it to be truly valu­able, I have acquired knowl­edge not only of what I am truly pas­sion­ate about but also how one can exude a lot of time and energy on the wrong approach to share that pas­sion. Now I need to ensure I apply that knowl­edge and not repeat past errors while also apply­ing the knowl­edge that, if I want to write sto­ries I need to com­pose music first. Thus I am open to sug­ges­tions — and expe­ri­ences. How has your cre­ative pro­gres­sions been on the web? Please feel free to share your story in the com­ments or point me to your post.

This post was in part moti­vated by Diana Baur’s post titled “the sim­ple art of inter­de­pen­dence” and I highly rec­om­mend read­ing it. My wife Holly Becker also wrote some­thing sim­i­lar a few years back.

And at the very end of this post, reluc­tantly so due to the odd feel­ing asso­ci­ated, I do like to point to my music being avail­able on iTunes and Ama­zon.

15. July 2011
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Love, Passion and Creativity — Part 3

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As I am writ­ing part three now I real­ize how much I do love writ­ing. There is a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between know­ing and under­stand­ing and it can take quite a while before one turns into the other. Despite major lapses and set­back I keep on writ­ing, in one for or another.

In the pre­vi­ous post I’ve left off in 1997. Con­tin­u­ing on to 1998 writ­ing once more became a major part of my life as I met my future wife Holly. Our rela­tion­ship lit­er­ally grew page upon page as we sent lengthy emails to each other — day after day. We have print­outs of many of those mes­sages and they num­ber into the hun­dreds. As a result my Eng­lish skills dras­ti­cally improved which in turn fos­tered our rela­tion­ship. Fast for­ward to 2001 and my move to Amer­ica. As men­tioned prior with that also came a long lost sense of adven­ture and new which quickly rekin­dled my desire to write. I pitched a few arti­cles to local news­pa­pers but was briskly turned down. Worse, my ideas were taken and handed over to in-house writ­ers. That was my first foray into US pub­lish­ing, decid­edly very dif­fer­ent from my expe­ri­ences back in Ger­many (where I was given oppor­tu­ni­ties from the get-go). Nev­er­the­less, I had brought sev­eral of my old arti­cles with me and began trans­lat­ing them into Eng­lish. I also started work­ing for var­i­ous trans­la­tion (or inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion) com­pa­nies and for a short period of time even found my way back in to the video game indus­try as an edi­tor of Ger­man trans­la­tions for var­i­ous games and offi­cial websites.

Even­tu­ally I cre­ated Alternate:Words. At first it served sim­ply as a port­fo­lio of my pre­vi­ous arti­cles and as a means of offer­ing writ­ing and edit­ing ser­vices. How­ever, oppor­tu­ni­ties kept open­ing up in other areas thus I returned to the IT world once more (with a tremen­dously suc­cess­ful expe­ri­ence nev­er­the­less). Dur­ing that time I kept Alternate:Words alive and even­tu­ally some­thing I longed for years ear­lier became a real­ity when blogs appeared. I installed the first ver­sion of Word­Press but didn’t really do much with it until I pub­lished my “Infil­tra­tor”? CD (called a “Music­novel”?) and began post­ing about air­play and reviews of it. After some time I felt I was not really tak­ing advan­tage of the for­mat turned Alternate:Words into what it is today — or was sup­posed to be. If you’ve fol­lowed along over the years you may have seen short sto­ries appear,and dis­ap­pear again, var­i­ous forms of poetry styles posted as well as occa­sional mus­ings. At first I posted quite reg­u­larly, if you look through the archives there are barely any gaps — except for posts I’ve move to other blogs rea­son­ing they’d be bet­ter suited on their own blogs. Thus Fab­ula Bre­vis came and went, a blog I ini­tially filled with short sto­ries and flash fic­tion. Cog­nizant Dreamer has come, and gone again, which was the same con­cept under a more poignant name. I even started a blog for another novel idea I’ve con­ceived the past few years — Lucian the Seeker. And then there is Cin­e­matic Toys meant for post­ings about my toy pho­tog­ra­phy — also in dire need of any updates.

Of course I only shared the most rel­e­vant bits of what has hap­pened over the years and the ques­tion now stands as to why my dream of writ­ing a novel has not pro­gressed much, aside from respon­si­bil­i­ties demand­ing their dues. That leads me back to the begin­ning of this series of posts and the ques­tion of what was the moti­va­tion for that dream? For me the moti­va­tion back then was and still is the desire to explore, to uncover the extra­or­di­nary behind the ordi­nary, the vast realm of imagination.But truth be told I am not a novel reader. In all hon­esty most nov­els sim­ply bore me. I’d say that many decent nov­els would make great short sto­ries as they tend to get lost in details ans lose pace and focus. And that’s the key for my future endeavors.

I grew up read­ing mostly short sto­ries (I actu­ally have read less then two dozen full length nov­els my whole life), watch­ing episodes on TV and lis­ten­ing to 60 minute sto­ries on tape. Maybe a case for ADD could be made, I cer­tainly had the signs grow­ing up, but I’d argue that this is what I really enjoy. And there is that lit­tle impor­tant word — joy. It’s not just fun, it’s joy. And with that joy comes love. I love writ­ing, but what­ever I write is done in a pur­suit of well paced prose and care­fully cho­sen words. I don’t like waste, least to waste time.

Now the ques­tion is what to make of it all? When I wrote arti­cles and saw them in print after­ward there was a sense of pride, of accom­plish­ment, of con­tent. As I said in the pre­ced­ing post when I was first exposed to the web I was quite neg­a­tive about it. While my over­all dis­po­si­tion has changed, as a writer I am still reluc­tant. Sure, there are plenty of exam­ples of suc­cess­ful web writ­ers out there (my wife being one of them), but for me as some­one who is more of an observer than an approacher I find it not only dif­fi­cult but also demo­ti­vat­ing to sim­ply push my work out to a global audi­ence with­out a cer­tain reward. Of course obsta­cles are there to be over­come but an hon­est eval­u­a­tion of one’s per­son­al­ity has to come into play as well.

Con­sid­er­ing what I shared to this point I con­cluded that my dream was in need of evolv­ing. What was sim­ply a child’s dream has to be con­sid­ered in light of advances in pub­lish­ing as well as a clearer under­stand­ing of what I enjoy and love. I am now con­sid­er­ing e-publishing fore­most and am work­ing on a con­cept for a series of short sto­ries, or episodes as I call them. Every story idea I’ve devel­oped to this point is pre­des­tined to be episodic, from my orig­i­nal sci­ence fic­tion story to my recent steampunk(ish) project all the way to my “Infil­tra­tor”? music­novel. I’ve also talked about my love of music before so I con­sider com­bin­ing episodes with specif­i­cally writ­ten com­po­si­tions. Adding in a few illus­tra­tions shall round out the whole con­cept. And of course I’d very much enjoy writ­ing arti­cles for (paper) mag­a­zines again. That is the goal, that is the dream once held evolved and brought from the past to the present.

What about Alternate:Words? It has a small audi­ence and that is enough for me to keep post­ing on it, how reg­u­larly only time will tell. Part of the prob­lem has been that I’ve quite lit­er­ally writ­ten myself into a cor­ner. I enjoy pho­tog­ra­phy a lot but I had made it a rule to only post if I had an image avail­able. I am aban­don­ing this rule. There may be posts with­out images in the future. There’ll prob­a­bly be less haikus as they were often the result of the “image needed”? rule. I still write poetry but it’s about prose more than it is about meter when I write. And while con­sis­tency is great it must be in sup­port and not in com­pe­ti­tion with the actual goal. And of course what­ever may be use­ful and encour­ag­ing to other writ­ers and cre­atives I’ll keep post­ing here as well.

Do you maybe feel that a long held dream has some­how been stuck in time? Take a few moments, days, weeks and ana­lyze what the under­ly­ing love is that formed that dream. Maybe your dream is in need of evolv­ing as well. And then put it out there.

12. July 2011
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Love, Passion and Creativity — Part 2

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Before head­ing into this post I rec­om­mend read­ing part one of “Love, Pas­sion and Cre­ativ­ity”, if you haven’t already done so, as I’ve laid the foun­da­tion in that post for what’s to follow.

Time is a curi­ous thing. I’ve writ­ten about it before but I want to men­tion it here again in the con­text of this post. Time acts reverse pro­por­tional to our age, mean­ing to chil­dren days can feel extremely long but the older we get the shorter those same days feel until we hit a point where we fre­quently seem to say “time flies”. It’s sim­ply a mat­ter of per­cep­tion and the fact that over the years we accu­mu­late expe­ri­ences (been there, done that) thus it may lose our sense of excite­ment and dis­cov­ery. I expe­ri­enced this myself and even with my own blog. Alternate:Words started out in 2002 as sim­ply a web­site to pro­mote my writ­ing. A year prior I’ve had moved to the US and while my Eng­lish was still improv­ing I was feel­ing a sense of new and excite­ment and I felt inspired to write for mag­a­zines — again.

Rewind a sev­eral years to 1995. My child­hood dream of writ­ing had still been very much alive. In fact I’ve picked up my sci­ence fic­tion story again and started over by writ­ing a new out­line and some tech­ni­cal ref­er­ences. Through­out the years prior I’ve had talked about my ideas to my friends and one of my best friends had even cre­ated sev­eral con­cept draw­ings. I again looked into pub­lish­ing, from tra­di­tional to self pub­lish­ing. The only prob­lem was that “real­ity” was firmly estab­lished in my life now. I needed to make a liv­ing. Of course there were var­i­ous options, espe­cially in the IT indus­try. I worked as a sys­tem and net­work admin­is­tra­tor for BMW in the early PC days, then switched to the more cre­ative side by work­ing for graphic design firms cre­at­ing logos, fly­ers and even web­sites. As inter­est­ing as these projects were I felt I was get­ting fur­ther and fur­ther away from my writ­ing dream.

Even­tu­ally I decided to pitch some arti­cles to var­i­ous mag­a­zines con­cern­ing inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment (or sim­ply video games), music soft­ware and graphic design soft­ware. Once I put my mind to some­thing I am extremely dri­ven and deter­mined and it only took a few weeks before I had my first assign­ments. Over the fol­low­ing two years I built an exten­sive net­work of press con­tacts, liaisons and mag­a­zine edi­tors that enabled me to not only delve deeper into the world of inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling but also fos­ter my own writing.

While there are numer­ous nov­els pub­lished in Ger­many each year by Ger­man authors the mar­ket is of course rather lim­ited. At that point I had a key con­ver­sa­tion with a game designer who was also writ­ing nov­els based on the games his com­pany devel­oped (some­thing unheard of back then and com­mon­place now). His con­clu­sion was that if you don’t have an Eng­lish pen name and don’t write in Eng­lish you won’t get far. He sounded quite frus­trated at that point and even­tu­ally turned his back on the whole indus­try as well as writ­ing. Con­sid­er­ing the vast quan­tity of trans­lated US/UK lit­er­a­ture in Ger­man book­stores his obser­va­tion made sense. How­ever, at that time my Eng­lish was rather rudi­men­tary. I didn’t par­tic­u­larly liked tak­ing Eng­lish in high school even though I had a very enthu­si­as­tic teacher. I sim­ply had no inter­est and it showed. In fact I was encour­aged to skip French and solely focus on Eng­lish, some­thing only sug­gested to stu­dents who are severely “lacking”.

What sounded like a road­block actu­ally encour­aged me to push for­ward. I started to seek out native Eng­lish speak­ers and was deter­mined to learn the lan­guage. And what bet­ter place then the emerg­ing Inter­net, right? Well, truth be told I couldn’t really care less at first. Quite the oppo­site, I felt uncom­fort­able about the web, almost threat­ened. Which was odd con­sid­er­ing the movie Tron had left a major impres­sion on me dur­ing child­hood. I bought my first com­puter because of it (when I was twelve years old), learned pro­gram­ming, became fas­ci­nated with video games and even cre­ated some com­puter ani­ma­tions in later years. Maybe sub­con­sciously I feared that the web would neg­a­tively impact pub­lish­ing and there­fore threaten my dreams.

That resis­tance cer­tainly didn’t last long (after all I was just in my mid twen­ties). Curios­ity won and I bough my first modem, hor­ri­bly slow and prone to drop-outs, which came bun­dled with AOL. Aside from the ridicu­lous cost involved (phone charges by the minute plus ISP charges by the minute plus base fee) a whole new world lit­er­ally opened up (one that even­tu­ally lead to find­ing my lovely wife years later). Hence­forth I emailed my arti­cles to my pub­lish­ers (instead of mail­ing them on floppy disks) and even­tu­ally estab­lished my very own web mag­a­zine in 1997 called PCIn­former. Back then every new arti­cle had to be added to the HTML code of the main page and then uploaded to the server. I quickly longed for some type of con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem which was still years off, at least for non-commercial users. But, being my own pub­lisher aside from hav­ing estab­lished columns in mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers I felt I had reached an impor­tant mile­stone on my jour­ney as a writer. There is a deep sat­is­fac­tion that comes from reach­ing goals against odds.

Unfor­tu­nately the odds turned against me as a major mag­a­zine dying swept through Ger­many in 1997 and within a four week time span I lost all my con­tracts. Due to a lack of options (since I was writ­ing in Ger­man) I tried des­per­ately to find new writ­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, includ­ing pro­duc­ing arti­cles for emerg­ing web por­tals. But the con­tent needed fell out­side my exper­tise and the pay was mar­ginal. Ulti­mately finan­cial oblig­a­tions forced me to recon­sider. It was a major blow to my dream, and my con­fi­dence. The last thing I was con­cerned with now was writ­ing a novel. So I went back to the IT world, my cre­ativ­ity squarely tucked away in a dark cor­ners of my mind.

Have you expe­ri­enced any major set­backs, maybe to the degree where you felt you had to aban­don your dreams forever?

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