So I did another stupid piece of music today.

As you might have guessed, I am not really happy with how it turned out. But I think I know where my problems lie.

One, I get way too impatient to be done. When I see that there’s only 15 seconds more to create, I lose my head and all sense of restraint or quality and just slap in any old thing or use any old trick to make an ending.

Like that totally out of place male chorus at the end of this piece. It really throws the whole thing off. It’s an awesome sample and I have been wanting to use it for ages, but that was not the way or the place.

Up till that it was doing decent. Nothing to blow away the voters of the Academy, but an interesting little exploration of a simple, pentatonic-ish scale and a vaguely Middle Eastern sound.

I think in my next piece, I will go further East and experiment with an Oriental, koto and taicho, black keys only kind of sound.

Or maybe not. Ya never know. Inspiration can strike at any time.

So yeah, being in a hurry to finish is definitely a problem. Impatience in general is a problem. I do much better work when I give myself whatever time I need to complete it.

Like with the Funky Duck. It’s not long, but it’s still the best work I have done lately. It’s fun, and upbeat, and perky, and silly. And I didn’t totally fuck up the ending.

So more patience and more follow-through would definitely improve the art. And you get more patience by simply giving it more time. No more deciding to just finish whatever music I am working on and then stuff it into video format and throw it up there on YouTube in order to do the day’s video in the laziest way possible either.

I am better than that, and my small but mighty audience deserves better.

I am just going to have to get better at doing this sort of thing, and that probably means not waiting until 4 PM, which is scientifically the time of day when I feel crappiest, to do the ding dang things.

It’s always been very hard for me to change a habit once it has been established. I have trouble acquiring and sticking to routine, but once it is in there, it is in there, and hard to get out.

But I might be able to convince myself to start working on the things at, like, 1 PM instead. That way I have plenty of time to fuss and fiddle and perfect.

And that leads to my biggest problem in art period, and in some ways in life as well, and that is this terror I have of going backwards. This mighty brain of mine is conspicuous in its lack of a reverse gear.

And that means that, historically, I have had a very hard time going back to things and editing them to make them better. I have to do it all in one session, with no breaks except for the bathroom, and then push it out into the world to fend for itself and never look back at it.

And while this has lead to me being more productive than I have ever been before in my life, and it has allowed me to give my writing and creative muscles a really good workout every single day.

But the quality is low, or at least, lower than it should be. I am capable of so much more than the scratchings in the mud that I have done so far. I could be a truly great writer if I could just get my shit together and develop the ability to make what I do all shiny and perfect before I show it to the world.

That’s so hard for me, though. In the past, when I try to go back to something and fix it up, I just end up staring at it, unable to do anything, trying to figure out how to start while anxiety shreds my confidence into confetti and instead of seeing a bunch of things I should be fixing up, I just end up seeing a bunch of reasons why I suck, my writing sucks, and I was a fool to think I could ever do anything competently.

You can see the problem. I need to build enough confidence in my work to be able to keep believing in it even as I am trying to correct all its flaws.

But how do you build confidence with such substandard work? If I can’t make it good enough to send anywhere, how can I get the positive feedback I need?

That is the conundrum of the kind of anxiety trap I live in. I am too scared of the world to interact with it, and thus I never get the kind of reinforcement that would be just the thing to counteract the fear.

Like how I have suffered with depression/anxiety for so long because the disease itself made me far too shy and scared to ask for help when I needed it, and even when I had some help, it kept me from successfully advocating for myself and saying “This is not working for me” or “maybe I need different meds”.

Like I said before, if a disease keeps you from seeking help, you are its bitch.

And I have to tell you folks, I have been struggling with my depression more lately than any other time recently. The doc said that going from 30 mg of Paxil to 25 would mean passing through a threshold and he was right. I feel way more emotional now than I did before the lowering of dosage.

Not suicidal, so don’t worry. But angry and frustrated and impatient and restless all the goddamned time.

Sometimes I even find myself feeling sullen, which is a new thing for me. I don’t think I have done “sullen” much in my life. Not even as a teen.

Oh well, I will weather this storm as well, as I did the ones previous, and at the end, I will be stronger, more whole, more completely, and far less scared as a result.

Now I am going to go stare into the darkness till it stares back. Bye folks!