The new year brings a new musical challenge, this time in the form of a string quartet inspired by a series of rainy windows. Music writer Sid Smith has been taking photographs of the patterns rain makes on his office windows for a few years and has now set up the results as programme of […]
Author: Mick
Writing Progress
This year I once again had a go at the NaNoWriMo challenge of writing a book/50,000 words in the space of 30 days. I bent the rules somewhat this time around, using the 50k to finish off Some Other Scotland (yes, at last, I know!), write several short stories for both Every Photo Tells… and […]
Scapple for Quick Maps
I’ve mentioned my use of the relatively new application Scapple before, but as I work towards finishing off the epic that ‘Some Other Scotland‘ has become, this apparently simple little app has been making a growing impression on my workflow. Quick Recap: Scapple is in essence just a small mind-mapping application that gives you a […]
Christmas Markets in Vienna
A new book! Last year, Katharina and I visited all the Christmas markets in Vienna (and there are many), wandering the stalls, tasting the delicious food and discovering some quirky and unusual crafts. Armed with her then new camera, Katharina took hundreds of photographs and combined them into a series of popular posts on her […]
Oddities
I had no plan to produce two instrumental albums within the space of this year, yet only five months after the release of ‘Obscurities‘, I’m delighted to announce the release of ‘Oddities’. This can be viewed as a direct sequel to Obscurities, comprised as it is of an eclectic range of instrumental music in numerous […]
A Lament for The Culture
I’m currently coming towards the end of the month’s challenge to create short musical pieces and accompanying photographs based on prompts from FMSPhotoADay. The results so far can be found on my previous post on the subject, but I thought today’s prompt was worthy of a little more in-depth commentary. The Culture The given prompt […]
Sounds like a Picture
I thoroughly enjoyed June’s Photo-a-day challenge, coming up with something musically-related for each of the diverse prompts. This month I’m making it a little more complicated and challenging by attempting to accompany each photo with a short piece of music: yes, a tune-a-day for the next month. They will be added to my Soundcloud page […]
Two Lords of Looping
It has been a while since I recommended any music here, but there are two musicians I have been listening to a lot recently who both have new albums out and are well worth investigating if you like instrumental music that is varied, exciting and challenging. Both make great use of digital looping to provide […]
Photo-a-day 2013
Whilst I continue to plug away at completing and editing the rest of ‘Some Other Scotland‘, I’ve taken on a lighter challenge this month, one which is outside my usual area of interest. Katharina’s wonderful selection of photographs for Obscurities has inspired me to have a go at my own photographs of a musical nature, […]
Obscurities – Inside the Package
Time for a little more behind-the-scenes about Obscurities. The text side of the whole package was put together with Scrivener, which I use for all my writing, but this time I dug deeper into the facilities within the software than I have ever done writing short stories and novels. As well as producing the Obscurities […]