So to justify the expense of having bought the software, I created scores for NaSoPiAlMo 2006. I originally recorded the MIDI playback of those pieces for the album, but now I'd like to record them live. I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be neat if I could work off of a score book, like my Beethoven and Bach pieces?"

Sibelius doesn't do book formatting, but QuarkXpress does. So I exported my piano scores to EPS and fashioned a book out of it. Then I went to Lulu to see about printing it up. After poring over the help section of the site, I added a cover, title page and copyright page to the book. Then I loaded it up.

Huh. That was easy. What else can I get printed up?

So I fired up QuarkXpress again and formatted that story as well. Instead of going with a canned cover, I wanted to create my own. The story begins with a chase scene across a number of rooftops, so I pictured some blurry photos of downtown buildings at night, with streaks of light running vertically on the cover.

Rather than browse for someone else's photo, I went to downtown Austin one Saturday night with my digital camera and just wandered around taking random shots. The very last one was what I picked for the cover.

I decided to load all those photos to my Flickr account, and as I watched the Uploadr read the files on the hard drive, the thumbnails formed a kind of animation. That gave me another idea. What if I could craft a music video using nothing but a series of pictures? Moving images, of course, are nothing but a series of pictures shown in rapid succession (24 frames per second, in fact.)

At the same time, I realized I would never really shop around the one and only novel I've so far written to publishers or agents, so I fired up QuarkXpress once more and started laying out that book to print at Lulu. In laying it out, I went back and rewrote a few scenes, changed a few details. It got me thinking about these characters again and wondering what's happened in the years that I haven't really been thinking about them.

While I waited for the books to be printed, I started shooting some footage for the video around downtown Austin. I would take some high-speed pictures, import them into a video editor, set each image to three frames and export an MPEG. After seeing all the jerky, hand-held footage, I decided to get a tripod.

The tripod lets me take some fairly adventurous self-portraits, and I thought, can I make a music video with the video function on my camera? So during the July 4 weekend, I mugged in front of the camera and spent a day in a marathon of editing. Before I could finish the idea of my first music video, I had another one already done.

Now I'm coming up with ideas for new videos or new stories. New music, I'm somewhat and oddly relieved to report, has been squeezed out.

What started out as a justification to use some software has ended up turning into many separate projects -- writing, publishing, photography, video.

Sometimes I think I work too much.

I haven't worked on it since, and now that I've launched a label and a publishing company, I don't think I'll get back to it any time soon.

So I'm extending the shinkyoku moratorium from September 2007, or at least, I'm not considering it broken. Launching the label forces me to look seriously at the current state of my catalog, and adding to it just doesn't seem appealing. Now that I have a means through which this music can be (somewhat) properly distributed, I need to make sure it's the best it can possibly be.

That means recording and editing vocals, finalizing arrangements and closing outstanding bugs issues.

I've already shipped off a majority of my songs for Copyright registration, and I'm still considering whether to register them with ASCAP.

After three years of attempting to curb my productivity, I finally have something to put me in check. In essence, I'm moving out of the prototyping phase and am transitioning to a production phase. That opens up a whole slew of tasks -- perhaps requiring outside involvement -- which makes pure creation a dubious endeavor.

In other words, I won't have time to add to the workload.

Is it hazardous to have a title before an actual idea?

From Acadia to Zenith, another title I've vowed to turn into an Eponymous 4 project, sounds great, but now I have to contemplate what kind of work would be suitable for it. Perhaps I'm putting the cart before the proverbial horse.

Existential Eureka Moments in the Seismic Context Shift almost sounds like a greatest hits collection, though.

• A collaboration with my friend Double-A, code named Eponymous 4 × Sharazad, where she writes lyrics and I write music to them. Three lyrics have been done so far. Gotta follow-up to see any more are in the works.
• A second string quartet, perhaps even a third. I want to gauge how far I've gotten as a writer in the 20-some odd years since my first quartet.
• From Acadia to Zenith, most likely the follow-up to 「健忘症」, making it the second album of entirely newly-written material.
• Existential Eureka Moments in the Seismic Context Shift is a project of an undetermined nature, although the more I think about it, the more it feels archival.

At some point I'm going to have to stop fantasizing and get to work.

[UPDATE, 3/5/2008, 2:45 pm] I've always wanted to write a piece for the instrumentation of the Bang on a Can All-Stars (clarinet, cello, keyboard, electric guitar, bass, drums), and I've always thought Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand had the vague feel of a long-form classical piece. Since Existential Eureka Moments in the Seismic Context Shift strikes me as a fake Guided By Voices album title, I figure that's my starting point for such a piece.

Now the question is whether I can pull something like this off.

For all the times a new idea made no sense
For all the moments when a dream would fade
For every hour spent in vain
And every ounce of wasted pain
The slightest hint of hope is just another ruse

For all the times a memory held one more truth
Then history would never be so wrong
If every minute passing by
Takes one more piece of every lie
The story left remaining is another ruse

How does the time go by so fast?
What are the phases of the moon?
Who knew it wasn't meant to last?
Who knew it wouldn't end so soon?

For every hour passed into another day
And every second ticking one by one
I leave another clue behind
To let you seek what I can't find
And maybe you can see right through this final ruse

How does the time go by so fast?
What are the phases of the moon?
Who knew it wasn't meant to last?
Who knew it wouldn't end so soon?

What's one more minute in the greater scheme?
What's one more minute in an endless dream?

I know the time, it moves so fast
I know the phases of the moon
I knew it wasn't meant to last
I knew it wouldn't end so soon

What's one more minute in the race for time?
This moment here with you was never mine

A number of weeks back, someone on Metafilter posted a link to an old Harpers article by Dorothy Thompson, titled "Who goes Nazi?" A single phrase jumped out at me -- "from Acadia to Zenith" -- and I feel compelled to work that into an Eponymous 4 project. I'm thinking it's going to be the title of the next album, but I'm not sure what that album is going to sound like.

So we'll see how From Acadia to Zenith inspires me.

I've also been listening to a lot 20th century string quartet repertoire. Before I announced the annual shinkyoku moratorium, I considered recording an album of string quartet music for NaSoAlMo 2007, an idea I've had for quite a while. I've been wanting to do my homework first, studying scores of other string quartets. But I haven't really gotten around to acquiring many scores.

For now, I'm just absorbing all the different ways composers have approached the medium. I listened to all of Dmitri Shostakovich's quartets in 2006, and I delved into Béla Bartók's quartets last year. I'm revisiting Terry Riley's Salome Dances for Peace, and I even sought out the Samuel Barber quartet from whence the Adagio for Strings came.

My first string quartet, which I wrote when I was a teenager, wears its Shostakovich and Barber influences on its sleeve. (I had just discovered Kronos Quartet around that time.) I would like this next string quartet (or two) to sound more like, well, myself. Whatever that means.

In short, I don't need a New Year's resolution to spur me to work -- I've got more than enough. Yes, I could make a resolution to get through that work, but last year, I made one which was immediately sidelined by a pinched nerve. I know the work needs to be done, and no amount of resolving is going to change the fact it's going to get done.

Rather, I prefer New Year's resolutions that challenge me to try something new, like when I took singing lessons for a month or learned how to play bass guitar. If I were to make a New Year's resolution, I would probably start with forming a band.

If the exercise of laying down vocal tracks is any indication, I am not a singer. Even my sister said I need singing lessons. I think these songs need more than my meager voice to do them justice.

And even though I've recorded everything with keyboards, most of the songs I've written are really geared for live musicians. I just don't need a singer -- I need guitarists and a rhythm section as well.

But I'm not resolving to do form a band in 2008. I have this perception of a band as being a life-turning commitment -- once it's formed, I have to spend a number of years making it work. And like any kind of relationship, it requires time and money. The former, I probably have too much of it. The latter, not so much.

Of course, just because I don't make a New Year's resolution to do something doesn't mean I won't end up doing it.

An alternative ideas for a New Year's resolution is to release an actual CD on CD Baby. enigmatics has been in the can for years. All I really need to do is pay the various fees, slap a barcode on the cover art and send CD Baby five copies.

Hmm. Doable.

But I'm not committing to that one either.

This past summer, I managed to record vocals for 10 songs, and I was actually pleased with the results. It took helping someone else to record a song to teach me how to do it for myself, and I'm much more comfortable knowing that most of the limitations of my voice -- and there are many -- can be "fixed" in production.

Thus inspired, I went through all Eponymous 4 songs requiring vocals and noted the highest and lowest notes of each. My most comfortable range is from low C to D near middle C. Every song was categorized in relation to that range. If the lowest note was a B, it was considered too low. If the highest note was an E-flat, it was considered too high. In reality, I can hit those notes but not as easily as anything within range.

Songs that hit the furthest acceptable ranges -- low F for bass, G near middle C for tenor -- were flagged to be transposed in such a way where the extreme note would be near the comfortable range. Songs with an extremely wide range -- the folly of a writer who isn't a singer -- posed the most problems. Two songs in particular were more difficult rhythmically than melodically.

And after all that analysis, the Spreadsheet was born! It really should be called the Eponymous 4 Vocal Schedule, but I'm calling it the Spreadsheet.

I've used the Spreadsheet in the last few days to figure out which songs I'm going to tackle first. My first inclination, like all lazy people, was to do the easiest stuff first and save the harder stuff for later. Then I dove straight into the most complex song to record -- "Hear the Wind Sing". I wanted to get a benchmark of just how much work would be required to do the more challenging stuff.

When I realized it wouldn't be that bad, I decided to go against inclination and tackle all the difficult stuff first. If I get it out of the way now, they won't be around for wild procrastination later.

See that section of green? Those are songs that have some vocals done (not necessarily final draft vocals). The goal is to make that green section as large as possible. Not pictured is a blue section, which signifies the songs that fall in the comfortable range. The yellow sections, of course, are the more difficult songs, with the darker shades being more difficult than others.

All this organization isn't very rock 'n' roll, but I've been putting off recording vocals for a long, long time now. I needed a picture of the work I'm facing, and the Spreadsheet illustrates it nicely.

Most shinkyoku moratorium are attempts to curb my overproductivity, but this time, I'm calling one to take care of something not related at all to music. I need to get my weight under control, so I've started to walk the treadmill every night. It's sufficiently time-consuming to cause potential conflict with any future creative spurts.

So I'm not going to work on music from now till after the start of the year. At that point, I'll see how much progress I've made on the health front to determine whether shinkyoku moratorium needs to continue.

I'm also making the decision not to participate in NaSoAlMo this year. If I were to participate, I would want to spend every spare moment writing and recording. Right now, the weight issue is more pressing. I'm also dodging a bullet with this decision -- I was seriously going to write a string quartet album, but I haven't really studied any scores yet to prepare.

During those hours I'm not working out -- or researching about losing weight -- I'll be concentrating on works currently in progress. I have far too many vocals to record, and now I have the environment to finish them.

So we'll see how this shinkyoku moratorium turns out.

It is for me.

I'm not a singer, so I fall into the trap of comparing my untrained vox with people who can sing. Regardless, I've spent the last few weeks recording vocals for a number of songs. If it weren't for extensive editing I couldn't sit through hearing myself.

First off, I have a hard time staying in tune. I never seem to hit a note right on, and in some cases, I can be slightly more than a half-step off. I don't stay steady on long notes, and the nasal timbre of my voice could be considered an acquired taste.

But it depends on the material. I think my voice is well-suited for singer-songwriter-y kind of stuff, not so much on commercial pop. It's not strong enough for heavy rock, unless it's processed to hell, but it seems to work for introspective stuff.

And while there are some questionable ethics issues with editing vocals, I need it. I need to hear what my songs sound like when I'm singing them in tune, and all that post-processing has actually instructed me to handle my voice differently.

That said, here's what I sound like. Or rather, here's what I would ideally sound like:

• Untold Demons
• Revulsion
• DESTRUCTION BABY
• 聞いてはいけない、言ってはいけない
• Go
• The One to Make Me Whole
• Imprint
• Silver Sting
• What I Deserve
• 波動
• Speechless