Managing Time... Or Not

[jacey]

I'm still trying to get my head on straight after the Christmas break. There's such a lot to do. The advantage of being self employed is that you can choose when, where and how long to work; the disadvantage is that it's easy to think you're working when, in fact, you're busy but not in a constructive moneymaking way.

I have to do a lot of real day-job work (my folk music agency) which I need to do to the pay the bills, but on top of that there's my writing work which sometimes pays some of the bills and hopefully will pay a bigger percentage of the bills when I sell the first novel. (Note I said when and not if.) And then there's all the stuff I do which earns me nothing, such as: being on the board of directors (company secretary, in fact) of FolkWISE, an organisation aiming to improve the lot of folk performers through cooperative networking; and volunteering at our local village hall, which means I not only write the web page and edit the village's paper newsletter, but I'm also currently on the team writing a quarter of a million pound grant application... so you can guess how much work is involved in that!

And so today, with all that work looming over me I've spent the morning digitising some old photographs, spurred on by llygoden's LJ entry about digitising slides. I'm definitely a happy amateur photographer, but sometimes I get a good shot by accident. I'm also a dab hand with photoshop and an average photo can be much improved by cropping and adjusting a few light/contrast values. Just for the record, though, I haven't doctored today's shots because of the time constraint. Take a look at my pics for a sample of what I've been doing today.

Comments

Pix and Music

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the comments on the pics. It's hard to take a bad photo in the Rockies. All these great shots keep lining themselves up for you.

Re your nephew's band... Do I take it their repertoire is jazz? Most of the festivals I'm familiar with are folky but there's nearly always an element of participation, either a come-all-ye event or a hiring fair or - in some cases - young musician showcases and competitions. Our own festival in Birdsedge has a youth music competition open to all gentres of acoustic music. (www.birdsedgevillagefestival.com)

Folk festival organisers are always open to approaches from young bands (backed up by a demo to prove they can play) and will often give them a showcase spot in a concert (for no pay, of course, until they've established themselves). There are some frighteningly good young musicians about. I'm guessing jazz festivals are the same. Arts festivals tend to be a bit more stuffy.

If you google jazz festival and hit 'search UK' you get about 666,000 hits, so it's worth just doing a bit of web research, targeting your festivals and making polite enquiries via the e-mail on the web site.

Tell your nephew to check out my agent-blog on the agency myspace page which I'm just getting underway with handy hints for performers. Also there might be something of interest on the Jazz Services website at http://www.jazzservices.org.uk/

Re: Pix and Music

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Sorry I should have added the URL for the myspace page:
http://www.myspace.com/jaceybedfordtourmanagement

Re: Pix and Music

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that's exactly what I wanted. It's given me some ideas as to where to look. The lads have no plans for full time musical careers - university beckons in a year or two! -- but reading between the lines of the conversation at a recent family gathering, I think they would like to spread their wings a bit and do something off their own bat rather than just going to events organised by school and parents.