Friday, August 27, 2010

So now what???


A week ago today, I clicked the "Upload" button on my first fan video -- "You Renegade Vamp". These past seven days, I've taken a step back from the project to work on other creative stuff, see friends, look for a job, catch up on errands, lose my cell phone, find my cell phone, recoup from all of the above, and ask myself the big question: "NOW WHAT???"

Putting up the video felt like a big accomplishment. As an artist, so much of your creative and career progress is unquantifiable. There are certain milestones -- booking a role, performing in a play, premiering a film, getting a paycheck, getting a project funded or green lit. But these come rather rarely even for somebody seemingly successful. So much time in between is spent brainstorming, generating, pursuing, asking, and doing all sorts of inane little tasks that feel like they have nothing to do with anything glamorous or passionate or fun. The payoff could be years away or never. We throw out millions of messages in a bottle, never knowing who might find one and how they might respond. This week, I got my response. In fact, I got many -- basically all positive. The YouTube hit counter is up to 263, which is pretty darn good considering I don't yet have an online following, nor the technological know-how to make a video viral. And a few of them could be Buffy actors or maybe even Joss Whedon himself. Who knows?

Once I got the video up, I thought, "This isn't so hard. I can totally do it again!" Looking back, it was a long process that involved many steps. It was daunting, time-consuming, and exhausting, but it all seemed worth it in the end. Now, I'm back to the daunting phase. In actuality, the next one will be easier -- both because the melody is more fleshed out and because I've done the whole process before. Nevertheless, thought of it leaves me weak in the knees. One big blessing about blogging: accountability.

As I mentioned before, the next item on the agenda is my song for Drusilla entitled "Wherefore Art Thou Juliet?" It was inspired by meeting Juliet Landau at the Thrilling Adventure & Supernatural Suspense Hour a couple of months back. Since the next show is September 10, I figure it would be a good deadline for the next release. Tom Lenk is one of the guest stars so there will be many Buffy fans. Maybe Juliet will be there herself. More than anything, it's a good excuse to get my butt in gear. Now for the nuts and bolts...

The biggest and scariest thing on the To-Do List is finding a musician collaborate with. Myke Wilken did an awesome job last round. This time I need a pianist. It's a pretty simple melody with a 50s doo-wop style chord progression and one key change in the middle. If someone has a digital piano with MIDI, I think we could pound it out in one sitting. Since I'm beyond broke, it would need to be somebody who would be willing to donate a few hours of their time (I could return the favor with a home-cooked meal or some awesome vegan cupcakes). I have a couple of people I could ask, but if anybody out there has the ability to help or knows someone who does, please shoot an e-mail or Facebook message my way.

In the meantime, I'll do what Barbara Deutsch calls "throwing your hat over the wall." The idea is that you throw your hat over a high wall, which is sort of a metaphor for your future. You don't know what's on the other side, and you may even be scared to find out, but now that you've thrown your hat, you must find a way to get there in order to retrieve it. In this case, it means finding the perfect Drusilla quote to put on the T-shirt I'll wear in the next video. So the next time I write an entry in this blog, be prepared to see that T-shirt.

Thus, I lay the groundwork for my next song and video to appear. As Kevin Costner says in Field of Dreams, "If you build it, he will come." I doubt W.P. Kinsella could have ever expected his baseball quote to apply to a love song for a psychotically sexy vampiress, but such is the power of manifestation, right?

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