this blog

But first: Jamie has started drawing again! Among his many amazing talents, he’s been drawing all of his life. He’d been doing it for a living a long while and got a bit burned out, so he stopped and just focused on music and theresynths. Then he got an iPad, a couple of apps and now he’s started a comic featuring The Modeens! For now the best place to check it out is this public Facebook album (you don’t need to be a member to see it) but I’m working on a gallery for the Modeens website. Please check it out – it’s frikken cool! Oh and if you ARE a member of Facebook, I’d love it if you’d ‘Like’ us. Now on to today’s sorely overdue blog post:

Wow, I can’t  believe how long it’s taken me to update the ol’ blog here. I took a week and recorded an album with a very cool side project, The Cordials. It was a wonderful, challenging, all-engrossing week of going into Wavelab studios and not coming out until after dark. In the encroaching heat of another Tucson summer, I got to work on my studio tan, and I loved every minute of it. But then another week passed in a flash of intense coding work at my day job (which after all my blatherings about various jobs I’ve had in the past, I suppose I should fill yall in on what my current job is – but that’s another post for another day) and back to back Modeens and Cordials gigs. And I kept hitting the snooze alarm on my iCal reminders to “Write a blog post!”

Now that I’m up way too early on a Sunday morning, I’m doing just that. Then I realized it’s been over a year since I started this whole experiment of writing blog posts about the flotsam and jetsam of my life so far. So I wanted to say how grateful I am to you dear readers who actually check out these chronicles of my past and present. This really started as a way to get myself to write more. After focusing most of my writing muscles on songs, the odd bit of poetry and lots of technical documentation (which has been my job off and on since ’96) I started itching for something more…meaty? I’m not sure, just something more, y’know? And for the first time in my life I’ve started thinking about writing actual full length books, no, novels! Which seems like so much commitment – and with everything else going on my life, a bit of a stretch. So I thought at the very least I could handle a blog post once a week. I didn’t know what I would actually write about, but I figured I’d just start and see what happened.

And then it turns out I have many many stories to tell. After taking a meandering trail through my adult life, from folk artist to Shakespeare to rock n roll, from  temp to technical writer to coat check girl back to technical writer, from South Beach to New York City to Venice Beach to the Sonoran desert, apparently I haven’t even scratched the surface of my life. Some folks have suggested this will eventually morph into a book of memoirs – and that may be. There are actually some parts of my life that are still too painful to talk about – too personal to expose to the world just yet. But we’ll see.

In the meantime, on top of the (mostly) weekly posts, I’ve started writing short stories. And I even finished one, egads! I’m still getting the courage up to post it here – though it’s too long for one post. Maybe I’ll publish it in increments. Or just give a link to a PDF. I don’t know, I’m still swimming around blindly, figuring out which way to go by sheer intuition (very similar to my life approach actually).

What I’m trying to say as the sun finally starts peeking into my backyard and the birds swoop around catching buzzing bugs before the heat tames them back into a summer stupor is that this blog has sparked a new writing life for me. Even though music has been my main creative driving force throughout my life – and then acting for a big chunk of time – I’m entering a new phase and looks like I’ll be writing a lot more in the future. About what or whom or where – we’ll all have to wait and see. But thanks again for being there, for reading this at all. It means more than you can possibly know. Now if I can only have the time to do everything I want to do in this little life!! And I’m sure you all know how that is, right?

Love,

Cristina