Little bit by little bit, this blog is starting to come together. I’ve been slowly making my way though figuring out my new theme and how to make it work for what I’m doing. I hate to pitch a bitch about WordPress on this blog, but it’s a giant pain in the ass trying to cobble together anything original with this software anymore. Ironic to nobody who was paying attention: seeking to unleash the potential of every would-be writer/graphic designer, we arrive at the severe limitation of any particular creativity at all.
But we press on! I’m not here to serve WordPress, WordPress (and umpteen other paid-for plugins and themes that promise the world and deliver garbage) serves me. So goes the theory. And how is that theory being put into practice, so far?
I love my choice of colors. They are largely inspired by the walls in my basement, though no one color particularly matches. Instead, the triad of purple, gold, and blue is lightened a bit to stand out against a black background. The purple I chose was color-picked directly from the Purple Rain album cover so.. let the lawsuits begin, right?
Through a bunch of trial and error, I’ve finally arrived at the way to select and style the individual blog post pages, which is great. What I have not figured out yet is how to create templates for custom post types. I’m probably wasting my effort putting that much thought into post types on WordPress anymore – they’ve pretty much given up any pretense at being a CMS in anything other than data structure. But I digress.
What is necessary now is content, and that’s what I’m doing right now. Clever, right? I still have what I imagined would be static project pages yet to build and link up to the front page. And I really need better photography, somewhere along the way. One thing at a time. For now, I need to fill out content.
Before every song, there has to be a beginning. There has to be a moment of intention when we transfer our thought processes from whatever they were just a second ago to this, our mission. We’ve set aside the time and the brain space, now we have to turn that opportunity into some sort of musical expression.
How that process begins depends entirely on circumstance. But inevitably, it begins with a sound that sparks an idea. I get all kinds of ideas while I’m away from my instrument, but rare is the song that really started that way. For me, anyway. Nothing really substitutes for music that isn’t music.
So this blog needs to start in the same way: within the medium that I’m creating. Nothing substitutes for the real thing. And these early posts are the random tapping of keys before the real jam starts.