This Is Not a Music Blog, So Shugo Tokumaru

I know this isn't a music blog, and I'm not very good at playing the music discovery game. My iTunes is full and robust and replete with names that most of my peers have never heard of, but whenever I try to drop a musician full hipster style, it never works. Instead of going with whatever obscure Portuguese indie electro-pop group that plays non-stop in my house and in my head, I screw it up. "Have you ever heard of Radiohead? I just discovered them. Looks like they've been making music for awhile. Pretty heavy stuff. You should check them out."

But, hey, for real, I just found an album, a few years old, sure, but this is it. This is the music that comes closer to sounding like the inside of my head that anything I've come across. Plus, the artist is Japanese (+2 hipster points), the album is in Japanese (+3), features traditional instruments (+5), and has a sweet video that kills when you get into a game of Youtube tennis with friends (+10). Watch this.

Reddit's r/music shared this video, and I watched it twenty times in a row, then bought the album, and discovered that "Katachi" wasn't even my favorite song of the bunch.

This album has everything I love. It is one-hundred-percent, unabashedly, unapologetically happy. You'll hear clapping, and lots of people singing together. Tokumaru is a multi-instrumentalist, and the album contains plenty of weird ones. I wish I knew enough about music to describe what I mean, but it has a light-hit aesthetic delivered with with full pop music energy. The filler tracks between songs tread a little too far into Loony Tunes soundtrack territory even for me, but they are fun. This is fun music, get up in the bright, sunshiny morning music, go for a stroll and have a picnic music. It's probably WAY too sweet for most, but mixed in with all the sugar are some amazing flavors, flavors that are hinted at by acts like Sufjan Stevens in his more playful moments. This is pretty much what I hope for every time I buy a new album.

I don't know what it is, but Mr. Tokumaru will be one of three artists whose entire catalog I will acquire and love and be super proud of (the other two are Sufjan Stevens and They Might Be Giants). This is not a music blog, but I had to share. All the hand clapping and group singing and bubbly happiness has me far too excited.

The One-Year Anniversary of This Blog

Take that, Eric Rasmussen from one year ago. You said, I heard you say it, "I'll start this blog, but I know I'm just going to end up ignoring it." Proved you wrong.

The lake that inspired manuscript #3

To mark the first year of this effort, here's an update on my writing progress. Writers navigating the publishing labyrinth love reading about other writers' progress. There are gobs of places to read people's success stories, not so many places to compare one's data to those who are still fighting the noble fight. So, here are my stats.

Output: 
Since making the decision to pursue writing fiction as a professional, I have written three complete manuscripts (about 900 pages), seven short stories (about 140 pages), fourteen original creative nonfiction blog posts, a few articles for Volume One. I write just about every day. A lot of it is bad. Some of it is okay.

Successes: 
My goal was a blog post every two weeks, for a total of 26 posts. I hit 35, and one of them, Things I Left in My Classroom Over the Summer, hit 2300 views (thanks Reddit, I know you're not big on the blogs). My Volume One pieces have earned much positive feedback from friends, family, and strangers. Manuscript one earned one partial request. Manuscript two received seventeen total requests. Manuscript three enticed eight agents to look at more of the work, with numerous queries still outstanding, and a selection in a Twitter pitch contest (thanks Michelle!) Over fifty short story submissions with my name on them are being considered by various journals and websites. Through all of this I've made connections with all sorts of folks in the publishing world, including a handful of critique partners who I value profoundly. Lots of real-life, non-digital friendships have been strengthened through these writing efforts and a phenomenal writing group.

I used to waste a lot of time on the internet and watching HGTV shows. Now I'm working on something, towards something, and no matter what else, that feels good.

In the story, under this ridge, something exciting happens

Failures: 
93 rejections on manuscript one. 70 rejections on manuscript two. 51 rejections on number three, so far. A dozen rejections from short story and literary journals. For all the effort, I have not yet technically published any fiction.

Next steps:
I enrolled in an MFA program (Augsburg College, yo!), starting June of 2016. Manuscript number four sits prettily at 200 pages, and my goal is to finish by the New Year. Short story ideas abound. This blog is an actual thing. Motivation and hope persist.

The unbelievable, epic, heartbreaking ending takes place on a
frozen lake, much like this

When I started this trip, I thought what I wanted sat just over the next hill. Two states later, I'm still driving, convinced that we'll get there any minute now. If I am epically, monumentally wrong, I'll hit the ocean eventually, and it sure has been a pretty drive.

This blog, year two, stay tuned...