Week 12, 3/25

This project has swallowed me up into the days of its life of its own. I say so matter-of-factly; once again, the old saying “the mills of the gods grind slowly” has taken its familiar place at the head of my life.

I’ve gotten into a regular rhythm in which I have a daily fix of work on the project, as regular and addicting as my morning coffee—and at the same time, anywhere from 4-6, when I get up. I tend to work on the novel part, increasingly, for the first couple of hours. The other parts are processing music and texts, and conducting and holding interviews.

Work I’ve done this week: more music and texts from Vijay and Rudresh, to get me into the rest of Vijay’s interview, and then to Rudresh, hopefully with both wrapped up by mid-April. I find I don’t like jumping around too much. I started with these two closely music-related guys a month or so ago, and feel like staying with them more or less exclusively until they’re finished. At least now I do...I say that after having branched off into the other direction, of China and Korea, which I’ve also been busy with—the bios & CDs of Min Xiao-Fen, Wu Man, and Jin Hi Kim—but if I had it to do over, I might have stuck with one or the other, until I was ready to connect them up.

I find I want to immerse myself in Chinese music, history and other related issues and areas when I’m dealing with those players, then India with those...I don’t like having a lot of different things going on at once. Of course, a lot of it unfolds according to musicians’ availability...

Anyway, the only thing I want to say at this point is that the fiction side of this book—the most fun part, for me, and the most private—is cooking along like a healthy bun in the oven. The music study is proceeding like all similar ones have done before in my life, and my ingrained writing habits have taken over both to give each about 2-3 hours a day, scattered over various times, according to what they are.

The only new elements in the usual mix is my project site and this blog—and I’m keeping them going as planned out of sheer will, even as they seem to be sleeping as functional components in the real world. I see this project spanning over at least the next year or two, and the project site and/or this blog coming alive interactively only as I start getting interviews up, if at all.

The one interview I have transcribed and sent off to the musician for editing/approval is the one with Mei Han. I told her to take her time, and that’s just what she’s doing. That’s a good sign, for me; the more seriously she and everyone takes their interviews, in the knowledge that they will be read by and possibly part of an interactive thread with the several dozen fellow musicians and music scholars on my site who are of the most interest to them...and that the results will be part of a serious book on their work, not more boilerplate press-kit journalism that comes and goes...the better it will be for me and my work.