Complete Reorganization

Monday 28 February 2011 - Filed under Housekeeping

Edward Semblance started as more of a joke than anything, because I liked the sound and connotations of the word “semblance” and “Edward” can be contracted to “Ted”, my present nom-de-mundi. It later became my alter-ego for various musical projects I’ve done, including the never-popular and long-defunct live bands Külip and Conspiracy Theorists and the long-dormant one-man studio band Twin Boom. Some of this dormancy has to do with a sojourn in the visual arts, which leaves less time for music and writing and less creative mana from which to draw from. But this dormancy also has echoes of a longer dormancy involving my fiction writing.

Time was, back in my late teen and early twenty years, I would write future histories or toss off planetary maps or flags or shoot black-and-white photographs or what-have-you at the drop of a hat. There wasn’t much self-editing in any of it, at least not neurotic self-editing. The visual creativity has continued to be relatively free of neurosis, but the music and especially the writing started to be trammeled by strange anti-productive feelings. I would try to work everything out in my head without actually writing everything down, as I wanted no continuity problems. Most of what did come out was mood music, settings with no heat and characters with no fire, and all with no plot. I have ideas, several of them, some of them possibly interesting and fun ideas, all floating around in my head, but they won’t come out. It’s annoying. Perhaps I can’t channel the Muse, and shouldn’t try, but I’ve attempted ten years of “just letting things come” and nothing has come. So maybe a little bit of automatic writing would help, some kind of seance to contact the Muse and see what she’s mumbling about up there in the aether.

To do so, I decided to take the site named edwardsemblance.com—parked with an index page giving some basic information and a smattering of Twin Boom music—and turn it into a tabula rasa for the Muse to rap against. It was already a fun assumed name with an assumed alter-ego behind it. Why not let that alter-ego channel the Muse without caring about what came before? It might work. It just might. Plus, it would be easily available without being tied to a specific computer or application.

So. Here it is. I will see—and any reader might witness—what happens on these pages. Mostly me, but you are welcome to read along.

2011-02-28  »  Edward Semblance