The entertainment industry is a strange beast. Nothing ever happens on schedule, which means you end up dead slow sometimes and insanely busy others. As hard as you try it’s not really a predictable thing, you just keep hustling and taking on everything you can, knowing that you’ve just got to find a way to make it work. May & June were slower months for me, it was a building period again; making connections, setting up the groundwork for, well, work.
July & August have been very different. In terms of composing work alone, it’s been out of control. I mean that in the best way, because I LOVE being busy. Because of the donations that are coming in from the SOLOnauts (who are amazing & I love you all for your help & generosity), we’re on the cusp of shooting more episodes of “SOLO The Series.”, which means 6 new episodes to score. Also, “End Result” is finally reaching the end of the editing process, and I can start scoring the 10 episode series. “My Bitchy-Witchy Paris Vacation” showrunner Alexis Niki sent me the first 2 of 6 episodes to score. I’ve started to score episode 1, season 2 of “Space Hospital.” I’m putting the finishing touches on the horror short “Kill Devil Hill.” On top of that, I just got a super exciting gig writing cues for a production company who’s producing multiple reality shows, which means a lot of action cues over the next 3-5 months.
And then there’s the book tour.
Allison Vanore, my other half, has done an amazing job at helping market and prep the tour. We’ve been emailing and calling bookstores, finding lodging, planning the route, all the details. But she’s suddenly involved in multiple webseries projects and a feature film that needs to finish shooting this month. To top it all off, SOLO got into the New York Television Festival in September, and we needed to go to represent the show. So last week we reached a point where we had to sit down and figure out what needed to get done before we leave town. That’s when we realized that there was too much to do and not enough time, and we were going to have to choose: the book tour or entertainment work.
The book is and has been a great experience. It’s allowed me the opportunity to meet people I wouldn’t have otherwise met, speak at events and get to know people on Twitter better. But it’s always been secondary to composing. If I wasn’t a film composer, I wouldn’t have been on Twitter in the first place and written the book. So, ultimately, music work has to come first. So we decided to postpone the book tour.
We’re both disappointed in that we had every intention of going, and anticipated the workload we had coming up in September, which was doable. What we didn’t see was the new work that came in (and is still coming in) that needs to get done during the time frame we’d be gone. If we leave for a month, we’re going to lose the chance to work on some amazing things that have surfaced.
We will be in New Jersey/New York for the NYTV Festival September 20-25, “SOLO” is screening and we’ll be doing lots of networking. We’re planning on being in Jersey for 2 weeks for the fest, and might schedule some signings in drivable towns (NJ, NY, possibly even DC, which is only 4 hours away) during our stay. We’re going to look at attempting the book tour again in January, weather permitting. I apologize to everyone looking forward to meeting us, and I’m genuinely sad that I don’t get to meet those of you in the cities we were planning on visiting.
