Exciting News: I'm Moving!

Great news, readers! For a multitude of reasons, I've decided to move away from Blogger and back to my own hosting. You can find Mix Tapes & Scribbles, complete and hardly worse for wear, by clicking here. If you subscribe via RSS, click here to update your reader.

Also, keeping www.jaclynpaul.com in your favorites will ensure that you can forever disregard messages like this, because no matter where the blog lives, the address to get there is always the same. Isn't that nice?

Please update your favorite, RSS reader, homepage (loyal fans only!), and most importantly, drop by and let me know what you think!

So This is the New Year...

If you haven't noticed, Mix Tapes & Scribbles has taken a holiday break. I had a mind to announce this, but decided I would just make sure I kept posting over the holidays instead. Instead, here's what I've experienced:

1. Watching the last Broadway performance of Rent  before leaving for Christmas (not even in the same class as the movie version, folks).
2. Traveling to PA for a whirlwind four-day weekend of Christmas festivities.
3. Singing with my dad, cousin, and the church choir on Christmas Eve and experiencing four-part vocal harmony for the first time.
4. Finding out that yes, if pressed, I can still play the piccolo proficiently.
5. Getting good at the drums in Rock Band.
6. Spending two days trying to fly from Baltimore to Los Angeles, including some really exciting foul-weather landing attempts and an unexpected overnight stay in Houston.
7. Finishing my wool wrist warmers and beginning to knit an afghan.
8. Taking a lot of photographs and feeling inspired to write.
9. Seeing Black Swan at the Arclight Theater in Hollywood..

I'm sure there's more, but during this crazy adventure (which remains ongoing—I'm still in L.A.) I haven't had much blogging time in my days. Not to worry, I'm working on a new piece of writing about it all and once the dust settles, I'll have a lot of fodder for the blog. Until then (i.e. until the weekend), posting will be light.

However, I have another artist feature in the can and I'm going to leave you with a short list of resolutions for 2011. These will return with some friends in an upcoming post about goal setting/management, but for now, I'd like to do the following in 2011:

1. Write a script
2. Finish my novel
3. Be in a flashmob
4. Learn a dance
5. Submit to six literary publications
6. Write and feature more guest posts

What do you have in mind for the new year?

WordPress vs. Blogger: Thoughts Anyone?

I'm currently spearheading an exciting project at the office: guiding our organization through a major website redesign. For a well-established, not-exactly-small non-profit with a limited budget, collating and meeting everyone's needs is harder than it looks!

I ended up deciding to use WordPress as a content management system and combine our website and blog into one pretty unit. Hopefully the new site will launch by late February.

It seems like this solution is going to work well for us, and it got me to thinking about Mix Tapes & Scribbles (I consider this sort of learning/experimenting a major perk of my job). I've been waiting for a Blogger iPhone app, but I think I've come to terms with the fact that it's never going to exist. WordPress not only has an app for convenient, manage-and-moderate-anywhere control, it would let me return to self-hosting as opposed to redirecting my domain to Blogger.

Disadvantages include having to maintain my own platform again (I did this before with Movable Type) and being tempted to get overambitious with customizations. Also, Google rules the data mining and indexing world, so having them host the blog does very well for search engine results.

In the end, switching to WordPress could give me a much more attractive, easier to manage home for Mix Tapes & Scribbles, but just like the Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux argument, there are no clear answers.

So I turn to you, Dear Readers, and ask: have you had any experience with Blogger, WordPress, or even switched between the two? Have you used the WordPress app on your iPhone/iPod/iPad? What do you have to share with me?

New Direction and Call for Artists!

Last week, I started to wonder aloud about my direction with this blog. It has spent over a year in its baby stages, and I feel like it's ready to branch out into the world.

Since I launched it in July 2009, Mix Tapes & Scribbles has been about my creative journey, and what it means to live in the world as an artist. For me, this has meant exploring different mediums, finding my true calling, balancing distractions and self-doubt, and realizing my true calling could change on a semi-annual basis if it felt right.

Moving forward, the blog will still chronicle this personal journey. However, I'd like to open it up to feature other artists' journeys as well. Rather than talking about the "art scene" and what important shows are happening, these artists will be people like me: people who may have changed media, people who have struggled, people who love their work and have had to make tough decisions between art and job and family. Everyday artists who wander the world creating meaning every day.

Before launching this portion of the blog, though, I want to gather a critical mass of features and interviews so I can actually keep a reliable schedule.

Here's where you come in:

I'm seeking visual artists, actors, and writers (there is some flexibility there) who aren't exclusively supporting themselves with their art. In addition, I'm going to make sure I dedicate a percentage of my features to artists whose work centers on LGBT issues. Interviews would be done online, so geography isn't an issue. I'm looking to explore the interplay between life and art, what keeps us going, and how we do our work.

Sound like you or anyone you know? Please drop me an email at mixtapesandscribbles [at] gmail [dot] com or leave me a note in the comments.

(Edit 10/18/2010: a number of people seem to have gotten the impression I am looking exclusively for artists with an LGBT focus in their work, which is not the case. While I am putting that out there to make sure they are always represented in my features, I'm seeking writers, actors, and visual artists of all stripes.)

I'm really excited about this new (or expanded, really) direction for the blog. My real and true hope is to have enough interviews ready to go to launch it in November, but we'll see how it goes. I'll keep you posted!

And I'd be remiss if I didn't close out this entry by saying thank you to everyone who already reads Mix Tapes & Scribbles and supports me with comments, emails, chat messages, etc. There's no way I'd still be blogging without you!

What's It All About?

Within the past week, I've seen two plays. As a result, I found myself wanting to resurrect my onetime identity as an arts and entertainment writer, reviewing shows I see in my corner of the city. That led me to wonder whether such reviews would be a worthwhile addition to my blog, which brings up my most dreaded question: is the blog about what I want to say, or what readers want to read?

I shut down my previous blog, Words + Images, because it became a chore. It stopped enriching my life. A couple months later I returned to blogging with Mix Tapes & Scribbles, which has followed a much more freeform posting schedule, featured more personal topics, and chronicled my creative journey more than regular happenings in the art world at large.

I sacrificed hit counts, opportunities to represent the Baltimore art blogging community, and probably some other perks I haven't even considered. But I firmly believe that a blog takes years to establish, and this one has way more potential. Why? Because it's genuine.

However, I still haven't answered the question: how much of blogging comes from a marketing mindset? How much should writers be considering their target audience with every word they write? A recent post on Write to Done states:

Every post you write should satisfy a core desire for you and deliver a real benefit for your reader.  If you are simply writing to satisfy yourself then purchase a moleskin notebook and write away.  But if you want to blog publicly then you owe it to readers to deliver real value.

I think I first need to find more blogs on the creative process—how creative people live. Then I need to figure out where I fit in, even if it doesn't change my end product at all. This sentiment springs from the old adage: you can't create art in a vacuum. Any artist is responsible for knowing who else is producing similar work, and we should be able to compare and contrast them intelligently, as well as explain our own work succinctly.


On that note, do you know anyone else who blogs about the creative process? Whether you're the type who likes to email feedback to me or post it in the comments, please let me know if there's something I should be adding to my reading list!