Tag Archives: Curiosity

The To Do Lost

Posted on February 12, 2023 by tropicaltheartist

My friend, Amy, is a very clever lady, but through serendipity, she came up with something I thought was especially brilliant, today. She wrote that she felt she’d wasted her weekend, as she hadn’t done anything on her “Creative Things … Continue reading →

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Arting Shapes You

Posted on August 18, 2022 by tropicaltheartist

I’m going to suggest that by far the most significant and dominant thing that comes out of maintaining a creative practice is that it defines and refines you. It teaches you better habits, improves your resilience, hones your fine motor … Continue reading →

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Prosodic Event Mapping in Songwriting

Posted on May 18, 2022 by tropicaltheartist

What are you talking about? There’s music in the spoken word. Poets know it. So do songwriters. Phrases and words have a rhythm. The way we stress and emphasise the syllables in our utterances makes accented rhythmic patterns. Some words … Continue reading →

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Art Smuggling

Posted on October 3, 2018 by tropicaltheartist

There’s something important about LP records that the inventors of the compact cassette, compact disc and streaming music services evidently failed to grasp. If they were to be believed, these music delivery formats had a single function – to deliver … Continue reading →

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Infinite Options, Finite Self

Posted on July 8, 2018 by tropicaltheartist

Have you ever heard that phrase, “drowning, not waving”? It can feel that way when you’ve bitten off lots of projects, but you’re struggling to complete any of them. Suddenly, you can feel like you’re under water, barely coping with … Continue reading →

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On Not Doing the Work You Love

Posted on June 21, 2018 by tropicaltheartist

It might seem strange to be writing about underemployment, when the executive branch of the most militarised and powerful nation on Earth is, through its legions of official goons and flunkies, bureaucratically, permanently orphaning jailed small children and babies, just … Continue reading →

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How Many Creative Options Do You Need?

Posted on June 11, 2018 by tropicaltheartist

This is a hard lesson to learn for many artists, myself included. Here it is, though: adding more creative options only causes you to reach a point of diminishing returns quite rapidly. Beyond that point, having more creative options available … Continue reading →

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Expense or Investment?

Posted on May 21, 2018 by tropicaltheartist

It all depends on how you look at things. Two people can observe the same event, but because of their default mental models about that happenstance, conclude that two entirely different and irreconcilable consequences have resulted. What you think happened … Continue reading →

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Boring and Ordinary

Posted on May 6, 2018 by tropicaltheartist

There are people whose greatest fear is being boring and ordinary. They have an existential need to be special and outstanding. Obscurity terrifies them. Their whole identity is built on this foundation. Sadly, it’s not a very stable footing. I’ve … Continue reading →

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The Ideas That Excite You

Posted on May 1, 2018 by tropicaltheartist

There are some ideas that fully capture your imagination and enrapture you. They pique your interest and stimulate your curiosity. In short, they excite you. Not everybody responds to the ideas that grab you the same way you do, so … Continue reading →

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