Before anything else, the big news is that I've decided to name the label in honor of both my original company, and my original artist collective. The record label will now be called Fateless Flows Records. Just sounds better, and there is a whole backstory behind the name that you will be able to read about on the actual website. Clarity is awesome.
Due to a new need for surgery, I am home this year, which turned out to be anything but a break. Amidst getting back to all of the obligations pending while on the road for the last two years, relaunching Fateless and it's website has def been a long hard road. The first web designer did not work out at all. I had to leave on tour last year in the middle of our work, and when I got back, everything she had done basically amounted to nothing. My server had erased her work because of "phishing" (apparently a plugin she had used that made our site vulnerable), and when I went to her for the master files, she told me that she never keeps any, ever. This person never keeps copies of her work. She actually found it odd that I would even ask for them. I had just payed her $500 to work hard on nothing that I could possibly use. And now she was about to put my account on her back-burner because I had been out of town.
For the sake of etiquette, I won't divulge her name here, but if anyone ever wants to know, please feel free to ask. I'll tell you. Clients deserve to be safe from people like that.
So this was a major monkey wrench. I obviously ditched her and started my long search for another designer. That was a whole other adventure. After telling each new potential designer the story of my original designer, many of them actually got paranoid that I was a spammer for some reason, and/or they were extremely impatient with my new tentativeness. This made me crazy, and I seriously wondered about designers in general. What could make them all so unstable? Some people told me that they are trigger-happy because of how many bad clients they are used to getting. Bad? Good? That stuff really doesn't matter when you are simply trying to get something done.
I finally seem to have secured a dependable and professional designer and developer. The developer part is what made him so enticing. It was tricky at first, because he requested payment in unusual and non-secure ways, so I didn't know if I could trust him. So far, he has turned out to be just the blessing I needed in my life this year. All I've had to do now is my own job (creative management and basic info architecture) which is almost a novelty at this point.
Still, it took quite a while to compile the info and files for the site, so he wouldn't have to do any of my job for me. Amidst all of the music projects and collaborations I'm in the middle of, this one (the label website), had to take me out of the entire game for a bit. When you get a big job like that, you have to be able to concentrate/crunch. Had to put all my other work on hold. There was a lot of compiling the various artist's info, and rewriting it. I also had to rethink the label policies and decide on a basic look. Mission accomplished though!
The rest is all up to the designer now.
Back to my projects, which have not gotten any less congested since I started on the website months ago. Also, I seem to have achieved another falling-out with a long-time colleague during this period. ??? Amazing. I apologized profusely for anything I might have done, but he didn't seem to soften up at all. That always amazes me. I guess I should stop apologizing for things, even when I know I made a mistake. No none-life-threatening mistake deserves this kind of treatment. Sure, I do work exceptionally slow because of my lack of talent for multi-tasking, and my signals get a little confusing sometimes because of all my stress, but I'm not that different from everyone else trying to juggle the same magnitude. Doing work like this, or any work, takes patience, and you have to be able to not take little disagreements along the way personally. Imagine taking every little disagreement personally in a corporate conference room. You're career would basically end right there. There's no room for ego when it comes to achievement--you have to focus on the work, not the disappointment. It really seems like a "mad world" to me when I have to deal with this. I guess more than any learning experience that my ex-colleague might think he's getting out of it, I should take this to mean that I should choose my friends and colleagues more carefully, and keep some distance between us.
As usual, the stress is oddly high right now for not getting payed, but I have no doubt that all of the seeds I'm planting will lead to something, monetarily or not. I just have to keep meditating, taking breaks and getting acceptable sleep. Sounds easy, doesn't it?
Dean
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