Blog: Ineptitude Unveiled

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As regular readers of this blog will know, I do love a bit of ROCK ADMIN. However, as anyone who has dealt with the RESULTS of my ROCK ADMIN will know, I am really not very good at ALL at muultiple aspects of it.

This realisation came upon me for the 17,000th time yesterday when I had a meeting with a Festival Organiser about maybe doing my DOCTOR DOOM SHOW at their event. It was a LOVELY meeting and I think it might actually work out as HAPPENING, but this was not helped in any way by MY efforts which were HAPLESS to say the least. For instance, right at the end we briefly touched on how to publicise it and I said "Oh, well I do have a mailing list of about 800 people, would that help?" That is OF COURSE the sort of thing you are meant to mention AT THE START, or indeed in the original proposal, and certainly NOT 20 minutes after a lengthy description of which nation's athletes* stayed in your flat during the Olympics (*San Marino - all of them).

Even worse is my ability to NEGOTIATE about FEES and suchlike. I have managed to build myself up to the point of nervously saying that I'm happy to do gigs if I don't lose any money - an improvement of my previous stance of saying YES PLEASE and then wondering, several months after the event, whether anyone was supposed to pay me - but the idea of someone e.g. FEEDING me or even PAYING ACTUAL MONEY never really occurs. This often leads - as in this case - to promoters gently talking up the fee FOR me, which is a bit embarrassing to say the least.

In my defence, I am QUITE GOOD at remembering to check that trains are actually running these days (after several years spent on rail replacement bus services), and unlike e.g. Bruce Springsteen I am doing all this alongside a) a day job b) trying to think up rhymes for "unified catalogue of transmedia character coherence"2, but still, you'd think I'd have got better at if over several ACTUAL DECADES.

Still, it's all a learning process, and MUSING upon my manifold failures this morning did remind my brain that - HEY - if I'm going to do an entire SHOW based on a BOOK, it might be an idea to let the people who published the book KNOW about it! OH YEAH! Thanks BRANE!

posted 17/1/2025 by MJ Hibbett

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