RickMooreWriter

It’s been a couple months since I’ve been on here, so it’s time to update a little. I got married to a fabulous woman named Caryn on July 3rd, and we’re still trying to get our life straight. It’s been an adventure trying to move everything out of my bachelor pad and into her (now our) house and trying to make a living (she’s in sales) and keeping the honeymoon going at the same time. I also just took over as the president of Nashville Toastmasters, so that’s been keeping me busy too.

So now, even though my writing business is good, it’s also up and down, and isn’t really a good thing to try to do full-time now that I have a wife (and five grandkids) and a mortgage. So I’m beating the bushes for a job. I’m relatively confident I’ll find one in short order, given my writing and public relations skills and my contacts around Nashville. And I’m also confident that my novel (which needs another edit, as if I have time) and my songs (one of which has just been pitched to a couple Gospel artists) are going to hit. The Lord didn’t give me (or Caryn, who also writes) these abilities for no reason. It’s gonna be our turn soon.

One of the purposes of a blog is to write something every day, and live under the assumption that people care about my life and are reading it. So I guess I need to write more regularly, and perhaps I can even make some money as a professional blogger at some point when I find something I’m so passionate about that I will blog about it on a regular basis.

Work is picking up. Have done six articles for the Nashville Business Journal in the past week, have several assignments coming up for the Tennessean, I’m writing a press release for an author’s press kit…quite a bit going on. And I’m finishing another edit of my novel. I have an agent interested, and a champion in my good novelist friend Eric Wilson, and it WILL get published.

The big news is that I’m starting to play out in public again, doing the singer/songwriter thing with an acoustic guitar. I don’t enjoy it all that much, but some doors are starting to open for me in terms of playing my original material for some people who matter, and I play and sing like crap these days because I never practice. So I have to get in shape, and there’s no better practice than playing in public, like it or not. I used to be great at it, especially playing lead, when I did it six nights a week in a band. Girls flashed me and people bought me drinks and I had it goin’ on. But I’m afraid I’ve lost my mojo, and the only way I’m gonna get it back is by playing in front of people, no matter what my Nashville songwriting peers (and there are thousands) think of me or my material. I think most of them suck, the same way they’ll think I do, so I don’t care. I need to do it anyway.

I want to thank everyone who made my party last night at Take 121 Arts such a great success. The two dozen or so people there made new friends, renewed old acquaintances, and had a fantastic time in general, and I was chief among them.  Most everyone was involved in some way in the music business, although there were a few exceptions. I hope to do this again soon with the lovely Nanette, the hostess and gallery marketing director, and a whole other set of guests, as I couldn’t fit everybody in on this one. This showed me how many friends I really have in Nashville. What a great problem to have.

< Nikki Mitchell dog rescue story

This is a story I wrote for the Tennessean about Nikki Mitchell of Waylon Jennings Music. In addition to being a great person and a fellow Toastmaster, Nikki saves animals from certain death.

Never having had any kids of my own, I found I was ill-equipped to play and sing for a roomful of four-year-old pre-school kids at Buena Vista Elementary School in North Nashville. It never used to bother me a bit to play for a packed nightclub or casino lounge. But this was different.

These children live in an area of Nashville known for drugs, violence, gangs, and every other bad thing we hear about urban America on the Nightly News. The majority of them are from single-parent households, and will probably repeat the same dysfunctional, even hopeless, existences as adults that their parents seemed trapped in. But if my being there to lead them in a chorus of “This Land Is Your Land,” or to explain to them what a guitar or a mandolin are…well, I’ll probably never know, but maybe one of them will be influenced or inspired enough by me to become a musician, to learn a skill that will give them confidence and self-worth, which may, in turn, someday be their ticket out of that neighborhood.

Having said that, it was a tough gig. I can hold my own in a room full of drunks or a Toastmasters audience, but this was…different. I was nervous as a cat for some reason. It was good for me.

What a weekend…my old buddy Monte Doty from Michigan and I went exploring in East Tennessee, wanting to travel the mile-high scenic Cherohala Skyway at the TN-NC border. It was awesome to be sure, but when we ended up on the stretch of highway known as the “Tail of the Dragon” that travels from Robbinsville, NC up to Maryville, TN, we ended up driving something neither of us had ever heard of or even imagined existed. With 318 up-and-down curves in 11 miles, the “Tail of the Dragon” is a road in the gap between the Smoky Mountains and the Appalachians where motorcycle riders play, and die, with regularity. Thankfully, there was almost no traffic when we were there Sunday afternoon, allowing us to check out some incredible scenic views and the rapids of the Little Tennessee River (at least I think that’s what it was). It was amazing. Check it out at www.tailofthedragon.com.

I got back to Nashville in one piece, just in time to work on newspaper articles for the Tennessean and the Jacksonville, FL Times-Union. Also went to my Nashville Toastmasters meeting tonight. But it was good to get out of Music City for a couple days.

So far this week, I’ve had newspaper articles published about fellow Nashville musicians and songwriters JR Ottow (the South Bend Tribune), Troy Bullock (the Bonner County, ID Daily Bee) and JoAnn Rankin (the Poughkeepsie Journal). Also working today on some Web writing for a real estate site in Raleigh and doing some marketing work for myself, as well as a story for the Tennessean about my friend Nikki who runs Waylon Jennings Music; she’s a dog rescuer.

It’s a beautiful, 60-ish, breezy day in Music City. I just came home from the library with my usual haul of jazz CDs and I’m listening to a little Dexter Gordon as I write this. Plan to make myself a nice fish dinner this evening and watch the Democrats continue to sabotage themselves on the Nightly News before settling in to work on an article I’m writing for the prestigious worldwide Toastmasters Magazine.

Another Easter has passed and Jesus still isn’t back. Oh well. Things are great anyway…lots of work this week, several newspaper articles in the works as well as some hopeful SEO and Web site writing. And a couple music business parties and meetings to go, as well as a couple guitar students, all before heading to East Tennessee for a couple days to hang out with my old bud Monte Doty from Michigan at his timeshare near Crossville.

I went to World Music in Bellevue to see my friend Nick Autry, along with such hit songwriters as Steve Leslie and Irene Kelley, perform to raise money for cancer victims and research. It was a long night though…things in Nashville tend to never start or end on time, and always seem to run a lot longer than they’re supposed to. So I ducked out early…got to hear Nick play though.

This is a story I wrote for the New York Times-owned Web site www.nashville.about.com about the excellent Monet to Dali exhibit at Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts.