Career: REBOOTED

So this is what a revamped, freshly polished, renewed, reaffirmed, remodulated "career" looks like!

I've started a fresh new blog, after many failed attempts to blog actively on my own website as a professional touring, performing, recording musician who needs to relentlessly hustle to get his music heard and keep the gigs rolling in.

But I'm done with that game now. Not the music game, just the uphill battle to force my music into people's earholes. The truth is, I make music - and have ALWAYS made music - for myself. I love soul, I love funk, I love old school disco, and I love a lot of other kinds of music too, but I've spent many years getting really good at making music that fits the above labels. And let's face it... it's not pop. So my early childhood ambition to be a world-famous rockstar was probably foiled the very moment I decided to follow in the footsteps of Jamiroquai, Incognito and my various West Coast (Yacht Rock) idols. My style is not really suited to the kids today, and the result has been that musicians tend to enjoy my music, and a handful of punters (non-musical appreciators of music) buy it, support what I do, book me for their events and shake their asses to my stuff.

And I like it like that.

It's been a journey to let go of the NEED to be uber-famous, but I have come to realise on my more recent journey through learning about philosophy, and learning about myself (through therapy and self-work), that my very career choice that I made at the ripe age of 8 years old was actually a choice to fill an emotional hole in my life... the need to have a voice and to be heard. This is something I will likely touch on in more depth in future blogs, but suffice to say for now that this realisation opened up an epic wormhole into which my very identity was sucked and, as a result, I've spent the last year really re-evaluating what is important to me and what my career should look like.

And the truth is... I am not just a musician. I am many things.

Husband.
Father.
Songwriter.
Keyboardist.
Wedding Singer.
Producer of music.
Webdesigner.
Philosopher.
Reader.
Film Buff.
Film-maker.
Music Video Director.
Amateur builder (yep, built my own studio with my own hands).
Cartoonist/Illustrator.
Maker of cardboard Samurai Helmets (four-year-old-son... need I explain further?).
Expert Level Duplo Engineer (as above).

Writer.

I've been writing stories my whole life.

I used to draw pictures with intricate details of battles between various monsters, men and creatures - sometimes characters from Greek Mythology, which I adored - and I would scribble down brief, but epic stories of their adventures.

When I was 10 I attempted to write a novel. It was about sentient mice escaping genocide at the claws of evil rats. I got a little fixated on how to perfect the binding of the paperback version, which I self-published in my bedroom with my 486 computer, sporting Windows 3.1 and a dot-matrix printer - the pages from which required very careful trimming to make into paperback format. Once the binding was perfect, I got hungry for a snack, so I stopped writing the novel and never picked it up again.

Music was too all-consuming to ever give prose writing a serious go.

But I never stopped writing.

Throughout my high school and university years, though my mind was mostly focussed on the music career (and getting laid), in my spare time I would write short stories, film treatments, stage plays, and I even wrote, produced, directed and edited my own short film just for fun (might share that here at some point).

Shortly after the short film, I wrote my first feature-length screenplay, and planned its sequel, as well as continued with the numerous short stories that poured out of me at random.

But I never published any of it, I never even really did anything with the short film... it always felt like a hobby.

This year however, (you know... 2016 - the current year!) I have had an epiphany which has coincided with the intense and easy flow of writing my first full-length novel (of the Science Fiction persuasion). I am going to take my writing seriously as a profession. I will publish my novel when it is done. And it will follow with two sequels, to make a glorious, epic, and fantastical trilogy - all about the very future of humanity as a species.

I will also write freely and with passion and determination about the philosophy I have discovered and become utterly changed by. By opening my mind to rational thought and feeding it countless hours of content to support my tools for thinking in a manner that stems from rational metaphysics, I have become aware of how lost I was for so many years in a twisted form of nihilism and apathy that was disguised as being a (keyboard) warrior of social justice. Even since this learning, I spent a long time being too scared to shout my message to the larger world, so I kept my rants to my private Facebook page... but no more!

I am now the Editor-in-Chief, co-founder of and major contributor to a new philosophical news/commentary website called The Rational Right, of which I am immensely proud and dedicated to turning into a loud voice in the world of rational political/social discourse.

I will also write non-fiction books about philosophy... one day.

In the meantime, while I finish my first fiction works, I will tell my stories here on my blog. Stories from my own life, and stories from the vaults of my younger creative years. I may also rant, as and when I need to, about things happening in the world, or in my mind. I reserve the right to write whatever I like here, and I hope that even if you disagree with some of my political ideas that I can present an entertaining and compelling enough chunk of text to engage your mind in the conversation.

I started writing a comedic autobiographical book about the music business (from the perspective of a frustrated artist come wedding singer)... but I think this is something I can share here, chapter by chapter, and maybe even keep writing to *perhaps* make into a future novel... but who knows.

There are many words that pour from my mouth and mind (via my fingertips), and I am resolved to no longer limiting my storytelling to Verse, Chorus, Verse, Repeat Chorus, Bridge, Repeat Chorus to Fade....

So, welcome to Philosopher Fox, and I hope you'll subscribe if you like what you read, and keep in touch via the comments. Let's have a conversation.

Honestly yours,

James Fox Higgins

The Philosopher Fox

PS. If you've found me via my prose writing, rather than via my music, you may like to check out my music at my official website: http://jamesfoxhiggins.com