A couple of months ago, I began work on a new, long term blog series that I'm going to call "Ghosts of DFW Music History." This series will focus on revisiting the locations of long gone music and performance related venues in the DFW area and providing a bit of history behind them. Some of these were well known fixtures in their day, while others were holes in the wall that have long since been forgotten. Some were local record labels, some were performance venues, and all have been missing in action for a minimum of 15-20 years. Unlike most of my other current projects, this one requires that I not only pull from my own archival materials, but also that I research and clear the use of materials from a lot of other people. Locating and getting permission to use content is going to be the biggest bottleneck to this entire process. Happily, most people I've contacted have been very willing to authorize use of their old photos and flyer images, a fact for which I am grateful. Right now I am still in the research stage, but hopefully I can post the first series entries sometime in July.
The other big project I've been working on is the return of the road trip travelogues to the site. Way back in the day I had a few of them on here, but they were shabby, hastily produced affairs that were slapped together while I was actually on the road and sent back for people (mainly coworkers) back home. They also never continued past 2017 and didn't even feature everything up to that point. This time I'm finally at work putting proper narratives together, sifting through the thousands of photos and occasional videos in an effort to get everything organized and properly presented. This is such an involved process that I've spread it over many, many months, having actually begun work in August 2022 before leaving for (and subsequently adding into the queue) last year's road trip. As much as I'd like to have all of this up on the site before the end of this year, it seems a bit unlikely given the sheer amount of time, effort, and work involved to make it to that point. Still, it's possible, so I won't count it out just yet.
The final two projects in the pipeline are more directly related to the local music scene during the years I was actually involved in it. I am occasionally (often when I get tired of the other projects I'm working on and desire a break) working on my "DFW Archives" collection of videos and images, items that I've digitized myself from original physical source materials as part of ongoing preservation efforts. I have plenty of scanned images that have yet to be edited and published. Last of all, there are the live performance photo galleries that used to be one of the main features of this site. Earlier this spring I finished cataloging all the concert material from my days shooting bands, and finished filtering out everything that was in some way unsuitable for publication due to photographer error, etc. The remainder has been sorted out by performer(s) and by show, and what's left to do now is to go through each collection and determine which individual photos will make the final cut, as well as make the corrections and tweaks necessary to get them into final form. At that point, the performance galleries can begin to go back up. This has meant reviewing tens of thousands of images, and even after my first round of cuts, I still have hundreds of potential photos for some bands - over 500 as of this writing for Silver Loves Mercury, and around 1500 for With These Words, to give just two examples. This is a very long term project which has been relegated to secondary importance behind the road trip travelogues. Look for the galleries to start going up some time in 2024 based on progress made thus far.
So this is where things stand with the site as of now. I have a "real" job, and other things I like to do outside of the internet world - I run a coffee/conversation group, go out dining with multiple other groups of people, have a regular hiking partner I meet with on the weekends, and I of course engage in various other activities with friends and acquaintances as life allows. Website-related activities are something I only work on when I don't have any of the other more social prospects immediately available to me. At some point I will "catch up" with everything and will complete all the long term projects. In the meantime, I have a couple of food-related blog posts that I'm finishing up, and I am still gathering research and illustrative materials for the new blog series. I start a new job in a little over two weeks and I will out of necessity be focusing much of my attention on that once it begins.