My big weekend actually began on Thursday, sitting in the customer lounge of Albany Subaru, calculating how much time I had to finish the first draft of a remix. John Digweed was scheduled to play in San Francisco the following night, and thanks to some networking done by my friend and music collaborator Mark Musselman, we had a channel to get him some tracks. But I hadn’t made much progress on the remix, and it would take something of a miracle to get it into shape. You don’t want to send one of your favorite DJs something half-baked!

But then I remembered my 2026 motto. For the past few years I’ve been doing an annual motto instead of resolutions. A theme for the year, a few words to encapsulate what I’m focusing on or going for or just trying to remember. My 2026 motto is “Swing Big,” and when I remembered that I realized I had to at least try to finish a draft of the remix. Better to swing and miss than to let an easy pitch go by…

Thursday night I spent at my mixing desk (which is the same as my regular desk), working in Cubase. The remix I was working on was called Feed Your Soul, an unreleased debut track originally written by three friends of mine (Mark Musselman, Jonathan Ojeda, and Den Jones) collaborating under the moniker Big Room Drama. Like the name of their group, the original mix was big, bombastic, and dramatic. I wanted to go for a different feel for the Jondi & Spesh remix, something more understated, groove-oriented, and hypnotic.

After hours of work I finally came up with a bassline/lead combination that felt good. After I had that groove, the arrangement fell into place pretty easily. I sent a draft to Spesh, did revisions based on his feedback, and sent the remix over to the BRD boys. A long shot, but still a swing!

Friday night Kia and I went on a pub crawl. We didn’t start off with that intention, but she had a bar in mind she’d once visited in the Mission, but she’d forgotten the name of it. So we kept going to bars and having rounds until we found it. The bar turned out to be Wildhawk, where we had our last drink of the night, toasting the many things we have to celebrate in our lives (top of this list, our kid is very much on track to graduate from high school next week).

At that point Mark texted me with an extra ticket to Digweed. I hadn’t planned to actually go the show since I had plans to attend an all-day writing conference the next day. I’m well into my fifties and I keep saying that my nightclubbing days are behind me, but maybe I should just give up on that idea and resign myself to the probability that I’ll be pumping my fist in the air to techno until my dying breath. The venue was only a ten minute walk from my house, I had a free ticket (thanks Den!), and there was a nonzero chance that one of my favorite DJs would play our new remix. I told Mark I’d meet them there.

Well, I had a great time. John Digweed’s set was amazing and reminded me of why I love electronic dance music. His set also strengthened my resolve to ignore Spotify’s demand for ever-shorter, tighter, hookier tracks, and to instead keep making long weird tracks for the dance floor. Around 1am I started to lose energy and said goodbye to the BRD boys who were still going strong. Digweed wasn’t playing any vocal tracks so it seemed unlikely that he would play our new one (which heavily features a vocal sample), but I didn’t feel disappointed at all, just uplifted from the great music and the warm fuzzy feeling I always get from music collaborations.

I slept well and woke up excited to attend the Locus Awards conference in Berkeley. One of the guests of honor was Nnedi Okorafor, an author I greatly admire, and I was looking forward to attending her panels. But as I was getting ready, I noticed a bunch of text notifications. Turns out, Digweed did play our track! And Mark got it on video.

Huge congrats to Big Room Drama for having John Digweed debut their track. That’s an extremely auspicious start to their collaboration. And I was happy to be a part of it. As a bonus, John Digweed also closed out the night with Jondi & Spesh – We Are Connected, a nineties track that Digweed plucked out of obscurity (from a used record store in Berkeley) and turned into something of a global hit. So big thanks and tons of respect to John Digweed, we appreciate the love!

But…my weekend wasn’t over. I spent all of Saturday in downtown Berkeley at the Hotel Shattuck for the Locus Awards panels and awards dinners. I generally find writing conventions to be both awkward and stressful, but I force myself to attend them because they’re an amazing opportunity to meet people, to rub elbows with your favorite authors, and to learn the ropes of the industry. One conference highlight was a lively discussion about AI, both as-is realities and could-be potential, with the panelists taking very different positions and bringing up points I hadn’t considered (even though it’s a topic I think about a great deal). I also reconnected with a few people I’d met before, made a few new acquaintances, and enjoyed a stroll through downtown Berkeley past my old high school.

And here I am on Monday, still feeling a little groggy. I think I need a few weekends of painting fantasy miniatures by myself, and taking quiet walks around my neighborhood hunting Pokémon. That was all a bit too much.

But I promise I will keep swinging big, at least until the end of the year…