Mark Richer

Financial contributions are always welcome. You can donate via paypal at paypal@ableminds.com or send a check to Able Minds, 1750-1 30th St, #170, Boulder, CO 80301. If you send any money, please indicate who it is from (your screen name from which forum) and for what purpose. I receive money for other forums so I need to keep things sorted out. The first thing I need to do is get this forum moved to my server, and I might need to pay my mysql/php guy for help if we run into any obstacles. For financial reasons, I stopped supporting youngcomposers altogether. Business is finally picking up again in general, but not to hire anyone on staff to help. If we had enough money, however, I could hire a contractor to do any work that is needed. My nephew Billy (on my wife's side) graduated from USC already -- I recently heard from him actually as he asked me to host a movie teaser for something his older brother is trying to pitch to producers. Billy's doing quite well teaching music and being an accompaniest at a church. He is going by the name William Thompson-Sturdivant. He was interested in film composition (e.g., a big star wars fan) so I think he eventually hopes to focus more on composing again but right now is trying to make some money for 1-2 years. His first job out of college was working at Target for 2 months so he's doing quite well now compared to that start.

I just stopped by to say hello. We do need to work out various details to make things sustainable financially, but I'm also excited for Mike's offer to help reinvigorate youngcomposers.com. It doesn't matter to me about the message board software, so we can move this new one over to our server. We'd like to bring the rest of the site out of dormancy too, but as Mike said, we need to work out details on how to make that possible. I'm in Boulder, CO, 51 years old, with three teenage daughters (15, 15 and 19). The oldest was a very good pianist, but hasn't played in years as she seems to have other interests. My 15 year old twins (well almost 16 now) play bass and drums and are into contemporary alternative pop and rock music mostly. None have taken an interest in music composition yet ... my wife actually started the site almost 10 years ago because it was a personal interest of hers. She's been too busy the last few years to have any involvement, one of several reasons the site has been stale. Her nephew Billy used to update the site until we couldn't pay him anymore so that was another reason for it going into hybernation. I think Billy (William Thompson on the site) might have already graduated from USC by now, but he was studying film music composition there when he was a student. Well that's it for now. The first thing to do is to prepare the server for the new message board. Stay tuned and Mike will announce progress on this.