Under the pen name 'Otto Moon', the filmmaker has penned Sing in the Shower, It's Your Superpower - a self-help book about the emotional benefits of shower singing and why it sounds so good. Photo: Smiling Whale Books
Under the pen name 'Otto Moon', the filmmaker has penned Sing in the Shower, It's Your Superpower - a self-help book about the emotional benefits of shower singing and why it sounds so good.
When his late father Frank became ill a couple of years ago, Florian Habicht moved from Auckland to Northland.
With his "life hack" of singing his heart out in a private karaoke room for a couple of hours now off the table, the filmmaker got back into his teenage habit of singing in the shower.
For someone who fancied themselves a good singer, Habicht rediscovered, shower singing was no less than "a gift from God".
Wondering if anyone had ever written a book about this fun, creative, judgement-free activity, he did some careful research and found they had not.
"I started exploring it deeper and realised why water is such an amazing, magical thing."
To make the process of writing and illustrating his first book more fun and not so intimidating, Habicht used a pen name. The author of Sing in the Shower, It's Your Superpower: Mindfulness Made Fun for Adult Humans (A Practical Guide) is officially Otto Moon.
In the past, Habicht said, his spirit had been crushed by "often heartbreaking" feedback from friends and colleagues about rough cuts of films he had worked on for years.
"With [the 2003 film] Woodenheads, a friend of mine told me 'Florian, don't put any more time into this'.
"I've had good ones too but most of the time it's really harsh feedback and my world sort of crumbles down."
His first book - which may also be the first book about singing in the shower - was a kind of self-help book, he said, with a bunch of great stories about the magic of water and why, acoustically, shower singing sounded so good.
While a solo session with a karaoke system made him feel like "he can take on the world", their sound quality did not always stack up to the bathroom anyway, Habicht said.
"In the shower, you're guaranteed to sound amazing."
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