A Little Night Music

Screnzy update - 52k and counting. They've yet to leave the prison. So, so much is going to get cut. I can't quite believe there's only four days left at this point.




I participated in February Album Writing Month, AKA FAWM, two months ago. I won, finishing 14 and one half songs in twenty-nine days. I'm relatively happy with three of my songs, and wish, a little, that I could pretend the other recordings didn't exist. All of the recordings I made are here. The whole experience, however, was amazing. One of my songs was even featured on the nightly FAWMcast, a radio-show produced during the month, and that's incredible. The entire idea of these monthly challenges - FAWM, NaNoWriMo, Screnzy - is an awesome concept. For one month, people from everywhere get together and start doing something they love to do, knowing there are other people there to help them, who are going through the exact same difficult and amazing challenge. It's a month-long run-on sentence incredible jam session of people having fun and being creative.

Screnzy is my third such jam-session this year, and part of me keeps screaming, "Why are you doing this? You don't get enough sleep as it is, and you need sleep to have a working memory so you don't forget all the things you actually need to do! Like homework! You're shooting yourself in the foot!" The thing is, that part of me is the same thing that told me I shouldn't audition for my first choir, because they'd kick me out while laughing at me. If I'd listened to that part of me, I'd be a sad, music-less girl without a clue what I wanted to do. So I didn't listen to it for Screnzy, and suddenly I've got more words than I had for NaNo down in a Word file on my hard drive. (That reminds me - I should really save it to the cloud soon.) I've got a working novel in progress, waiting for me to finish it. By the time I do, I'll be able to say, "You know that novel everyone wants to write? I've written two." I've pushed myself to do something that seems impossible, but I did it. Knowing that I can do this, with nothing but a semi-arbitrary deadline and a computer, is a huge rush. I can look at that Word file and think, "That's right, I did that."

I did do that. I am doing that. I intend to keep doing that. I might just set myself another deadline for next month, and see if I can write another story, or write another album. Practice might make perfect, but it's the practice that's the fun part. I am practicing, and it's the coolest thing on the planet.