You may be familiar with NaNoWriMo, or “National Novel Writing Month,” in which people are encouraged to overcome their own personal inertia and write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I’ve been intrigued with the idea since I first heard about it a few years ago, but fiction writing has always been an area that I’ve studiously avoided. I have enough trouble self-critiquing my lyrics and declaring them stupid before I’ve even finished the third line — I can only shudder in horror at the thought of reading over my own fiction.
Still, the idea is sound and something I actually wrote about in a song to myself back in the late 90s:
You don’t know what you can do until you do it.
And you won’t know what you can get through ’till you get through it.
There’s a world waiting for you, go pursue it.
There’s nothing left to stop you, so go to it.
For awhile it worked, but I’ve been in a funk for over six years now and haven’t written a thing worth mentioning. I’ve started thinking about music more and more lately, though, and NaNoWriMo has the right idea. It’s defined. There’s a ticking clock. There’s a clear measure for success.
I first thought that, in solidarity with my literary bretheren, I’d would tackle the musician’s equivalent of writing a novel — recording an album — in November. Then I remembered that I’ll be in Texas for 20 days of it. While I’ve gotten a pretty decent mobile studio started down there, it’s not quite ready for all of the work I’d need to do.
So I’m shifting My Album Recording Month back to December. I’ll be in Milwaukee for all but four days of it, so the time is good. What I haven’t quite decided yet is whether this will be a brand new set of songs, reworkings of older stuff, or something in between. I also haven’t decided what kind of music it will be or if I might do some pre-production work ahead of time. The main thing is that I want to have final recordings either on their way to CD duplication or making their way to something like the iTunes online store by the end of 2009.
I’ll be keeping a diary of progress here, so stay tuned if you’re interested.
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