About Time!

I finally got around to adding cover images from my newest pieces to my homepage at www.jasonwkrug.com. With the end of the school year drawing near and a recital for my private piano students tomorrow afternoon, it's been hectic. Thank goodness the summer is just around the corner!

Now, time for me to explain just what, exactly, InMuWriJu (Indianapolis Music Writing June) is. I promise I'll get to a point -- bear with me!

Starting back in 2006, I began participating in National Novel Writing Month, a 30-day forced march through creativity which just also happens to span the month of November. That first NaNoWriMo (as it's called) was a real eye-opener to me. At the time I was ringing in my church's handbell choir and singing in the loft choir, working half my day as our school's computer tech and the other half as a library assistant, and still teaching a dozen or so piano students in the evening. As a result, the amonut of time I devoted to creative pursuits -- namely composing and arranging -- was minimal. I had just had Il Est Né accepted by Beckenhorst in July of 2006, and I was worried I would have neither the time nor the ability to follow it up with anything else.

Enter NaNoWriMo. I had hemmed and hawed about whether to participate after I first heard about it, and finally decided to take the plunge. The basic gist of it -- you try to write a 50,000-word rough draft of a novel in 30 days. Insane, I know. But as I had wanted to write for a while, I figured, what the heck? What harm will it do?

By the end of November that year, I had finished my 50,000 word rough draft, and it was so terrible I subsequently destroyed all existence of it. However, it didn't take me long to realize there were two important and vital lessons I had learned from the effort:

1) I have far more "free time" than I think I do, time in which I can write, compose, arrange, or do anything else I wish.

2) You can do anything for 30 days, and if it's something you enjoy, so much the better. What's more, the creative energy you build during such an intense period is unrivaled.

It took me another NaNoWriMo in 2007 to realize I could also apply this to music writing. When a couple of my writer friends decided to spend June writing new novels, I decided to challenge myself to write 5,000 new measures of music, and in June 2008, the challenge began.

The results? Despite falling far, far short of my 5,000 measure goal, the outcome was better than I could have hoped. Some pieces that I worked on or completed rough drafts of in June 2008:

Jingle Bells -- commission by the Raleigh Ringers
O Sacred Head, Now Wounded -- Beckenhorst Press, released fall 2008
The First Noel -- Beckenhorst Press, released spring 2009
O Come, All Ye Faithful -- Beckenhorst Press, released spring 2009
Winter's Waltz -- Beckenhorst Press, released spring 2009
Kum Ba Yah -- Lorenz Company, coming in either fall 2009 or spring 2010

Five more of my pieces from June 2008 are still floating around out there at various publishers, just awaiting a response.

Any of you wanting to try your hand at handbell writing, I invite you to contact me (jason@jasonwkrug.com) and let me know -- it's better to go through this together than alone! I'd love to say there's an official InMuWriJu website, but as I made it up, there's not. Oh well.

Or, for those of you wanting to try your hand at writing a novel of your very own, check out the NaNoWriMo site for details.