Saturday Summary, June 4, 2011

Every Saturday, The Creative will feature a brief post about my current creative efforts and how they are progressing. If this doesn't interest you, read no further -- not only will I not be offended, I'll never know.

This week seemed to go much faster than last week, perhaps because I had a ton of time for all my creative pursuits.  Monday was a day off, Tuesday was the last day of school, and with the exception of a few piano lessons Wednesday and a couple of hours of rehearsals Thursday night, the week's been all mine.  Very nice.

One housekeeping thing while it's on my mind -- some of you may have noticed that the section at the top left is no longer called the "Daily Haiku."  Well, I was missing more days writing than I was making, so I decided instead of failing at writing a daily haiku, I could succeed at writing a haiku whenever I felt like it, which usually is the same day I write a post.

I also should update the Haiku archives, too, but we'll get to that later.  For now, on to the update:

Music -- I finished up a 3-5 octave arrangement of the slow part from Holst's Jupiter.  He later set that tune to lyrics for the hymn "I Vow to Thee, My Country" (the hymntune is THAXTED -- big in England, not so much on this side of the pond).  It has other titles, but I chose that one because it will go well with our church's upcoming Patriotic Concert, and we needed another piece to play.

I also updated my whiteboard with a list of pieces I want to write this summer, and it's a doozy.  If I can actually get really moving on those, it ought to be a wonderfully productive summer.

Here's where my count of compositions stands for the year so far:

• Handbell pieces -- 20  10
• Piano pieces -- 20  16
• Choral pieces -10
• String pieces -- 4
• Band pieces -- 2
• Other instrumental pieces -- 4
• GRAND TOTAL FOR 2011 -- 60 46

Looking at my whiteboard, I think I'm going to overshoot the handbell number by quite a bit, which I'm just fine with.  Sadly, that means I may undershoot (is that even a word?) some of the other categories, but we'll see what transpires.

Writing -- I didn't get to it much, but I did spend some time editing the second book of The Sadonian Chronicles (hereinafter "SC2," because I'm already tired of typing and writing "Sadonian Chronicles 2").  I had made some edits by hand to a hard copy of it, but just hadn't transferred them to the computer yet.  I'm still in the midst of that, and it's going well.  Sadly, I fear for when those hand edits run out and I've still got two-thirds of the book to edit from scratch.  It wasn't great progress, but it was something, so I'll take it.

Publishing -- Aside from submitting I Vow to Thee, My Country for publication, all that happened here was I finished editing the four proofs for my upcoming Beckenhorst releases.  By the time the end of December rolls around, that will make eight pieces of mine that Beckenhorst will have released this year alone.  All in all, a really good year for my publishing.


That's it from here.  I'm off for more coffee, and then some fun (I've promised myself I get to play an hour of Civilization V as this week's "Artist Date" for The Artist's Way), then some recycling -- the sad part of cleaning out (some would say "gutting") two offices in two days is you end up with a lot of trash, a lot of dust everywhere, and a ton of stuff that needs to go various places to be recycled.  Still, once that's gone, our house and our lives will breathe easier, and we'll reclaim half our garage.

Until next time, happy creating!