Saturday Summary, August 27, 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.

It's Saturday again.  Unlike some weeks that fly by, I felt every minute of this week as it battered my body, mind, and soul.  It was one of those run-run-run sort of weeks where I was busy a lot of the time, but didn't actually get much accomplished.

That being said, I'm counting my blessings today for living in a city nearly a thousand miles from a major body of water, and sending my thoughts, prayers, and well-wishes to those friends, colleagues, and random strangers who are today being buffeted about, drenched, and otherwise assaulted by Irene.  May you all stay safe and as dry as possible.

Now, on to the update:

Music -- Sum total of time I was able to spend for the entire week on composing was somewhere just north of an hour.  Needless to say, not much got done.  I did start in on a unison choral anthem for my choir at church that I hope we'll be able to sing our first Sunday back (which is September 11, so you can guess what sort of happy, uplifting piece it's going to be), and jotted down some ideas for a commission I just received a week or two ago.  Beyond that ... nada.

I did want to update my yearly totals, since I've not done that for several days:

• Handbell pieces -- 20 5
• Piano pieces -- 20  13
• Choral pieces -10
• String pieces --  4  1
• Band pieces -- 2
• Other instrumental pieces -- 4
• GRAND TOTAL FOR 2011 -- 60 35

I hope to change those numbers drastically in the coming days, but I'll just need that all important commodity -- time.

Writing -- I got even less done here than I did on my music (though I did see that someone else bought a copy of The Coming of the Heroes on Amazon -- thank you, whoever you are!).  Still waiting for comments to start coming in on Fealty and Fire so I can start tweaking it.

Publishing -- I finished my first look-over of the proof for Escape Velocity.  It's a weird thing, but the more difficult the piece itself is, the fewer errors I tend to find in the engravers proof.  My theory is that there's so much happening on the page that the engraver is more careful than usual when putting the score together, hence fewer mistakes creep in.  Of course, it's just as possible that there are a ton more mistakes in there and the piece is just so nutty that I'm not seeing them in all the confusion ... but I really doubt that's the case -- the proofs I get from Jeffers are all top-notch and quite nearly perfect before I ever get hold of them.


So that's it from here.  Again, my East Coast friends, stay safe, and we'll hope to see you all back here again on Wednesday.