It’s strange to me that I can do the music, but I can’t do the writing. And I’m probably a better writer than I am a musician. But it wasn’t always easy, and the music has gotten better and easier with positive feedback that I’ve gotten because I’ve been trying.

The thing is, I have tried with the writing, and I’ve been hurt. Granted, it was a long time ago, and what I’m writing now is very different than what I was writing then. I think that I’ve grown and changed, I think my writing is more mature. But I don’t know, and that’s what scares me.

So this is a big dilemma in my head now. I just registered on Duotrope and actually found a few publishers that I could submit to. I did a Google search for romance agents and found a long list of possibilities. Could it really hurt anything to try? Just to try? Query letters frankly terrify me, as do synopses. But still…it would be good to try. If nothing else, I can call myself a working writer trying to get published, as well as a working musician. And then next year I won’t be faced with this question once again…

As any football fan knows, Indianapolis is host to this year’s Super Bowl. Steve and I went downtown yesterday and again today to take a look at all the festivities. There’s still some work in progress, but downtown is looking fantastic. I have photos posted on Google+:

Saturday Part 1: The walk down to Monument Circle to see the XLVI and the race cars with the team logos. Glad we did this Saturday, because Sunday it was just a solid mass of people. Continued on through Circle Center Mall (with a stop at the Colts pro shop) and into Super Bowl Village.

Saturday Part 2: Visited the NFL Experience, which in my opinion wasn’t worth it unless you have kids under 12, or you really want to wait in a long line to have your picture taken with this year’s Lombardi Trophy. Pictures of it all was enough for me.

Sunday: A repeat of Saturday minus NFL Experience. Managed to get some different views, and made it to Lucas Oil Stadium. Sadly, the tours were sold out. Walked back up through Monument Circle again.

We have been blessed with excellent weather. Mid-30s and no snow on the ground is unheard of in February. We’ll take it. This week starts the craziness, and I will watch it from the comfort of my suburban living room.

This was a fun book to write, and it’s a pretty good book all in all. That still surprises me. The revision comes in at just shy of 50k words (I cut 1k words… Hope I can cut a similar proportion of words in the next revision of Mancunian Waltz…) I don’t think a 50k word romance is marketable, but I don’t know. Don’t know if I care.

So, now another break and then it’s on to Friends and Lovers. 

While I was writing Of Love and Coffee, there were moments when I hated it. (See here.) On re-reading, I do not know what I hated! This has got to be the tightest rough draft I have ever written, which is mind boggling. When I sat down to write it on Nov 21, with ten days left of NaNoWriMo, I had no idea what I was going to write. All I had was 1) it’s a romance, so there’s a couple that ends up together in the end, and 2) it takes place in Starbucks. That’s it! How did I do this? How do I do it again?

There is some really, really good stuff in this book. I’m a little stunned that I wrote it. I’ve read through the whole thing once and there are a few things that need work, a few instances where I changed my mind about something midway through so now have to go back and edit those changes into the earlier story. I mixed up names (Melanie? Melinda?), spellings of names, and there are lots of grammar and spelling errors. But other than that, the revisions are light. Nothing compared to what I just went through with Mancunian Waltz. I should have this finished in the next week or so, long before my end of winter deadline. Wow…

Play Ethic rehearsals begin again this week. Today, in fact. Our new program is Scandinavian music, and the performance is on March 3rd at a new venue for us. We are playing:

• Grieg, 2 Nordic Melodies, op.63
• Nielsen, Little Suite, op.1
• Sibelius, Kuolema: Canzonetta, op.62a
• Svendsen, 2 Icelandic Melodies
• Svendsen, I fjol gjaett’e gjeitinn (variations on a Norwegian folksong), op.31 (I can’t find a YouTube for this one.)

I’ve also been feeling the itch to write again, and since I really wasn’t wanting to dive right back into a massive project again (like Friends and Lovers, my 2009 NaNo novel that needs a complete rewrite, much like Mancunian Waltz did), I decided to work on a revision of my second 2010 novel, Of Love and Coffee. That was my 50k word novel that I wrote in nine days, that I thought I hated, but on re-reading I think it’s not so bad. I have it on my Kindle (I bought myself a new graphite Kindle Keyboard) and am going through and making notes. I’m resisting the temptation to expand and throw more into the story. I want to keep it short and simple, mostly just to prove that I can. So I hope to have it finished by the end of March. And then I’ll delve into the rewrite of Friends and Lovers and hope to have that finished by the end of the summer. Then I can come up with something new for November this year! I really hate that I have nothing new to add to my W.I.P. list after last November. I don’t want to do that again!

Football: Colts Win!!   Packers lose?!!?!!   I wonder if I would have it the other way around. I really wanted the Pack to go 16-0 (if only to erase the Patriots). Now the best they can do is 18-1. They’d just better go and win the Super Bowl. I really did not want the Colts to go 0-16, so I guess I’ll take it.

Writing: Making progress. I am nearly finished going back through what I wrote in November and integrating all the stuff that I wanted to re-use. I’ve managed to cut as many scenes as I’ve added. If I continue that trend, the entire book is on pace to be about 150k words. So I’m satisfied for now. It’s been a great weekend of work.

Is it really a week until Christmas? Wow…

I’ve gone back to fill in and integrate all of the scenes that I marked for re-use from the rough draft and earlier re-write attempt. It’s been challenging. I’m the type of writer who hates to delete or overwrite anything. I use Scrivener’s “snapshot” feature obsessively. But there comes a time when it needs to be done. Just cut it, write over it, get rid of what doesn’t work and move on. I’m making progress. The most challenging thing is keeping track of what hasn’t happened yet, since the rewrite that I did in November is still so fresh in my mind. I have so many notes written again. Every time I start to look at the big picture it gets daunting again, and I remind myself to focus on the scene or chapter or week where I am, rather than thinking of the whole right now.

One scary thing is that my word count for the first half (what I think of as the first half anyway) is now 90k words–and I’m not finished adding scenes yet. Obviously some cuts are going have to be made. But first I have to get the whole thing written. I keep reminding myself of that, too.

One more performance next Sunday and I’m finished with lessons and orchestras at least until mid-January. I love to play, but I’m looking forward to the break. There will be ample time for writing.

So, as an adult, and taking lessons for the first time, I relied on these crutches and continued these habits as long as I could. I didn’t have to rely on the finger numbers being written, but I definitely thought them, even though I told myself I shouldn’t. And up into Suzuki book 3, which I was using for repertoire, I was happily situated in 1st position. Then my teacher says we’re going to try this piece in 3rd position (one of the Seitz student concertos). And I’m like…why? It perfectly sits in 1st? Why shift to 3rd? What’s the point? My teacher was a professional symphony musician, so I had to trust she knew what she was doing. So I learned it, and I started to understand the why. I also started to learn and understand the whole concept of fingerings and making choices depending on the music written and the timbre of each string. And also working with the strength of the instrument I’m playing.

The first thing I had to learn, or unlearn, was that finger number does not equal a note. Finger number is just a finger number. I also had to learn to  know what I’m doing rather than translate it from 1st position, much like a person learning a foreign language has to at some point get past translating from the native language to the new one and just learn to think in the new language.

Now, this was a long process, and is a continuing one. And fingerings can be a touchy subject among string players. It’s something I’m constantly faced with in orchestra music. In fact, playing in a high level orchestra has been a trial by fire, and has probably really helped the intellectual understanding of these things, if not necessarily the practical application of it.

So I grew comfortable with 3rd and 5th position, to a point. And then was introduced to 2nd and 4th. When I first joined a community orchestra and asked on a violin forum for some help and advice, one of the things I was told was “learn the even numbered positions.” Now, really, what is the point of the even numbered positions? Why not just use 1st or 3rd, or 5th? Don’t they basically do the same things? But, again, these were people who knew what they were talking about. So, when the time came that they were introduced, I diligently worked on them. And sure enough, they were right.

Of course, for the first two years, and still some today, I had to ask the advice of my teacher for fingerings, even in orchestral music, because thinking in terms of positions and fingerings has not been natural to me. However, once joining Play Ethic, I started to challenge myself to try something myself, write in the fingering (back to writing in fingerings!) and then ask for my teacher’s opinion. More and more, it was coming natural, and my fingerings were sensible ones.

The challenge is to utilize all the positions, even the ones that aren’t comfortable. And in looking at music, I’m discovering that those even-numbered positions are really, really handy. A couple of programs ago, it seemed like we were constantly in 2nd position, because that’s just where the music lay. I started to go back through the Whistler even-numbered position book again in order to really get it. And I realized that 4th position was still very weak, so challenged myself to work on it on my own. Lo and behold, the last two programs of Play Ethic music have utilized 4th position probably 50% of the time, if not more.

Unfortunately, I do still need to write in fingerings. But I’ve learned that this isn’t always a bad thing. If you rely on them to read the music, it might be a crutch to do away with. But when they’re used to aid in the playing of music, they’re a tool. I write in fingerings where I want to shift, or where my eyes and fingers aren’t quite working together properly. My challenge now is to read the notes. To know the notes and where I am on the fingerboard, but also to read by interval, so I don’t have to think “4th position, 2nd finger, F.” These are two different things, and both useful and necessary as the repertoire gets more and more difficult.

Playing the violin can be a fascinating intellectual exercise, and that part appeals to me, because I’ve always been better at the intellectual than the artistic. Learning to play music (rather than let the music play me, as my teacher likes to put it) is a whole other ball game.

Here’s where Scrivener is proving to be indispensable, though. During the course of the month I had kept the scenes I wanted to re-use in two separate files, and my NaNo re-write in a third. The first thing I did was combine them and number them as one whole rather than three separate things. In order to keep track of where they came from (since for now I want to know what was written when) I simply used the “status” label for each file. After I had everything basically where it was going to go, and reorganized by story-week rather than November day, I went through and updated the synopsis and meta-data for each file. I keep story-date and day of the week in the custom meta-data, so I can keep track of the chronology. Basically what this meant that I did, which I didn’t really realize before I started doing it, is that I reviewed the entire story, beginning to middle (I haven’t reached the end yet) and really looked at how each scene fit with the ones around it. It was a really useful review, and helped me realize that I hadn’t lost that POV-character quite as completely as I’d feared. I put a few place-holder files for scenes yet to write, one of them for him, and I was suddenly at the end of the first half. And I have a complete outline and chronology of my novel to this point. I also have a ton of notes, which I also wrote during the process of outlining in this way. So while no words have been written, it’s been a productive couple of days.

Now the question comes up again: what now? There’s a ton of work to be done on the first half. But the second half sits with no work done on it at all. There’s something to be said about working with small chunks, getting the first half cleaned up before moving onto the second. There’s also something to be said about getting through one complete revision before going back to work from the beginning again. What to do?