A different type of writing

When I was much younger I thought that my future was a lot closer than it was. I feel like this happens to a lot of children; they have a plan of what they want to do (my little cousin wanted to be a "cooker in the morning and a mommy in the day" for a long time) and then get to about our age and look back and can laugh about their career choices from when they were four or five. For me, that occupation was being a fiction writer. I was constantly coming up with little stories and trying to write them down with my terrible little-kid handwriting (which, truth be told, hasn't gotten much better since) and read them to my family. My mother would often chuckle and tell me I did a good job and my father would give me constructive criticism. Most of us probably know how well constructive criticism goes over with small children. He would say that I needed to have "less dialogue" and tell more about what the characters were doing. I would try and fail. I got to a mixture of angry and disappointed and decided I didn't want to be a writer anymore.

I still kept thinking of little stories though. Little by little I started coming out of my shell and would start writing again. In fifth grade I went to a competition with a story I had written and illustrated (a very big deal for me at the time) with a story about a family who lived inside a volcano. I ended up going and winning second place for the age group, I don't quite remember what it was. This should have influenced me to keep writing stories, but honestly it didn't. I put the whole writing thing aside while music started becoming the main focus in my life.

Last year, I first heard about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) which, if you don't know, is a challenge that has you write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I read about it in mid-October and decided I would give it a shot. The first day came along and I began writing. My initial idea was to have a group of students sitting in a class that were all going through a rough time at home, school, with friends, etc. and, in the end, they all were coming to the same moment of "zen," or clarity, and all thinking, even maybe for just a second, that everything would turn out in their favor later on, it's purpose to show how the human mind can subconsciously work. I started work on the first of November, completing about 2,500 words just that day. The next three or four days were progressively less productive and by about a week in I had given up. I still wanted to continue thinking about this idea which I felt was a different kind of writing than a strange family who lived in a volcano, escaping an eruption just in the nick of time.

November starts pretty soon. I'm already signed up for NaNoWriMo and I already have this idea which has been fermenting in my brain for a year. My goal this time around is to get to at least 30,000 words before I think about quitting. I'm feeling a lot more comfortable with writing fiction and I'm glad that I have at least the will power to try and finish this year.

This summer, pt. 2

I really did have an amazing summer. On top of the four and a half weeks of music camps, I had the privilege of having a full orchestral piece of mine played by a professional orchestra.

I'll back up. In the summer of 2013, the Urbana Pops Orchestra announced a composition contest. They did this the year before, I had submitted something, but it was pretty terrible. Not surprisingly, I didn't win. However, this time I was ready. I had started to work on my original idea from the previous summer again, and it was sounding alright, still not too good. I worked for three weeks straight on that thing and submitted it at the end of January. I waited for months for a response. Then, in mid-April, I ran into one of the conductors of the orchestra at Za's, of all places. We chatted a little bit, he and his family had been friends of ours for a few years, and then he said that they had selected a winner for the competition, and would love to play my piece. I thanked him profusely, and was super, annoyingly giddy for a few days afterwards. After this, I got in touch with the guy who judged the composition, a professor at Colombia College in Chicago for "Music of the Screen." He gave me comments on the piece and I took pretty much everything he said to heart. I really, really wanted this thing to be good.

What happened from that time to the performance was kind of a blur. I was actually in the orchestra who was playing my piece, back in the percussion section, but I had asked to not play during it. There were more qualified percussionists to play my piece back there than myself. We were playing some really great music during that concert. After the first rehearsal, I sat back and thought about this. My piece had a certain "Americana" quality to it, and that really clashed with the rest of the program, which featured some like this (like John Williams' "Jurassic Park", "Raiders of the Lost Ark") but others (like Saint-Seans "Bacchanale," look it up) that did not. I tried to shrug off this feeling and focus on my playing and not as much on my piece; it was kind of out of my hands at this point.

The night of the concert came way too quickly. Naturally, as they do, my entire extended family came. When we got to the venue, I started to freak out just a little bit. Not too much, I kept to myself, but I was sweating, trembling, going overall insane. I played on highlights from "Jurassic Park" (which, by the way, is an amazing piece, one of my favorites, and frankly scared me so bad to have played before mine) and went down into the audience. It was really hard to sit there and enjoy it. I was still in semi-freakout mode, and this was all a little much. But I eventually calmed myself down. I listened. They were doing a really fantastic job. I was so glad that I had pushed myself and taken the time to get this done, revise it, submit it, and be there for it.

This preceded the first camp I went to by about a week, and when I showed up at Blue Lake, the euphoria was still there. I was ready to learn from one of Tchaikovsky's most majestic works (his fourth symphony) on how to improve at what I do.
 
If you want to listen to it, here's a link to the performance of my piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUwnlojYgKk