A week has past since I finished the WAlbum project. With what little distance I have from the experience, here are some thoughts:
OBSERVATIONS:
- This was a lot of work.
- I’m proud of some things and embarrassed of others.
- I learned a lot about myself and how I work.
- It was great fun and very satisfying to create work that I could share and perform.
- This project stressed me out a lot; though, that was kind of the idea. I needed a push to get this project done. The blog helped so much with that. It was my weekly accountability marker.
- “Weekly Blog Posts:”
I decided early on that I wanted to do weekly blog posts to give myself motivation with a deadline. It was great way to use peer pressure to my advantage: tell everybody I’m going to do something, and then go get it done.The problem was that I don’t work this way. I often dive headfirst deep into a project and let it consume all of my free time and thoughts. My last project like this was my web-redesign. I worked so intensely, that I injured myself. I know I work this way, but rather than I embrace it, I tried to hide it.I wanted to show off that I could work disciplined and diligently on something to produce a product just like the “real people” do, with deadlines, work reviews, brainstorming meetings, etc.
In the end, it didn’t work out that way. The weekly post showed how difficult it is to go against the grain. I ended up procrastinating and working from the wrong direction on a lot of this until it became too much. - “Shared Development:”
I feel like I missed the goal of sharing my creative process. I wish I had shared more of how a fragment gets developed into an idea, and then fleshed-out into a composition.
MOVING ON:
I have a lot of love for the music I created the past few months and hope I can continue the spirit of the WAlbum in the future. I think the next version of the WAlbum will take on a form that looks more like the “shared development” topic (mentioned above).
FINAL THOUGHTS:
From this perspective, the project feels like a work-in-progress way to find out what I want to do with writing tunes and bloging. There are some things that I really liked about the process and some others that I did not.
I feel grateful for the experience and for the lessons learned. It gave me a lot of inspiration, motivation and stress. All in all, I’m happy to have completed and excited to move on.
