I’ve been a bit quiet on the Creative Pact front the last few days, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’ve been thinking about the approach I’m taking, about how I feel about what I’ve produced, about what the next step is with Ladders of Escape.

During this time I’ve finally launched my revised website. For a long time my site’s been bugging me. I originally set it up as a hybrid, before I understood how powerful WordPress could be, so the journal part was WordPress but everything else was just plain old hand-coded PHP. I’ve been working to make the whole thing WordPress-driven on and off for about 6 months, tinkering around with custom post types and other fancy stuff when I had a spare moment.

As part of launching it, I had to copy the content over from my existing site and write new content for pieces that hadn’t had their own page before and as part of this process, I ended up listening to recordings of a number of pieces I hadn’t heard in a very long time. While it always feels a bit egotistical to listen to my own music, I also find it grounds me somewhat, reminds me of who I am, something I’ve felt has slipped away from me throughout the process I’ve been working through this month.

As I said in I think in my last post, I’m increasingly feeling like I’m composing in a foreign language. Listening back to my older pieces, and then starting work on a new piano piece, mostly because I felt a need to work with something familiar, has just reinforced this feeling.

This doesn’t mean I don’t like what I’ve done on Ladders, but I do think it means that I’m abandoning Lilies, at least as a piece for Carla. I need to step back and rethink my whole approach, maybe work more slowly through Ladders so I can balance what I’m doing there with other work, working in my more usual fashion. I’d still like to be able to work without the computer, but evidently I need to ease into it a bit more.

And, of course, this means that the chances of me achieving my goal for Creative Pact – to finish one of these two pieces by the end of the month – extremely slim. I’ve not given up – a miracle could still happen! But I need to face the fact that changing my work process hasn’t been as successful as I’d hoped.