Now here’s my disclaimer: I worked on the original challenge last year & even wrote a tiny bit of content for it. Andy is my partner so I’m involved. He’s upstairs right now recording new material for this year’s challenge and I can hear the gentle strains of the guitar.

You could write more songs in the next 30 days than you have in the last 5 years with….

Songwriters Circle January Challenge 2012

The 2012 Songwriters Circle January Challenge
Have you fallen into one of the worst traps for song writers?
Let the January Challenge help you….

Do you feel you have to wait to be inspired?

That a song will just pop into your head and all you should  do is write it down?

If you answered “Yes” to either of these questions you have fallen for one of the most destructive and persistent myths of song-writing.

Now let’s just be clear, I write but I’m not a musician or a singer. The challenge for me is all about stepping out of my cosy writing comfort zone and doing something new and disconcerting. One of the things I learned last year is that writing songs is wildly different to writing poetry. Harder and more interesting. Most artists of any kind thrive on playing with limitations and song-writing provides me with a whole new set of those.

The Challenge consists of 30 days of short posts and videos suggesting exercises to free you up and get you writing songs. Takes around 30 minutes a day. Costs less than a latte and better for you!

I’d love it if anyone wanted to join me! I’m going to post some of my results here, if I’m brave enough! I was  chicken last year and mostly only shared them in the private area but hey, I’m a veteran now and I’ve less regard for my inner critic these days! Last year I finished 2 songs I was pleased with by the end of the 30 days. The best one was Twelve Bar Blues which Andy set to music and which I am unreasonably proud of!! You can hear it at the bottom of this post.

Along the way I used other material I’d generated for a couple of poems and a short story. It unblocked my creative writing. That was one of the main things I took away from the course.  Creative unlocking  like this spills over into everything creative that you do.

Feel like joining us? Songwriters Circle January Challenge
Clean Livin Blues by andyroberts

My word for the coming year is chosen. As part of Quinn’s 30 days of reflection and walking I pondered a number of words. Still unsure  I took Andy’s advice and played around with a few images to help me choose.  The first image  jumped out from my journal and I knew it was right.

I have decided ‘move’ will be my watchword next year. It gives me all sorts of possibilities to play with and feels right. Sometimes it might be scary to ‘move’ but, like my little Viking longboat in the stormy sea, I think I can weather any storms ahead.

My winter hat

Old friends, or be careful what you ‘like’

So my ‘old friend’ (‘old’ as in I’ve known her a long time!) Maggie has a newish venture. She set up a Facebook page for it Tanglewool Designs (actually called the rather wonderful Tanglewool Garbutt!) and I was looking through the hats. I happened to ‘like’ one of the photos and before I knew it Maggie was offering to knit me one for Christmas.

Lucky me. It arrived in double quick time and it is lovely. Beautifully knitted, the classic Fair Isle pattern produces a cosy double fabric. Maggie’s tension as a knitter is second to none and of course it is properly knitted in with none of those amateur loops that give Fair Isle a bad name. It feels great and my ears are suitably warm!

If you like it you could order your own  via Tanglewool Designs Etsy page.

Walking reflection - in the 'village'

I spent the first part of my walk today listening to a sort of internal mantra. I don’t know where it came from but I found it very helpful.

“Let the rhythm of your steps carry you forward”

And so it did, much further than I had intended. On past the duck pond, through the deserted park and all the way to ‘the village’. (OK so it really isn’t a village, just a suburb of London but is has a village green & everything!) The sun shone, the sky was blue and the air was cold. There was a biting wind. I had mental space and time to do some deep thinking.

Once there I bumped into a former student and exchanged a few pleasantries. This does not happen in London! I wandered on and then I grabbed some fat balls for my feathered friends and jumped a bus part of the way home. I still got off at the pond and walked back from there. All in all around 50 minutes of walking. About twice what I’d meant to do but some days the air is so fresh and the sky is so blue and you just have to:

“Let the rhythm of your steps carry you forward”

BTW – Anyone know where I got this phrase? Google can’t find it but I don’t think I made it up…..

Mrs Sensible advises loudly against it

“Oh no, dear, don’t do that! No one wants to see your sordid little  scribbles. They’ll just laugh at you and then you’ll be sad.”

"Oh dear, are you sure this is a good idea?"

Reflection - from my degree exhibition

I’m reviving an old practice.Reflection and walking reflection formed a huge part of my degree and have slipped out of my daily practice over the last year. For the next 30 days I’m returning to them.

Quinn has invited people to join her in a 30 day experiment. I’ll use it in my own way of course, rather than stick to the given guidelines. No surprises there then!  It’s come at a good time and what I’m going to do is a return to daily reflective practice. I’ll start by using ‘What? So What? Now What?’ for a week. That’s a nice gentle introduction into the habit. I’m toying with using occasional reflective splurges, maybe some fiction, maybe Gibbs, all the reflective tools I learnt at Ultraversity. Once a week I’ll take what I’ve done and do a double loop reflection. That should shake things up a bit! LOL!

I’m also going back to walking as a form of reflection. I used this a lot when I did the degree. Quinn’s version is meditative but that’s not my way. I shall be walking and chewing over my reflections, using that extra oxygen and the rhythm of my steps to help the thinking process.

I’ll be using this blog as a learning journal but as always it will be the insights and action planning that gets reported here, not the writing itself. That needs to be private.

Other people are doing this too and they can all be found in Quinn’s sidebar and, hopefully some of them in my comments section!

While in Spain I went to Finsterre. This is a photo of the view looking out from the very tip of the Cape. It is totally unaltered(!) I took it partly because I knew we’d be doing something like this in the workshop. The words down the side are the names of the shipping areas. Three times a day BBC Radio 4 broadcasts a shipping forecast and it has done so all my life.
In 2002 they changed the name of the Finisterre region in the forecast to Fitzroy but the damage was done.

I had to see it!

found poetry 1

 Natural
You want something more
Simple
To waste the precious summer in mountains,
Alps so speckled with wildflowers
Living in challenging valleys
You won’t escape

Found Poetry

Butterflies have no scruples,
The blue wings follow pleasure.
Immense white and red blossoms offered themselves.
After that
Proud and delighted conquerors,
The air was truth.
They abandoned land,
As right as the birds.

Find RAW Art Journaling on Amazon

Writing is my thing. I’m more used to writing than to drawing or painting. I’m doing a RAW Art workshop as a sort of antidote to spending all my time using words.

I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of altering an actual book page so I did it digitally instead.  I found a page from Fairy Tales by Édouard Laboulaye via the OpenLibrary project and then used Seashore Open Source Image Editor.

I’m really new to this sort of editing too. I’ve used it on photos a few times but never to make more abstract pieces.
OK – look away if you are scared by things a little bit techy. BTW You totally shouldn’t be as I really haven’t done this much!
First I checked the openlibrary.org for a scanned, old, out of copyright book. There are some wonderfully weird children’s books on there! I’ve used printed out pages from there before as part of classroom resources for schools. Some of the illustrations are amazing!
I didn’t use Photoshop – too expensive! I used a combination of 2 free tools, Skitch to do the screen shot of the book page and Seashore to add the decoration. Both of these are mac applications. You could use the gimp (also free) on mac or Windows but I find it a bit complicated.
I  outlined the words and phrases I wanted in graphite grey to look like pencil. Then I used the colour eyedropper to sample the page colour. Then filled the page using the paintpot. This left the words and phrases I wanted uncoloured. Next time I’ll try using a more transparent setting so some of the words show through.
I  zoomed in on a section of macro image of a butterfly wing from an old photo of mine as the decorative texture. This is easy to do in Seashore as you can just open a photo and export it as a texture. When you choose a tool like the paintbrush you can set the texture and the brush you want in the tool bar.  I used the ‘sand dunes’ setting for the brush.
My partner Andy Roberts did some useful video tutorials about Seashore for editing a while back.
Seashore Image Editing Tutorials.