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Day Two Hundred Three (Year Four)

Tonight feels like another "mini-milestone" kind of night, much like this post did last month:

 http://rock-muse-ings.blogspot.com/2014/01/day-one-hundred-seventy-five-year-four.html

Except that, where last month's post was a realization concerning goals, motivations, and the level of dedication it's going to take to get from where I am to where I want to be, tonight's post is all about follow through and surpassing expectations. 

Tonight, I think I finished off the music for my album-in-a-month project.  That means that I've written the music for 14 songs in just 12 days.  Never in my wildest dreams did I actually believe that was possible.  I've always said that, if you handed me an undisturbed weekend, a guitar, a notebook, and a pen, at the end of it I could come out with an album's worth of music.  This wasn't quite a weekend, but considering everything else that life brings these days, I think that getting done what I did in the time that I did is a pretty cool accomplishment.  It ties in not only with goals I've had since I was a teenager (if you want to be brutally honest about it), but also with the raised expectations for the year, not to mention a long held belief that, if you work hard enough at what it is you want to accomplish, there's nothing that is outside of your grasp.

If I look hard enough, I can trace tonight's post all the way back to last summer, when I went on a crazy 24 day quest with about 3,000 other people to prove to ourselves that we were capable of following our dreams to their completion.  If nothing else, Jon Acuff's #START Experiment showed me where the path was, all I had to have was the courage to follow it and see where it led.

Even if the music is 100% finished (and I strongly suspect that there will be some tweaks to that in the next 16 days), the hard part remains in front of me: these songs still need lyrics, and they still need to be recorded.  Still, if I can get the final arrangements and the words right, the actual recording should progress at a decent clip.

Yes, while tonight is a night for celebration, it will be a small one, for the real work starts tomorrow.
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