Much easier not to finish...

Deadline: Sunday!

I wrote the lyrics for the last song in One Plus One: The Musical this afternoon. We have two songs to finish off, musically speaking, and then a whole bunch of editing and recording tasks, some of which we still haven't figured out (who to get to sing what, mostly). But even with a prolonged squint at the to-do list, I can't find more than 40 things to do, half of which are fairly trivial mechanical chores. It's entirely possible that we'll have at least something approaching the complete package ready for people to hear in New York, and almost certainly it'll be finished not long after we return.

To which all I can say is: phew. Well, not quite all. Just as anyone who doesn't start writing can spend their time saying "I want to be a writer", it's suspiciously easy to cower behind the shield of an unfinished work, even if it's really, really close to being finished, and explain that the work is still under development, there's still work to do on it - anything to stop other people hearing it.

Now it might seem unlikely (especially to certain people who've wound up without warning in the audience every time we premiere a song) that we would be feeling that way, but nevertheless: this is bloody scary. We are close to finishing a musical. An actual, complete, it's-a-musical musical. As opposed to the attempts we've made in the past to hawk our music ("Your songs sound so theatrical! You should write a musical!") this is going to be much easier, because it is a musical, and it has themes, a plot, characters, and a bunch of related songs with intentional musical cohesion and all that jazz. (Well actually not that much jazz, fortunately.)

And this is terrifying, because as opposed to when you write a single song, which could be for a laugh, on a bet, for a specific person's entertainment, or just to prove to yourself that you can do it... you do not write an entire musical for no reason other than to file it under "things you have proven you can do". If you are writing a musical for that sole purpose, you are a muppet.

So we are about to have a musical, and the only option, when you deliberately generate that kind of artistic artefact, is attempt to do something with it. This means reading it (a lot) for editing purposes, letting other people read it, having group readings, workshopping it, sending it to people for consideration, letting singers hear and comment on the songs... oh goddddd.

Scary. And avoidable. All we have to do is keep claiming it's not finished.

Well it's not "not finished". It's two bits of music and a quick pass over the script away from being finished, in the sense that further work on it would be prevarication rather than productive, and we now have to bite the bullet and hand in our homework for the last year.

I wasn't expecting it to be what it's turned out to be; that's great, as it's turned out better. There are songs we didn't plan for which have taken centre stage, and there are songs on the discard pile which I thought were destined for stardom. And the ending that's been in place for six months got somewhat revised and made five times better thanks to an idea I had yesterday.

However, now we have to cross our fingers, grit our teeth, put our hands on our sword hilts, and let other people offer commentary. The bastards. Anything could happen in the next month, including - but not limited to - our year's work being dismissed after closer inspection than our careful promotion of individual songs has previously allowed. Argh.

Fortunately I have great faith in Sarah's music, and my lyrics are, frankly, made of 99% win. (I allow myself room for growth.) But if this weren't the case, I'd be worried.

I should probably go to bed. But I am very happy, at least, that we are at the point where we can start to unveil the full work and roll it out from behind the shield of "under development". The next few months are going to be interesting, and probably bloody hard work, not just in terms of doing stuff, but because that stuff will be at the behest of other people, some of whom may, I grudgingly note, know better than us. My hope is that we can find those people, steal their ideas, surreptitiously bludgeon them to death, and proceed to the next checkpoint without losing faith in our collective genius. Well, we'll find out, won't we, what what?

This is One Plus One: The Musical's homepage, or there's this Facebook group, which has some of the songs.