You can probably tell how well my life is going by how active the Prog List is. September is a month where I did basically no work on the Prog List due to personal life problems, I've just not been able to get into the mindset to listen and properly judge each album. Which is a shame because around July or August I thought that I could perhaps catchup to the present day before the years ends now that I had a better system in place, but it's now no longer possible to catchup. I'm still at the beginning of March on the list and it's almost October.
I certainly do not plan on giving up on the list though, my plans right from the get go were that as soon as I had caught up on the list, I would go back and work on the 2019 list or start a 2020 list (since I would like to listen to as much music as I can from this decade). My plan now is to continue on the 2023 list until the new year and then begin a 2024 list, hopefully by then my life will have sorted itself out to the point where I keep up with it and once I do I can do music from other years.
Anyway, I am not divulging my personal life issues here as they're not of anyone's concern other than me and my counsellor. Instead I'll just list off a couple of things that have happened this month and talk about future plans.
I've been replaying The Scrapped EP to myself and the more and more I played it the more and more I disliked it. In fairness I've made a lot of bad music but I had released this EP on Bandcamp, which is where I put what I consider to be my best works on there. The Scrapped EP is not one of my best works, it's one of my worst works. The only track I like on it is the first one and even then it needs a lot of work.
My father spoke to me about how he was listening to my music and he mentioned The Scrapped EP. At this point I had already been thinking that it wasn't that great so I mentioned to him that I was thinking of taking it down and he agreed with me. So at least I know I'm not alone in this decision.
With that being said, you know how much I am a fan of keeping archives of people's work, so rather than making The Scrapped EP completely unavailable. I have instead archived it on MEGA, you can download it there and listen to it if you really want to.
As part of the archive, I decided to include two alternative cover arts that I was considering using for the main release but ended up not using. These weren't part of the Bandcamp release, so this archive actually has more than what you'd get if you downloaded it on Bandcamp.
My collaborator, tz_scion, still has his part of our collaboration up and honestly it is way better. You should just go and listen to his part instead.
I announced in an earlier post that I was starting work on a new EP, that was true at the time and in fact I had finished the tracklist and almost completed the lyrics and was about to start work on the music. Unfortunately, things in my personal life changed and I could no longer bring myself to work on anything musical. I thought that maybe if I cut down the number of songs from 6 to 4 it would make it easier, but it hasn't.
That doesn't mean I've given up though. In fact, the songs that I was writing at the time were mostly about my insecurities and since things in my life have kicked off a new set of insecurities have emerged, which has just given me more writing material. This does mean that if I do finally get around to working on the EP it will likely be about something else rather than what I intended, but that's fine as far as I'm concerned.
Hopefully things will change and I can continue work on the EP before the year ends, I'm not holding my breath though.
October is just around the corner though and that means a new Inktober will begin. If you're not familiar, Inktober is an annual thing where artists are given a prompt sheet, one prompt for each day of October, and the goal is to draw something everyday for each prompt.
Now I'm no artist, at least, not in the sense that I can draw or paint or whatever, but I can make music. So as a way to get back into the spirit of making music I am going to attempt to do an Inktober, but instead write a short song each day for each of the prompts. This may seem like a lot of work, which it is, but I'm going to make each song hopefully less than 2 minutes long each. That way I don't burnout too quickly.
I already have some plans for some of the prompts, I will be working on each song and releasing them everyday on my Newgrounds page.