SCP #41: Cocoon

Friday's deadline failure has made me realise that 2am bed times for the rest of the year are just not sustainable, especially when I am teaching at 8:30 or 9am the following day.  I have generally been good at actually writing and recording the day's song before midnight (or at worst before 1am), but I don't feel my task is complete until I edit the video, upload it, write the day's blog post and then share it across my social media platforms.  

It's this part that has been keeping me up into the small hours, with the longer videos (eg the 3 - 4 minute ones, which doesn't actually seem that long in the scheme of things) taking up to two hours to upload.  A better internet provider would probably help the situation, but perhaps the real solution is to view the editing/uploading/blogging as an addition to the task, rather than the task itself.  That way, as long as the writing/recording is complete my main task for the day is complete, and the rest can wait until the next day.

I trialled this mindset yesterday and it was far less tiring, both last night and this morning.  I got home from a gig at about 11pm, and immediately started on this small improvised piece, because all I really wanted to do was relax on the couch for a little. So I recorded it, checked the audio and video files were OK, and then just left everything for this morning.

I did a 90 second writing exercise for the prompt silkworm (using silk in yesterday's lyrics as a starting point), which resulted in the following text:

"You find the end and it comes loose, unravels, spins, slides through your fingers."

I decided to alter the pronoun from "it" to "I", so that the cocoon became a metaphor rather than an object.  I added an opening line to give it context, but I think the text might have been more interesting if I'd left that out, and just kept the original text "You find my end and it comes loose. I unravel, spin, slide through your fingers".

I did some maths using the letters of SILK, which I assigned their numerical position in the alphabet.  I ended up with the numbers 2 and 5, and this dictated the melodic hook that starts the improvisation, which runs from the 2nd to the 5th degree of a major scale.