STARTING 61

Number 61.

Graduate from college.

I have three words for you.

I.

Got.

In.

YEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSS.

I got in to BYU Provo.

I’m going to college.

I’m moving to Utah.

Holy crap. Holy crap. HOLY CRAP.

Here’s what basically happened this week. Day to day, I’ll give you the rundown.

Monday: Was just waiting. Day started out not too great, kind of sluggish–nothing really exciting happened until the evening when my writing went really super well. I did endurance writing with some NaNoers that actually write in other months besides November like me and I wrote a total of 2000 words that day. It was awesome. But no word from BYU at all.

Tuesday: More waiting. I didn’t expect anything that day, and the day was basically the same as the day before. Kind of sluggish, but awesome in the evening because I went to a thing in preparation for another thing that I’m not going to talk about because people I know read this blog and it’s sort of a surprise. 🙂

Wednesday: I went insane. I was fully convinced I’d hear word that day, so I was obsessively checking my email every you don’t even want to know how often. I was just going crazy and more crazy and even more crazy and by the time the day was over I was like ADGOUAJEHFGSOUPAREGSFOUR because there was nothing.

Thursday: Here’s where things started getting interesting.

I heard from the School of Music on Thursday.

Not the university itself, but the school of music.

I didn’t get in. At least, not right away. I was put on the waiting list.

My dad, of course, immediately made three phone calls to figure out what was going on. Basically there are only a certain number of slots and they can only accept a certain number of people, but I’m literally one or two on the waiting list so it’s almost guaranteed I’ll still get in because people always change their minds. And it was funny because evidently one of the piano faculty took one look at my application and was like “whoa!! That’s Dan Montez’s daughter!!” because my dad went to BYU in the music department with this guy.

Anyway, there was that and then the person who’d listened to my recording had some criticism–the Bach prelude was good, because it was mechanical and it was kind of supposed to be that way. The fugue was a mess because it was mechanical and not sensitive enough, which made them think I wasn’t sensitive, but then they heard the Schubert and they knew I was and they actually commended me for even daring to play that because it was so hard. So that was good because that was what I was most terrified about. But the Ravel was a mess, too. And that had actually been the thing that I was like ehhhhh we should re-record that but we didn’t because we were tired of recording and we guessed it would be fine. Oops.

But it was a very nervewracking time. Because then I was all like oh, but now what if I don’t get into the school and all this stuff and my parents came up with like four backup plans for if each previous one fails so I knew something was going to happen I just didn’t know what yet.

Friday: Here’s what happened. I was worried out of my mind all of the day and it was getting to the point where I barely even wanted to hear from them because I was so afraid it would be bad news. So in the evening I drove to karate with my sister because that’s what happens on Friday nights. It’s literally a minute before class starts, and I check my phone one last time. The BYU admissions Facebook page. They themselves have said nothing like “we’re sending stuff out!” like they’ve done in previous years but OTHER people posted on the page saying “check the website! I got in!” and stuff so I freaked out and called my mom.

She said DO NOT check until I got home so all of karate I was nearly exploding with anxiety and once it was over I practically flew out the door. I was already putting my shoes on before anyone else was even out of the dojo. Then I tried not to drive home like a maniac. I’m not entirely sure I succeeded. So I got home and my mom was like AAHHH and we were both like poasdfghoipuahsjgfiuphjg and she said “I think I should look. I’ll look” and I said NO I CAN LOOK so I looked in a couple other places first to mentally prepare myself–see if they’d posted anything or who had gotten anything or what–nothing was going on except people on the facebook page were saying they got accepted so I went to the website. I had to log in.

It was very hard to press the enter button. I was scared. I was scared they’d say no but I finally just did it and the page looked almost exactly the same, saying all the materials they’d received and the dates they’d received them and that I’d met the priority deadline–

But.

Before– Application status: Complete

After– Application status: Admitted

I almost cried.

I screamed, a lot, and then I almost cried. I was on the edge of it. I was hugging my mom and jumping up and down and almost in hysterics.

After I calmed down a tiny bit, I closed my computer, took my craplot of stuff upstairs, changed into my relaxing clothes, then came back downstairs. Messaged Susan and D. They didn’t respond, so I texted them telling them to check the messages. D responded first and he was like !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 and Susan was being all like “oh, did something happen? Hmm?” and D gave me a virtual hug and Susan was laughing and it was eaogsopireghpuei[rthgpietwghflawtpejghtwp and then I posted it as a status and told another friend who was also eagerly waiting to check the website and she got in too and so did a few other people I know and it was all so flipping awesome I thought I was going to explode. And then I was reading the welcome to BYU thing and it was just a whole bunch of stuff and later I was also looking at the MyMap thing that they wouldn’t let me look at until I was officially affiliated with the university and it showed my requirements of GE and it all said “not complete” except ONE SAID COMPLETE AND IT WAS MY MATH CLASS THAT GOT WAIVED BECAUSE OF MY TEST SCORES SO THAT WAS EVEN AWESOMER and it also said I was in the music premajor program because I had applied but hadn’t gotten accepted yet but they knew that’s what I wanted as my major so I’m still going to be waiting on that but I won’t find out about it until like the end of April and that’s when I tell them I’m officially coming as well so until then I’m just basically waiting but I’m pretty sure I’m getting in to that so I can start making those class schedules and all sorts of fun stuff and also be able to figure out where I’m living and working and everything’s going to be awesome.

The end.

Except it’s only the beginning–that’s why I’m starting 61. Because getting accepted to college is the first step towards graduation.

So yes.

So.

Excited.

See you all next week!!!!

Pre-84

Piano competitions.

Piano competitions have been on my mind a lot this last week. And by this last week I mean Friday. But still.

See, this week was going pretty well by way of piano practice. I finally sucked it up in relation to my fear of a specific section of my Schumann sonata and just dove in and learned it.

I’d like to see YOU taking a look at that and knowing you have to play it without freaking out and wondering how. And if you know even a little bit about reading music, then you’ll be even more terrified, because you’ll have a knowledge of just how hard this is to do. (unless, of course, you’re a famous concert pianist. then you’re off the hook.) 

I spent far too long avoiding this part. I would go to rather ridiculous lengths to not practice it–mostly by just practicing everything else under the sun so that I wouldn’t end up with a whole lot of time to really practice this. However, this week I finally just gave myself a little pep talk that basically consisted of “man up. You can’t avoid this forever. It’s part of your repertoire this year, and if you don’t learn this now you’re going to be behind schedule. It’s only on page four of fourteen in this movement and it’s already been a month and a half and you don’t have very long to pull it together.”

So I sat down, opened this up for my first piece of the day, and manned up and learned it. I learned that entire page and the next eight measures or so of the following page in just three days.

I feel proud of myself. Just a little.

However, that is not the point of this post.

The point of this post is piano competitions.

On Friday, I looked up a piano competition that I knew existed. I’m not sure how it came into my head, but I just remembered that it had been that big one that was cool and it was every two years and I had actually been thinking about doing it last year but I wouldn’t have been able to learn all my music in time or be anywhere near ready.

But I knew it was coming up again in 2014, so I wanted to look it up again. So I did.

I’ll sum it up as quickly as I can–it’s awesome. It isn’t so much focused on the winning of the competition as it is on getting young pianists started on their careers. I mean, you do get ten thousand dollars for first prize, but there are like five other prizes after that and if you didn’t get one of those you get a thousand dollars just for competing. Granted, they only pick 22 pianists, but still. So that’s awesome in itself. They also have master classes and seminars at the end of each day of the competition. That’s cool too. Also, there is no elimination. In normal competitions, there’s a certain number of competitors in the first round, then they pick some to go on to the next one, and some to go to the next, and so forth until they pick winners. For this one, if you’re in, you’re in for all the rounds. Boom.

And finally, the thing that really caught me and made me go AAAHHHH was that if you win a placed prize, you get to perform in concerts and recitals in different places for up to the next three years. They set it up for you and you just go and play. It can be up to twelve times total over those three years.

THIS. THIS is how concert pianists get famous.

So I was all excited about that. I was reading over the required repertoire and I realized I have most of it already, or I will plenty in advance of the time I’d need to, minus the first movement of a concerto. So I was pondering the concertos, too.

I was flipping excited. I was pretty set on doing that. The application was due at the end of this year, and the competition itself would be in June of 2014.

Then my dad came home and I told him all about it, and he proceeded to give me a little bit of a reality check.

The repertoire, he said. Yes, I have all the repertoire right now–but after a semester at BYU(assuming I’m going there)? The deadline for the application and the audition DVD is December 6th. I’ll have spent a semester at BYU learning all new repertoire with a completely new teacher. When would I even record the music? What music would it be? It would have to be my old music, but having to keep that in my fingers that long? It would put me way behind in everything. And even if I made the recording before going to BYU, while it was still good and awesome, I’d have to keep it in my fingers ANYWAY because it’s what I would be using in the competition six months later.

He had an extremely valid point.

But he did say to talk to my new teacher about it. And I could easily point out the fact that it was every two years, and two years after that I would still be eligible to compete in it. It’s ages 16-21. So if I had enough notice, then I could better prepare for it and have repertoire that I’d be working on for more than just a single semester.

So no, I didn’t actually do anything this week for this goal. Hence the pre. But if I’m going to win a competition, then I have to compete in one. If I’m going to compete in one, then I have to apply for one. And if I’m going to apply for one, then I have to know what they are.

So just looking this up and having it on my radar can be counted as worthy to have a blog post about.

And it was cool to just have some thoughts and realizations about being a concert pianist.

Things are going to start getting real.

See you all next week. (by which point I will probably have a long, excited blog post about my acceptance letter to BYU, she said hopefully.)

The Waiting Period

Look, I’m not going to lie to you. I did almost nothing this week in relation to my goals.

Okay, that’s kind of a lie in itself. I practiced the piano. That could be counted toward my number 5 goals. I wrote. That could be counted toward 18. I did a couple other things.

But really, not a whole lot I can actually talk about.

This week hasn’t been the greatest of weeks. I feel like nothing exciting is going on right now, which is basically true. I mean, it’s my senior year. My college applications are in. My audition tapes were made and sent. Tests were taken. Scores were received.

There’s just one more thing I’m still waiting for–my admission status to BYU. They haven’t made a decision yet and won’t until an undetermined date. All they’ve said is “by the end of February.” Last year it was February 17th. The year before that it was February 23rd. There’s no consistency. They do at least tell you on the Facebook page the day of that that day is the day they’ll tell you, but that’s not helpful for now when I’m wondering what the heck day it’s going to be.

And it’s that uncertainty that is the cause of this lack of excitement in my life. Once I hear from them, assuming I get in, then everything’s going to explode into stuff. I get to start planning out classes and schedules and make lists and figure out housing and all that stuff. It’s going to be exciting again.

But right now, nothing is happening. Everything’s just all normal for the first time in almost my entire senior year and it’s weird and I don’t like it. September and October I was dealing with Mefistofele. November was NaNoWriMo. On top of that I was doing college applications. December I was dealing with finishing Masks and Christmas and holiday stuff. January I was doing my BYU School of Music application and audition DVD and test and then hearing from Juilliard and getting test results.

And now it’s February and there’s nothing.

And I don’t like it.

That’s basically all I have to say for this week.

Hopefully by next week I’ll have something better.

18.16 In-Progress

Well, this week was the week.

The week February began.

The week I started writing again.

And I’m not going to lie–it was pretty awesome.

First of all, on Tuesday I finally came up with a title. I figured it would be one of those titles that would take forever to come up with. Because for me, I either come up with it pretty quickly or it takes forever. And as I’d been planning this idea for the last four months, and I hadn’t come up with a title yet, I figured it would be pretty hard.

So I sat down on Tuesday, three days before I was supposed to start writing, and decided I’d come up with a title.

I pondered it for a little while, ready to write down any ideas that came to me. Masks had been the most perfect title ever, so I tried to think of how I came up with that. It related to the story in a very direct way, but it also had to do with the theme of the entire book. So I thought. I thought about how Mefistofele, the opera that brought on the creation of these characters in the first place, was titled as such. And also the opera Faust, which was basically the same story. So if it were just one character we were dealing with, we could just call it Lena, or Devon. However, we had two. And I’d already decided those were the names of each of their parts. Their backstories. Part one, Lena. Part two, Devon. Part three–well, I’m not 100% sure on that yet. I’ve been calling it “Together” for lack of actually having come up with a title for it but I’m not there yet so it doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Anyway, that didn’t work as the title. So I started thinking more. What was the theme of the book? Masks was so perfect because it was not only an acronym and the name of the society of superheroes, but it represented the theme of the story–identity. How the characters looked at and felt about themselves and who they were.

Theme. Theme. What was it? Hell? Sin? Lust? No. None of that was right. Redemption? That felt closer, but still not quite right. I didn’t want something negative like “Sin” or anything like that, but “Redemption” wasn’t the right title. That wasn’t the theme. The characters don’t care a whole lot about redemption until the very end. Sure, they’re trying to fix things and be better–but not with redemption as their actual goal.

But then–I swear I could almost FEEL the light bulb go on in my head–perfect moment. YES. That was the theme. How many times had those words come from my mouth or my pen or my fingers in the planning of this book? “It’s their perfect moment.” “It’s like the perfect moment.” “I wonder if that was her perfect moment.”

Stay Perfect Moment.

I wrote it down and I knew I didn’t have to think of any more. It literally took no time it all. Five minutes, maximum. It was awesome.

And the reason it works so well is because that phrase is one of the phrases used directly in the show Mefistofele. It’s part of the story, that the devil is trying to show Faust a perfect moment and if he does, if he gets Faust to say the words “stay perfect moment” then he gets Faust’s soul. Of course, it ends up that he doesn’t say the words the entire time he’s traveling with the devil, with the devil trying to show him everything possible. It’s not until he’s shown a vision from God with angels and singing and light and all this brilliance that he finally says the words “stay perfect moment” so he ends up getting redeemed.

Stay Perfect Moment.

So there was the utter brilliance of that.

And then I started actually writing on Friday, because it was February 1st. I wrote 1267 the first day, both the prologue and the first scene. It was awesome. Saturday was kind of a let-down, because I ended up not having a lot of time to write, so I didn’t finish a scene. My plan is to write six days a week, one scene every day excluding that first day, because I have 50 scenes not counting the prologue and there are 50 writing days until April 1st, which is when Lena’s part needs to be done.

So I’m going to write some today to try to catch up. I will not get behind after it’s only been two days.

But anyway, the point is it bodes well. I’m excited to write it all.

See you all next week.