I noticed that FAWM has a function to hide a song from the public. February Album Writing Month is meant to be a personal challenge — despite being a somewhat large community of participants, I can’t imagine anyone has time to listen to more than a handful of songs a day and still do things like, well, write, severely limiting the audience — and there are certain some songs that, let’s face it, ought to be kept under wraps. I’m currently sitting on a couple (#8 and #9) I’m not thrilled with.

It would be weird, though, to do this. The artist who truly creates only for themselves is rare, and they would not do FAWM in the first place. One could easily have their own album writing month any time they wanted and not worry about the support. But if the songs are hidden in public, that prevents external validation of completing the challenge.

Which brings be back to the songs I’m sitting on. There’s something fundamentally distasteful to me in the concept of writing for the sake of writing, without finishing the composition. Two days is not enough time for me to finish a song. I don’t have time to compose a guitar solo, there’s not enough time to get distance from the lyrics to lend perspective and properly edit them, and there’s no time to test the song out against listeners to determine if the song structure needs work. The idea that the songs can be fully explored later is a poor excuse for underwriting in the first place and then publicly releasing unfiltered songs.

I used to be an editor, so this is important for me.

At some point, I would have to decide between releasing something I don’t care for and completing the challenge. In the one case, I’m disappointed that I compromised artistic standards under an artificial constraint, and in the other I fail at a personal challenge I took on.

Neither is particularly appealing.