July 12, 2007

This has taken a LOT longer than I'd anticipated. Back at the beginning of the year, I had hopes that things would be updated very soon, but that was before a lot of family issues and health troubles got in the way. Real Life does stink, doesn't it? I had planned to revamp the entire site, but when I started working on the rescoring and rerecording of the symphonies, I realized that this wasn't going to go quickly at all. Aside from the interference of stress and depression and other as yet undiagnosed problems, I found that there were many troubles to be faced when working on the rescores. Not the least among them is my increasingly impaired hearing, which means I have to do a considerable amount of recording, tweaking, rerecording, and re-rerecording before I can put together an even marginally acceptably rescored version of each movement to post. Because it usually takes one to two weeks per recording to do all this work (what with RL and all) , some of the symphonies and suites are fully posted, others only partially. As I am able to rework them, I will add them to the site. I also have three full albums of holiday music I want to post; I hope to have them ready to go this fall (before I have to start work on this year's album).

What with all this work and stress staring me in the face (would you believe that the day after I saw an orthopedist about my gitchy ankle, I went and sprained the other one? This has been life, lately), I haven't gotten as far as I would like with the next installment of Twice Blessed, although it is progressing. There are dangers in having such long gaps during the writing of a story: temptations to change it creep in, and other ideas suggest themselves. That;'s been a part of the hold up, though I will admit that stress and depression are the biggest factors. I plan to do all I can to deal with those issues ASAP, so keep you fingers crossed.

Still h oping for a MUCH brighter future,

Mary Jean Holmes