Last Saturday night, the Lichtenbergian Society held its Annual Meeting around the fire. As longtime readers of this blog know, part of our ritual involves setting creative goals for the coming year, and before that confessing how well we did on the goals of the year just past.

So, before I get to my Lichtenbergian Proposed Efforts for 2011, let’s look at how I did in 2010. As longtime readers of this blog may recall, I had achieved all my goals last year , a matter of some shame to me , so my goals for this year were deliberately calibrated to be worth failing at.

Here are those Proposed Efforts for 2010:

• continue my painting, both the abstract Field series and my studies for the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait
• restart the 24-Hour Challenge, which to my surprise I had proposed last year to do only for six months, which is just about what I managed
• compose one complete work, any description
• write one good short story
• begin work on A Perfect Life, my proposed description of what it’s like to live a life like mine
• and in conjunction with all of the above, produce a lot of crap, i.e., produce boatloads of work

How’d I do?

I did continue my painting, although I didn’t really work on the Field series (sorry, Seth.) I worked on the ELP for the first half of the year, and yet the very week I went to visit Diane Mize for instruction on mixing color, I stopped painting to concentrate on music.

I did not restart the 24-Hour Challenge. I still have #12, #13, and #14 on sticky notes on my monitor, waiting for me to pick up the whole thing.

I did not write any short story, good or otherwise. The idea for the good one is still in my head, though.

I did not begin A Perfect Life, despite having the entire summer to do so.

I did produce a boatload of crap: drawings, paint sketches, music detritus.

Where I did succeed was in composing a complete work. In fact, I finished three and a half: Pieces for Bassoon & String Quartet; Six Preludes (No Fugues); Variations on ‘Resignation’; and made great strides on the cello sonata.

All three complete pieces are what I would consider worth hearing, especially the Preludes. I listened to all this year’s output this week, and I am very pleased at how well they hold up.

All in all, a respectable finish. I achieved some of the goals, and was completely unable even to start a couple of them. All praise to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg!