Back in the idealistic days of my youth, I took part in something called National Novel Writing Month. For those unfamiliar with the concept, "NaNoWriMo" consists of wannabe writers forcing themselves to the rather daunting task of writing a 50,000-word novel, from scratch, in 30 days. (It's amazing the lengths amateur authors will go in order to make it past the dreaded blank first page.) Needless to say, I failed spectacularly, owing to any number of the excuses I told myself: I was working too many hours at my "real job," my version of Microsoft Word was hopelessly outdated, those DVDs of The Wire weren't going to re-watch themselves...
On the other end of the go-get-'em spectrum is Seattle-via-Australia electronic composer Madeleine Cocolas. After settling in South Lake Union with her techie husband a little over two years ago, Cocolas gave herself a musical mission: to compose and record a brand-new track, every single week, for a year…
