The past two weeks have been spent in utter chaos trying to get together all of the paperwork and the work sample needed to apply for our first grant. I seriously had no idea that the process was so involved! But, "today, today, today; today is a very good day". I'm "blog singing" in case you didn't get that! OK, you can tell we are tired.
Our local Arts & Science Council is giving out grant money to regional artists who meet the criteria that they set forth in their application rules. Thankfully, we met those requirements. Artists can apply as "emerging artists" or as "established artists". Established artists can ask for more money than the emerging artists because they have proven that they are continuously pursuing their art. Of course, we applied as an emerging artist, and were allowed to request up to $3000.00 to aid us in the project of our choice. We decided that we would apply for money to complete our debut CD project.
We'll, it took us a lot longer to get everything together for the application than we thought it would. There is a lot of legwork that we didn't expect and we had a few meltdowns along the way. We were put on bandwidth restriction by our internet service provider, so we had to spend the entire day driving around to find wi-fi access last Sunday. Everything closes early, so we kept moving around from parking lots, to Panera, to Starbucks. But, that was the day that we finished our project budget (big chore, lots of research).
Also, the studio computer had "hard drive failure"- a computer heart attack :(, and it took several days to get the computer to a place, once the NEW hard drive was installed and all of the old software was loaded back on, where we could record one of our songs.
Our artist advocate at the Arts & Science Council told our group that she would be happy to review anyone's application as long as they turned it in one week before the actual turn-in deadline. We had already decided that we were going to take full advantage of that since this was our first attempt at applying for a grant. Honestly, we thought our first draft was pretty good, but WRONG!!! We had so many things that needed correction, so we had to write new content, re-arrange our budget, re-do our paperwork, and still, we didn't have a CD to send in. I cannot tell you how grateful we were that our advocate was honest with us, and let us know exactly how we needed to refocus our proposal. By the time we finished the final draft, we were sure (based on another review) that it was the best proposal we could write.
Due to a few snags uploading our grant paperwork, we only had 10 minutes yesterday before we left for work to record whatever it was that we were going to send in as our "work sample". We knew we only had time for one take, so we both told each other, "No pressure, but don't screw this up!". Surprisingly, we only had a couple of little errors that we knew we would be just fine living with. So, we went to work, then went to an open mic showcase that we were scheduled to sing at, and got home at 12:00 am. John went straight to the studio, mixed the live to 2 track recording (not a whole lot to do there), and burned the 3 copies that were required to finish our proposal. We made it to bed at 4:15 am (but set 3 alarms because we were terrified of oversleeping), woke up at 10:00 am, showered, drove down to the Arts & Science Council office, and dropped off the 3 CDs at 11:15 am. We actually got it in 45 minutes before the deadline. YAY!!! The way things were going yesterday, I wasn't sure that we would get it in 5 minutes before the deadline.
Overall, this has been an amazing learning experience, and we are very glad that we decided to see it through. Whether or not our project is funded, we definitely feel more confident about applying for our next grant (Wow, did I just say that we were going to go through all of this drama again?). Now it's out of our hands, and we wait until December 1st to hear... yes or no. Keep your fingers crossed for yes, please. : )
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