Last October (2021) I was sampling one of my own fragrances that I had almost forgotten.
It had not been a success. The fragrance wasn't great. Now when I sampled it I felt something was missing. I was in Canada at the time and I resolved to "fix" this fragrance when I got home to Walden in November.
Now for several weeks I've been working to "fix" that fragrance (Rough Day) but, although I've assembled a collection of aroma materials that I thought could correct its shortcomings, I'm feeling frustrated at my progress and I'm not sure I'm taking the right approach. Should I just set it aside and go on to something else? I'm almost at that point.
Perhaps I took a double wrong approach. On the one hand I wanted to tweak Rough Day as it already existed. On the other hand I wanted to redevelop Rough Day, keeping some of the original theme but enhancing it. Working mostly on the second approach, the real problem hit me like a rock. Rough Day had no personality. It was what I thought it should be "intellectually" but lacked any note, theme, or riff that could grab me, or anyone else. Zero personality.
This is something that can happen in any of the arts. You develop a creative project thinking the world will be at your feet only to find nobody has much interest in what you've done. In time you realize that YOU have no interest in what you've done either. Yet you keep examining it, sampling it, hoping that by some magic it will come to life, but it doesn't.
I'm giving the "Rough Day Project" a few more days, to see if I can create some gem of personality for it, a memorable note, a new heart, a new core from which I can then rebuild Rough Day, hopefully into something worth marketing.
Last night sniffing a sample I detected a faint smell of something that, if blown up, could be interesting. Now I want to see if I can do something with it. Stay tuned.
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