Write 14 songs in February -- it's easy

February Album Writing Month (http://fawm.org/) is about to begin. The FAWM challenge is to write 14 songs, roughly an album's worth, in 28 days. If this sounds difficult to you, then the FAWM challenge is exactly what you need — it's a deadline-driven opportunity to prove to yourself that songwriting doesn't have to be difficult.

Songwriting is supposed to be easy, and if you usually find it full of difficulties, you're making things unnecessarily hard for yourself. But even worse, you're probably also making things hard for your audience. As a rule of thumb, if a song is hard to write, it's also hard to listen to. Think about it. You're a specialist, an expert in the kind of music that you do. If a song is hard for you, how do you expect a general audience of non-musicians to tackle the song?

So if it's right for you, take the FAWM challenge. You can sign up right now at http://fawm.org. And, if you choose, you can also add my challenge, which is make February a month to practice writing songs quickly and easily, with no effort at all.

Where does all the effort come from? And how do you let go of it? I'll explain tomorrow.