Good. You're here.

You have a creative project that lives mostly in your head.

Maybe it's been there for a while. You think about it. You almost start. Something gets in the way — the day job, the gap between what you imagine and what you know you'd actually produce, the quiet fear that you'd pour yourself into it and no one would care.

I know this place. I've lived there.

I'm Matthew Carey. I'm a musician — thirty years as a musical director and conductor, most recently on a touring production of Pretty Woman. I know the mechanics of professional theatre from the inside. I know exactly what a polished, finished show looks and sounds and feels like. And for a long time, that knowledge was the thing that kept me from starting my own.

Then I decided to do the scariest thing I could think of. I'm writing a musical about Salvador Dalí. Not because I know how it ends. Because I needed to find out what happens when I stop playing someone else's show and write my own.

It is, objectively, a ridiculous undertaking. I'm doing it anyway, in public, one session at a time. My newsletter, The Studio Window, is the dispatch I send from inside the process — not the highlights, the actual thing. The false starts, the discoveries, the mornings where the ideas arrive and the mornings where they don't.

If you're a working creative with something you've been meaning to make — I've been thinking about you. Not because I have your answers. Because I was you, and I started anyway, and I've been taking notes ever since.

The light's on in the studio. Come and look in.

— Matthew