C.M. North's Blog

I've been MIA lately, but I'm diving deep into my creative journey. After years of music and writing, I've enrolled at Rutgers for composition, balancing all while keeping my novel ideas alive.

A running joke that wife wife and I have shared for years now is that we’ll retire when I make a million dollars from my books. At the current rate of writing-related income, that’ll be sometime in 2350, or thereabouts. Another ongoing debate between us is whose story is better – the ones I make […]

I don’t mean that in a woe-is-me, suffering artist kind of way. I mean that, whilst I deeply enjoy creating content, I’m not always very good at it, and I’m always very slow at it. Consider that I started writing 22 Scars in 2012, and didn’t publish it until 2017. The Broken took significantly less […]

On Friday, May 14, 1993, a self-titled debut album dropped. It didn’t really change the world, and didn’t quite gel with the musical landscape of the time (had it been released five or six years later, it might have been a different story). The first single, ‘In the Fields’, would see moderate success in the […]

It had to happen, eventually. I’ve been coasting on a weird high for the past few weeks – months, possibly – where I’ve had energy, enthusiasm and motivation. I started a new job in a new location (same company), which gave me a sense of reinvigoration in my work life; I finished re-working and recording […]

Once, I think, the apartments had been nice. Once, they had been new. Once, loving families had lived in them, made them home, hung paintings on the walls and laundry from the windows. There had been the swirling scents of home-cooked meals, and the floating laughter of children down halls and corridors, and the people […]

In the distance were some kind of mountains, awash in the blood of an ever-setting sun. In the sky, clouds – but not too many; just enough to give the sensation of staring at a slowly-changing painting, one created by a long-since vanished artist. Laid out before all that were the plains, dusty and barren, […]

Hello. I lived in apartment 515. It doesn’t matter what building. It doesn’t matter what neighborhood, what town, what country … none of that matters. You can make it up for yourself, if you like. It just … it just doesn’t matter. What matters is that I lived in apartment 515, and above me was apartment […]

There never seems to be enough time in the day, does there? When I’m not depressed I’m writing, and when I’m not writing I’m recording, and when I’m not recording I’m sleeping or working, and blogging just takes a back seat, it seems, to anything and everything else in the world. I checked WordPress today […]

tl;dr – visit https://thebroken3.bandcamp.com/releases to listen to The Broken’s first album! As some of you know, when I started writing The Broken, I also started writing their music – specifically, the albums they released between 1993 and 1997 as they rose to fame, fortune, and eventually, infamy. Starting with just a few samples of what […]