Music plays a big role in how I shape ideas, moments, or feelings I want a scene to evoke. Sometimes songs get stuck in my head until I write something out for it.
Jewel - Drive To You
I know it's cheesy but I like it. The song gives me such a feeling of an open-road breeze, a loud engine and illumination by headlights. I want to use this in the background for a scene from an alternative project idea I'm tinkering with- a kind of either novelization or screenplay that turns Tail of the Dragon into an American version of Initial D. Not exactly fan fiction, but more an homage. Because I am, after all, an 86 owner and fanboy amongst many other things.
I see this song working one of two ways in a scene. Two lead characters, opposite genders and potential love interests, spend an evening into the late night touge-chasing each other for fun down a mountain pass in their respective cars. Or one is finally on the way across the mountain pass or on a long distance drive to finally tell the other how they feel. Something like that.
It might be a useless side project, but it's fun to outline scenes for. Gives me a break from space.
Speaking of space...
Foo Fighters - Best Of You
I keep filling in things in the outline on Gravity's Reach and the subsequent books. I have approximately 150 pages of actual rough draft narration and another 70 of outline for scenes and pacing. There are scenes I can't wait to write. I jump around a little. Writing chronologically now is difficult. I've been stuck at this one point for a few days, filling in background for the characters introduced and getting firmer grips on motivation and mindset for them. But I'm at a point where a lead character is at a moment of rare non-hurry and I'm trying to figure out where they're going on a night they can't sleep. What would they do, what would they learn? What would advance the world-building and the plot?
What do people that aren't me do when they can't sleep?
Bruce Hornsby - Every Little Kiss
I know why I can't sleep. There are several reasons. Some I can do things about, some I have to wait out. I don't handle that anxiety in a way I like, how do others do it differently?
The story excites me when I look at the overall narrative moments and what I think I can say. But I worry it's gonna be shit. I worry I'm gonna spin my wheels. I worry I'll never finish. I worry you won't like it.
I worry a lot.
I'd removed myself from Facebook back in August in part because of worry about focusing and finishing. There were other reasons. I don't miss it often. I feel like it showed me how artificial a lot of human connection can be now. We don't talk to each other anymore. We shout into the void (much as I'm doing now, except more publicly) looking for some kind of artificial positive feedback and validation that we exist.
I want to contrast that kind of thinner kind of connection and networking against real bonds formed between physical people who go through things together that bind them in deeper levels.
Charlie Puth - We Don't Talk Anymore (ft Selena Gomez)
That's why I write this here instead of anywhere else. Right now, I figure people have to know where to look, and so far no one has looked. It's still for me. One day I'll share it when I am ready to publish.
I want a draft done in one year. It'll take two. I want this published before I turn 38.
How did I get so old so quick? How did I let so much time go by before I figured out this is what I wanted to do? And... can I do this? Is this for real or is this another thing to not take seriously?
Fuel - Shimmer
I want to be taken seriously. I want to do something real and good.
Don't we all?