Just for Fun Friday!

A quick note today: still transitioning back into a normal life with my darling actually at home. It's been remarkably busy. But at least now the constant, unending stress is gone and we now know where we are moving to: back to Ontario! So even though I've posted this song like, three times, I think it warrants another. And not only for the beautiful scenes of Ontario summer featured within:

Have a great weekend, everyone! Also yay! No more February! :)

Just for Fun Friday!!

This probably should have been last week, since they were on the Colbert Show last week.

Holy crap. I love it when I discover a band that sounds that amazing live. No processing needed, no funky audio bits or frills. Just an amazing voice, good instrumentation, a double bass and that feeling like you've stepped suddenly into peppy, upbeat rom-com soundtrack. Perfect for your V-Day. Especially good for this -- the HAPPIEST day I've had for the past three and a half years. But more on that on the other blog next week. ;)

Love it. No, Love Love it. So fun.

Music that Inspired RoboNomics Chapter 7

Well, kids, RoboNomics Chapter 7 comes out this coming Monday. I can't believe that it's been six chapters and more than that -- over 700 reads! I'm actually surprised that anyone would even be interested in this bit of shitty folly I call writing. All right -- that was false humility if ever I've seen it. Silly me.

Anyways, in Chapter 7 the particularly harsh winter has melted into spring in near-future Toronto as it always inevitably does. But Andrea's problems do not get better as time rolls on. In fact, the landscape of the city is changing rapidly with more and more wandering the streets, looking for employment of any kind. This spells trouble for Andrea's friends, who don't know what to do next. There's always the Protest Group, but joining it would mean aligning themselves with known criminals...



I'm excited about this next chapter! I'm also kind of excited about my other project. Just a little experiment to see what kind of response my YA fantasy writing gets on Wattpad....

Sounds into Words into Settings

I once wrote on my other blog about the system I use for establishing, editing and revising description. In that post, I wrote that sound was the most important, for me, of the senses. When thinking about fictional settings, the sight of it is primary in its establishment. Smell is secondary because it gives fictional scenes texture and a history. But sound, perhaps because I am an audiophile, gives a sense life and dimension. Without sounds, I think, scenes can fall flat.

But sometimes it's difficult to remember what things sound like. So that's when I turn to my perennial friend, YouTube. I've heard academics, back when I was a part of that world, denigrate the internet as a tool of research. But I don't care. I am old enough to remember the world before all of its collected knowledge was uploaded to accessible servers, and I'd much rather things were this way. Where else would I be able to access such boring but essential recordings as these:



There are so many sound clips like this on YouTube, all that can be used for remembering how things sound. Nothing can replace being there on the scene with notebook at the ready to describe things, but sometimes life gets the way, memory fades, setting that require descriptions are not readily accessible. In those cases, thank you Internets! :)

Just for Fun Friday!

Yay! It's Friday already/finally. Do you ever feel that way? You've been waiting for something for what feels like an eternity and then suddenly it creeps up on you and it's like, "oh. I thought I had another eternity to wait." Well, let's celebrate this little milestone at any rate. Another week closer to it being not February. Not February is so much better than February.

I am loving this track lately. And then I saw the video. It has an alternative/grunge '90s throwback vibe. Ah, nostalgia. To be 15 again. :P

Music that Inspired RoboNomics Chapter 6

Hey everyone! Another edition of the RoboNomics soundtrack coming at you! RoboNomics Chapter 6 will be on Wattpad on Monday, February 10 at midnight EST! Chapter 6 is back to material that is more polished than Chapters 3 to 5 turned out to be. But if you go over to wattpad to check it out (I don't think you need an account to read), please let me know via wattpad comments or Google+ comments on this blog post or even via tweet what you thought of it. I need some constructive criticisms!!

Also, in the next day or so I will be uploading some sweet sweet Chapter 6 preview pictures to Twitter. So watch out for that. I have been seriously thinking of throwing up some bits of other projects onto wattpad. Especially that Epic Fantasy YA business I keep banging on about. But that will be more of a fun experiment to see what sort of response I get so I won't be compiling playlists or making pictures or promoting it very much. Basically I want to see if that work can stand on its on a website of stories that is populated by 65% young adults.

But enough about that. In the meantime, back to Chapter 6. In Chapter 6, we find Andrea struggling with unemployment and a world that is increasingly filled with automated processes and robots that replace humans in their jobs. She is worried about how her and Austin's income has been drastically cut, but then something unexpected happens that makes her troubles a lot more serious.

The Origin Story

So I was initially going to put this on an 'About' page that I had plans to create for this blog. But I think the story actually deserves to have a post of its own, before it gets relegated to surrounding copy. And so I'll begin: the story of how I was first inspired by music.

Once Upon a Time...

There was a young seven year old girl -- me -- going to school in a suburban neighborhood east of the capital city of Canada. As was tradition for the schools in that part of the world (and still is, probably) one day a high school band came to visit my school. The teachers all rounded us up and brought us into the gym. We had to sit on the achingly cold floor with our legs crossed. It was torture. Or at least it was until the band began to play.

One can learn a lot from hindsight. For instance, later I joined my high school's band. And we were horrible musicians -- muddling through mostly pops, Broadway or jazz arrangements. But to my child's undeveloped ear, I felt as though I had never heard anything so beautiful. I remember that I closed my eyes and listened to the whole concert sitting still. And that's when it first happened. That's when I could picture -- I thought because of the music -- a story take place before my mind's eye. Characters came to life that I'd never heard of and had conflicts with each other that perhaps were not original but were still thrilling for a seven year old.

Later, when I was older, my high school band did the same thing as that one had -- we went on a tour of the "feeder schools" as the teachers called them and played for the little kids of the neighborhood. I remember looking out across the masses of children and seeing them bobbing around in places to the music -- dancing with abandon as only children can while the teachers attempted to keep them in one place. It struck me then as now how odd I must have looked to other seven year olds and teachers alike: this tiny kid sitting still with her eyes closed. But then that's just the sort of child I was. Sometimes, while I was in elementary school, I used to have contests with myself to see how long I could sit without moving a muscle. I never told anyone -- I'd just watch the clock on the classroom wall and keep track of how long I could be motionless. Just to know.

At any rate, it wasn't until a couple years later that I put pen to paper in an attempt to record a story for the first time. By that time, the infamous concert how grown into legend in my mind and I remembered it as being a symphony of the highest caliber. This idea was exaggerated by the fact that for Christmas that year I received a two volume set of "Classical Essentials" or some such other title. Did I forget to mention it was two tapes? Yes, I am that old!

That's when things really took off, in terms of imagining to music. And it's also why even now, some of my most inspiring tracks are classical ones. But that's not where it ended. I started to imagine things when I looked out the window of the car on those long drives to Grandma's house. On those occasions, the car radio was usually take over by my parents, who had a penchant for hits of the '60s and Leonard Cohen:

It strikes me that early exposure to a poet/songwriter might be behind the fact that lyrics are probably the most important aspects of pop songs for me. Whatever it was, it wasn't a far jump from imagining stories to those types of songs to transferring that skill to all songs with words. And so a habit was formed that would last my entire life: the habit of listening to music as a way of avoiding writer's block. Like they say, music can soothe the savage beast -- which I interpret to mean that music has a way of coaxing the (sometimes) savage muse to come out and play! :)

How about you? Is listening to music a habit that you have in your writing or creating?