Windows to the Past

Tags

Fused, Music, Thoughts

I got it into my head to set up an old list of songs I haven’t heard in a long time, and boy is this a window into the past. I haven’t remembered my younger self this strongly since the credits of Star Trek: Beyond. Except this time I’m just looking in and back, and seeing, well, me. So much of what I built then is still standing, and I hadn’t really fully realised quite how much of the old framework is still in there. Or how much I built atop it.

I also just went off to tidy some things, knocked over an old penholder that recently reappeared from my Boxes O’ Stuff, and discovered several whiskers from one of my old cats when they fell out along with a shower of drawing pins. (Ones she shed in her lifetime, not ones I clipped or anything.) I’d forgotten I did that. Apparently, when confronted with a full understanding of mortality, my response was to make sure I was able to memorialise and/or clone my then fairly youthful cats against the day, years in the future, when they were going to die. I’m not actually sure those shed whiskers have enough DNA in them to clone my cat, and in fact I wasn’t even sure then: I was banking on advances in technology, I think.

(This particular cat, incidentally, was called Tabitha. The other was Frisky. I have what’s probably one of his whiskers somewhere too: I remember my other storage place for them was an old film canister, which I labelled neatly with its contents. I haven’t found that yet, though.)

In other news, The Fused is about to come back online, as I’ve just been writing up the next chapter! The Tuesday posting schedule should, unforeseen issues notwithstanding, resume this week. More is about to be explained…

Writing BtSF

Tags

Before the Sun Fades, Music, NaNoWriMo, Writing process

Now that it’s out (which I’m still not entirely sure I believe, even though I’ve seen a photo of the hard copy!), I’m kinda thinking back over the process of writing Before the Sun Fades, and how it all went. Or didn’t go, for a lot of the time.

Reflections on Echoes

Tags

Music, Sci-Fi, Songs & Poetry, Timewarp Tales

I was travelling the other day, and part of the route took me through a major bus station, as it so often does. This particular bus station usually plays quiet background music, a rather pleasant thread of sound to pick out from the footsteps and chatter. The other day was no exception, but that particular time, the music that was playing happened to remind me of a particular moment in a game, a melancholy kind of moment in which you wander through the remains of an ancient civilisation more advanced than your own. I began to picture what it would be like to wander through a slightly more indestructible version of the bus station in a few hundred years, or perhaps a shopping centre, with the people and pigeons vanished, but the music still playing hauntingly as you passed through, detecting your presence, fading away as you moved on.

As I often do, therefore, I started singing quietly to myself. (Yes, I am that annoying stranger who hums under their breath and doesn’t shut up. Shush.) As I don’t do so often, I actually got around to writing some of it down, mostly on the return journey a couple of days later. Here’s the end result!

These old and lonely whispers
In these long-forgotten halls
And the sounds that spring from silence
As you walk between their walls

These pictures of another world
That dance as you pass
And you see your face distorted
In their ancient looking-glass

These things the world’s forgotten
Spin to life inside your head
And you dream about the dreamers
Of a world that’s long since dead

As you wander through the shadows
And the echoes in their halls
Hearing sounds that spring from silence
As you walk between their walls

You might see a coloured window
From the ancient times gone by
A child’s simple plastic toy
That flew through the sky

Or see a silent mystery
Its glassy screen all black
And the words that say within it
Someone should be looking back

You pass through open doorways
That still leave you feeling small
Hearing sounds that spring from silence
As you walk between their walls

And you think about the people
Of this long-forgotten world
Imagining the things they did
The things they saw and heard

Wondering if someone
Not too much unlike you
Might have foreseen this future —
You wonder if they knew

They’d be left as ancient whispers
In their long-forgotten halls
Or thought they would forever
Summon echoes from their walls

The lights that woke as you passed by
Now fade as you retreat
And leave the distant echoes
To their long and lonely sleep

The sun that set on their time
Is still rising on your own
And you take their dreams back with you
For the times when you’re alone

The old and lonely whispers
In those long-forgotten halls
And the sounds that sprang from silence
As you walked between their walls

This song by V. L. Bending is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Sing Along Stories

Tags

Books, Characters, Music, Writing process

Once I’ve got started on something, embarked on a voyage with the coast receding out of sight, I often like to pick a CD that I associate most with it, and put that on loop as I write. It’s a particularly useful motivator during NaNoWriMo, because it prompts my subconscious to stop getting distracted with other things by repeatedly distracting it with concepts from the very thing I’m writing! My subconscious all too frequently has the attention span of a one-year-old with multiple shiny objects being waved in front of their face. This is fine — my mind seems to come with multi-level multitasking built in — except when I’m doing full-focus tasks, like sticking to the 1,667 per day NaNo word count while simultaneously working for a PhD! These sorts of things are forefront tasks and I can’t put sufficient effort into them unless I have full focus… so here’s how I get it.

To date, I’ve been through NaNo three times, and here are the CDs I’ve used. Each of them in overall sense and feeling of the sound of the CD — not any single track and not even always the actual words — I find matches up reasonably well to the overall sense and feeling of the story, making it a good background prompt.

• Before The Sun Fades — Within Temptation: The Heart of Everything
• Alt-Shift — Doves: The Last Broadcast
• Reclamation — Sirenia: The Thirteenth Floor

In addition, certain characters acquire songs, some of them more than others, which seem to me to express aspects of their personality or life: character music, picked up from around my collection and noticed as particularly relevant to one person or another. There are a few more of those, and some characters have more than one as various events affect them throughout their lives. As a random sample, we have:

• Tsien: Disturbed: Indestructible (Indestructible)
• Seolas: Disturbed: Haunted (Indestructible)
• Rei: Green Day: She’s a Rebel (American Idiot)

I don’t think we’ve met Rei yet, here on Distant Realms. She comes from the Galactic Federation, but long in Tsien’s past: she was a contemporary of Siris’ back when he was still Human. Perhaps I’ll post something about her soon!