Conceit Part 1

thought i'd give in to my writer's conceit and put something up on my own writing.

any objections?

right. here i go.

music plays a hard to define role in my writing. my need for audible ambience swings from signal to noise and back again. sometimes i can't work unless good tunes are going on around me; other times, i need to turn everything off and let the white noise of my surroundings draw out the poison of my fictions in a strange form of osmosis.

i've rarely ever experienced working in complete silence. being a Citydweller, with an apartment just 5 floors off the ground and a balcony opening up to a main commercial avenue that's never deserted except in the worst possible weather conditions (often not even then), at an intersection that's always causing some form of road rage all along the spectrum and facing an overhead railway line that starts up at around 4 or 5 am and goes on till 11pm, with maintenance cars whoosh-whining back and forth in between, that's practically a given.

sometimes it's the white noise that gets me going. other times, it's definitely the music.

i wrote a story once that underwent spontaneous generation from a tune called "Orpheus" by David Sylvian. more specifically, it sprang from the flugelhorn solo that slides smoothly through the middle of the song, and winds around the melodies and verses and other bits of the song where the flugelhorn is conspicuously absent. the story has absolutely nothing to do with the song, except for that the flugelhorn from the song flows throughout the story, where i let the instrument transmogrify (or whatever the appropriate term is) into a more mundane trumpet, placed in the hands of a gifted musician who may or may not be human.

that was the first and only short story i've ever written that had its bones laid out by hand, all in one sitting. certainly, the skin of it went on when i typed the draft into my laptop, but it already had most of the muscle and grist on top of the bones that would be in the final version.

all my attempts at writing with a pen have failed since then. "Time and the Orpheus" isn't a great story, certainly nowhere near perfect, but i love it nontheless, warts, wonky bits and all.

i feel an affinity for David Sylvian's music, even the pieces i don't get.

His music again provided the backdrop for the opening scene of the book i've been writing these past weeks, with his "All My Mother's Names," collected with several other hauntingly strange, oddly beautiful, mostly instrumental pieces in his Camphor CD. the odd rhythms, haunting melodies and weird noises of it proved the perfect atmosphere for the bar i found could only be named The Mother.

that wasn't, however, going to be the music to put the meat on the book's bones. i stalled on the story for a long time after that opening scene.

then i discovered the Sin City soundtrack, and the whole thing, appropriately enough, blew wide open.