Tag: music

Soundtrack for an untitled book

I’ve got this great idea for a novel, with a rough plot outline, an awesome ending, setting and characters all worked out, even the soundtrack–but no title.

I enjoy making soundtracks for my novels, but this is the first time I’ve made one before writing the first draft.  Usually, my first drafts are so all over the place that I end up hating whatever music I try to associate with my work–that, or the feel of the book ends up being so different from the feel of the soundtrack that I just have to abandon it.

In spite of all this, I couldn’t really help myself from putting together a playlist for my next big project, a Gaia Nova novel combining characters from Bringing Stella Home and Desert Stars.  Here it is:

For me, soundtracks are all about the emotion that a story evokes.  I’m going for a tense and gritty feel, with heart-rending losses and soul-crushing defeats interspersed with poignant moments of personal triumph.

The really cool thing is that the soundtrack has helped me out a ton with the outlining process.  I’ve spent a lot of time in the past month hiking in the mountains around Provo, just listening to music and thinking about this story.  Whenever I put on the soundtrack, something would click and I’d see exactly what the story needed.  I kid you not, all of the plot twists and big reveals came to me while listening to this music.

Now if only I could come up with a title…

Desert Stars 3.0 is finished!

That’s right; after almost exactly two months of writing, the third draft of Desert Stars is now complete!

This is the first draft where I feel that things are truly coming together the way they should be, where the story is transforming into something that not only works, but is actually fairly awesome. I’m probably not the best judge, though, so I’ll have to send it out to another round of first readers to get their reactions to it, but I don’t think this will need more than one more draft before it’s ready to go to a copy editor.

Anyhow, here are the stats:

ms pages: 505
words: 108,468
file size: 246 KB
chapters: 22, prologue & epilogue
start date: 16 May 2011
end date: 18 Jul 2011

And the Wordle:

Wordle: Desert Stars 3.0

The most influential song in the writing of this draft comes from an mp3 cd of Arabic music that a friend in Jordan gave me while I was studying over there in 2008. The title is فرحة عمرانة بالدار, which apparently translates to “The Joy of _____ in Casablanca.” I know absolutely nothing else about it, other than it sounds very Arab. Since Desert Stars is essentially about a far-future Arab society, it resonated quite well.

The hardest part of writing this draft was probably at the very end, when my daily routine fell to pieces and I completely lost my stride. This seems to happen a lot whenever I’m trying to finish something, which reflects in my daily word count charts.

But the ending itself was not particularly hard to write; in fact, it was quite fun. A bunch of previous changes came together in a way that just clicked, including some spontaneous ones that I hadn’t planned for at all. As a result, I’m really excited about this draft and hope to get it out as an ebook before Christmas.

One question, for those of you who have read the previous draft: do you think I could justify splitting the story into two separate novels and selling them each at a lower cost? I hate books that end on a cliffhanger, but one of my first readers thought that this might work, and it would certainly give me more stuff to epublish.

Also, if you haven’t read a previous draft and would like to be a first reader, please let me know. I only send my rough work out to people I know in real life, however, so if our only interaction has been online, please don’t ask. I’ll probably start the fourth draft sometime in September, so you’ll have until the end of the summer (and possibly a little more) to finish it.

Next project? Publishing Bringing Stella Home and putting together the spin-off novella Sholpan. Shouldn’t take more than a couple weeks. After that, I think I’ll start the indirect sequel that I mentioned before. In the meantime, on with business as usual.

Civilized internet trolling and things to look out for

The Genesis Earth blog tour rolls on; just recently, I did an interview with Cindy Borgne of Dreamer’s Perch.  She’s been showcasing a number of other indie writers on her site, and the interviews are quite interesting, so check it out!

Also, Moses Siregar is up to an interesting new project called Indie Author Rockstar.  I’m not sure exactly how it will work, but it’s basically a community book blog / monthly book contest.  Genesis Earth will be participating in that, so be sure to check it out once it goes live (and also check out the site’s twitter feed)!

Finally, I got embroiled in a somewhat heated discussion with Howard Tayler on the comment thread of the latest Writing Excuses podcast.  The question we circled around was: “is traditional publishing still safe?” I’m not totally sure what ‘safe’ means in this context, since writing has never been truly ‘safe,’ but it was an interesting if somewhat exasperating discussion. 

Fortunately, it ended well, meaning that I didn’t get banned (though I think Howard was contemplating it). I don’t think either of us ‘won,’ but several onlookers came away feeling enlightened–and most of them agreed that the discussion was generally polite. So if I’m a troll, at least I’m a civilized one. If that’s even possible.

So that’s what’s going on here.  Genesis Earth is still selling at a slow but steady pace, and the revision of Desert Stars is going very, very well.  This is going to be such an AWESOME book–I can’t wait until I’ve got it up for you guys to check it out!

In parting, let me leave you with this amazing trance song I discovered while working data entry. That’s one of the advantages of doing boring computer work all day–it frees you in some ways to do other things. Enjoy!

I need a productivity boost

Yeah…today wasn’t that great.  I revised through about 2k words in Desert Stars, but none of it was new material, and I only worked on it for maybe 3 cumulative hours.  I’m working full time now, but even so, I can do better than this.

My self-imposed deadline for Desert Stars is July 9th.  That needs I need to do three chapters per week, and last week, I only did two.  Some of the later chapters are going to require tossing out everything and starting from scratch, but for the next four or five, I probably just need to shuffle scenes around without changing too much.  Hopefully, I can get through three this week, perhaps even four.

Genesis Earth continues to do well, though.  I checked it at work, and saw that 69% of the people who view the Amazon page end up buying the book.  That’s huge.  Some glitches over the weekend have made sales updates sporadic, but it’s still selling a good 1.5 copies per day.  So to all of you who have bought a copy: thanks so much!

There’s still a lot I need to do for Genesis Earth on the epublishing front, however.  Here’s my to do list for this week:

  • Send GE to +5 review sites.
  • Publish GE to the nook.
  • Get GE listed on Goodreads.
  • Do 3 guest posts / interviews for the blog tour.
  • Create an index for the blog tour.

Should be pretty straightforward…if I can balance writing time with non-writing publishing/promotion time (along with full time job time).  It’s going to be tricky, but I think I can do it.

Here’s my plan: I’ll get up at 6:30 each morning and write for at least half an hour, exercise, get ready for work, etc.  When I get  home at 5:30, I’ll eat a quick dinner and then devote myself to writing until about 7:30 (I have events going on every weekday evening that start at 7:30).  In the late night, I’ll maybe write a little, but that won’t be my primary writing time (since I never get much done when it is).

So anyways, that’s my tentative plan for this week.  Hopefully, that productivity boost will kick in soon, and I’ll be writing 3.5k words a day again.

In unrelated news, Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing posted an awesome interview of Kristine Katherine Rusch up on their podcast yesterday.  To all my writing friends: you really should check it out and listen to it.  Kris is an amazing veteran professional in the sf&f field, and has loads of good advice.  I read her blog religiously and recommend that all other aspiring writers do the same.

Which reminds me: Robin Sullivan was interviewed last week on another podcast, and this one is also very much worth checking out.  Robin runs a small press called Ridan, which is embracing unorthodox business practices and doing surprisingly well in today’s publishing climate.  I’ve said that I’m on hiatus from seeking a publishing house for the next three years…but if I could get into Ridan, I would in a heartbeat.

Finally, let me end this post with a cool trance song I discovered the other day.  Way mellow, with sweet vocals that fit surprisingly well with my current WIP.

New title and writing update

Just a quick update before I go to bed.

After much deliberation, I decided to go with Desert Stars as a title.  Thanks, Megan, for suggesting it.  It’s a little short, and doesn’t exactly wow me, but I’ll try it out and see if I grow into it.  The most important thing anyway is what the readers think.

The last couple of days have been going slow, mostly because of stupid writerly avoidance things.  It’s a lot easier for me to revise than it is to write new material, and the last couple of chapters have required a lot of new material.  But I think I’m through most of it, and will hopefully make some good progress tomorrow.

Genesis Earth has been selling a lot better than I thought it would…which doesn’t say much, but at least it says something.  For promotion, all I’ve done is the blog tour, a couple links on facebook, and general participation on the Kindle Boards.  In any case, I’m betting that writing is more important than promotion, so that’s where I’m focusing my energy.

The temp job I’m working is pretty good.  I listen to stories, writing podcasts, and lectures all day while doing data entry.  One of the most interesting ones is this presentation from Gencon, all about story structure and the hero’s journey.  Good stuff; it’s helped me figure out a lot of things with my current WIP (Desert Stars).

I’ve also been listening to a lot of trance music, especially Armin Van Buuren.  I know my Dad will think it’s crap, but hey I like it!  I think I’ll leave you with this track, where Armin teams up with the guy behind Owl City.  I’d tell you how many times I’ve listened to it, but that would be embarrassing.  So anyways…good night!

8-bit Irish music FTW!

Holy crap, this is so cool:

Doctor Octoroc is this awesome internet artist who did the 8-bit version of Dr. Horrible and the Twilight: Eclipse interactive game. This latest album release looks pretty good, combining two things I absolutely love: Celtic music and chiptunes.

Dude…seriously, this is awesome–like, 9.2 on the awesomeness Richter scale. I can’t stop listening to it.

Part of me is just a teeny tiny bit bummed, though…I was thinking of doing an 8-bit Celtic music album myself, but it looks like Octoroc beat me to it. Well, I can still give it a shot–and hopefully it will sound as good as this one!

Now, back to writing…

Change of plans

So I was going to start Edenfall this week…but then, I realized I wanted to spend some more time in the universe of Worlds Away from Home, so I decided to work on Into the Nebulous Deep instead.

ITND is a direct sequel to Mercenary Savior.  Basically, it grew out of the realization that James’s story wasn’t anywhere near finished.  Like WAFH, I’m trying to throw in some romantic elements…how well that works out remains to be seen.  I’ll probably get it all wrong on the first draft, but make it shine in subsequent drafts.

Anyhow, here’s the soundtrack I’ve put together.  Most of the songs are from ocremix, but there’s also a good bit of U2 and a little Daft Punk, as well as a couple chiptunes that probably no one’s heard of.  Man, I love chiptunes.

I’m going to try to write through this rough draft as quickly as possible.  Right now, I’ve got a deadline for April 16th, but I wonder if I can finish before that.

Part of that has to do with my new goal of two novels per year; I want to train myself to write quickly, so I can be putting out more work.  More than that, though, I want to try and tap into my creativity in a deeper way.  If I can train myself to write quickly, I’ll be less prone to self-edit, which hopefully will help the creative part of my mind to flourish more freely.  That was certainly the case with WAFH 2.1, and I want to do it again.

I stopped ITND 1.0 back in December in order to work on Bringing Stella Home; not because it wasn’t working, but because BSH needed a little more work.  After that, I ended up picking up WAFH.  Now, it’s time to go back and finish this project.

Looking for alpha readers and planning the next project

Worlds Away from Home 2.1 is going along well.  I had a hard time switching from Bringing Stella Home back to this other project, but I’ve got some good momentum going and assuming no major interruptions, should be able to do about 3k words a day for the rest of the week.

Then again, if I get interrupted by work, that might be a good thing…

The second draft is going to be pretty rough, but good enough to start sending out to alpha readers.  Anyone want to volunteer?  It’s basically a far future love story on a planet with desert-dwelling tribal nomads who drive micronuclear powered dune buggies and centuries-old arcologies under giant continent-sized domes.  Earth is an ancient, mythical legend, and roving bands of starfaring nomads stand poised to crush the galactic empire.

I hope to be finished with the second draft by March 1st, and I’d want to get feedback no later than the end of April.  If you’ve been one of my alpha readers before, or if we’re friends IRL, let me know if you’re interested.

So earlier today, I was thinking about the project I want to do after WAFH–a sequel to Genesis Earth.  I’ve been toying with the idea of releasing GE as an ebook, but I don’t want to do that until I have a sequel in the works.  Anyhow, I was thinking of ideas for the title, and out of the blue, it struck me:

EDENFALL.

Kind of plays on the subtle Adam and Eve theme of the first one (and no, Genesis Earth isn’t technically a sci-fi Adam and Eve story…but it kind of evokes one).  I like it because it fits well with my ideas for the story, which basically center around shattering the Edenic paradise that Michael and Terra reach at the end of GE.

I’ve got a lot of ideas for this book, and I think they’re reaching a critical mass.  Just last month, I came up with a great name for the main female protagonist: Estee.  She’s the eldest daughter of Terra and Michael, and kind of takes after her mother’s personality.  The male protagonist will be a young soldier from the military force sent out by panicky Earth officials to neutralize any threat on Icaria–which gives the commanders of the expedition a broad mandate to do whatever the hell they want. As you can imagine, conflict ensues.

I know how this story begins, and I know how it’s supposed to end (and thereby set things up for an awesome third book in the trilogy), but I have no idea how to build things up to the crazy twist ending.  It’s going to require some serious worldbuilding, and that’s going to take some time.  Daydreaming is such hard work, after all.

Anyhow, I should be ready by the time I finish WAFH 2.1.  As an experiment, I’m going to write the rough draft entirely in longhand.  Am I crazy?  Perhaps.  But I also want to spend some time in the Utah wilderness for inspiration while I’m writing it, so pen and paper is probably the best medium for that.

So those are my plans.  To close, let me link to this awesome cover of “Something About Us” by Daft Punk.  Now that’s some sweet theremin action…enjoy!

New OCR album and my first chiptune

So overclocked remix came out with a new album a few days ago, and it is absolutely fantastic.  It’s called THE ANSWER, and it’s a fanmade album of music from the Armored Core series.

For those of you who don’t know, ocremix is an online community of video game music fans.  It’s got a database of almost two thousand fanmade remixes of popular game tracks, and all of them are available for free download.

THE ANSWER is ocr’s 21st album project, and in my opinion it is one of the best.  It’s full of happy, high-energy techno mixed with guitar and drums, and the quality of production is quite good.  While each track is unique, there are enough recurring elements that the album feels very coherent as a whole.  In that, it reminds me a bit of Humans + Gears and Summoning of Spirits.

Anyhow, the album is available for free from the project’s webpage.  You should definitely check it out, even if you’ve never heard of the Armored Core games.  Good stuff– ocremix is definitely starting the year out right!

Speaking of which, remember how I mentioned I wanted to make an album of original chiptune music this year?  Well, I found a program for doing just that!

It’s called MilkyTracker, and it’s an open source program based off of FastTracker 2, an old DOS program for writing computer music.  The interface is way old school–makes me feel like I’m on my old 386 from the 90s.  Ah, those were the good days…

Anyhow, after playing around with it for a while, I wrote an 8-bit style remix of Son of Flynn, the third track on the Tron: Legacy soundtrack by Daft Punk.  Several excellent chiptune arrangements of songs from the Tron soundtrack have been popping up recently, so I thought I’d get in on the action.

Here it is:

Pretty sweet, huh? You can download the original file here, but unfortunately I don’t know how to convert .xm to .mp3, so unless you have a media player that can read extended module files, all I can say is go fish.

Anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to these past few days. Haven’t gotten a whole lot of writing done, but I’m slowly transitioning back into WAFH and getting excited about it again. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish it before LTUE as I’d hoped, but a February 28th deadline seems reasonable. More on that later, for sure.

You have no idea…

…how happy this makes me:

At some point this year, I want to put together an album of original 8-bit music. I don’t really care if it’s good or not, I just want to do it. Apparently, there’s a growing chip tune scene, mostly centered around New York and Tokyo. I saw this documentary the other day about it, and it looks really awesome.

The only thing is, I have no idea where to start. A lot of these guys use the actual NES and Game Boy hardware…yeah, I don’t think I’ve got the technical knowledge for that. But some kind of music editing program…are there any good freeware ones out there? I don’t have a lot of money to drop on this, though hopefully that’ll change soon…

Anyhow, this post is mostly to say that 8-bit music is awesome, and I want to start writing and composing it soon.  Expect to hear more about this in the future.