Romantic tragedy

[cornerofmadness]

Ha, that is so true.

Today I went to the library for a talk on Ohio's Romantic Tragedies of the 20s-40s. One of my writers group was going to be there but it took me so long to get there(got stuck at work) so I didn't get to talk to her. The speaker was older man and he started telling the story about Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, apparently married here in Ohio at Malabar Ranch and at the end of that story he showed off a keepsake box from a Bogie museum and it was filled with photos. He got a member of the audience to come show them off while he talked and suddenly the keepsake box slammed shut. He pointed out it was the only colored photo (the last one she put in) and the only one of Bogie alone. Ooooo, a message from beyond.

Then he told the story of Annie Oakley and at the end was showing memorablia from her and he went to put it away but decided to show us one last thing and the playing card he'd showed earlier now had a gunshot in it. It's like OMG he's not just a storyteller, he's a MAGICIAN.

It was great. He knew how to tell a story (he had period appropriate music playing throughout) and he did great with the sleight of hand. My favorite was the last (I got to play that one) where he handed out about thirty postcards with a popular movie poster on one side and a list of movies. He 'read your mind' by you reading the movies (in any order you wanted). I mean that IS impressive. How much he had to have memorized to pull that off.


enemytosleep reminded me how much music means to my writing process. I love writing to music. I love discovering a song that defines a character or pairing. I had scads of Buffyverse and FMA mix tapes and I usually try in October to compile a sound track for my nano novel. So I'm going to be sharing these over the next few days. It'll give me something to write about.

First up is the soundtrack for Hyperion's Son So even before Youtube existed, I had started using lyrics as an epigraph for each chapter. When I started finishing this last August (and I'm in the process of one last damn edit and then I'm walking away or I'll be editing this for life. I'm shocked I keep finding little tweaks).

Most of this sound track is a bit angsty. I will say that musically this thing will strip your gears because it's not one genre of music. I picked the songs for the lyrics as the epigraphs. If you read the chapters they make more sense than they do musically. That said I hope you'll enjoy it. The music covers several decades and even more genres. You can find the Hyperion's Son soundtrack right here on Youtube