roh morgon

~ musings of a moonlight writer

First of all, I’d like to introduce you to a couple of songs by one of my favorite independent artists, Justin St. Charles. I discovered him on the Nine Inch Nails remix site and he’s pretty talented. The first song, Reckless, tells the sad story of a breakup. It’s a soft hip-hop tune that’s quite heartwrenching. The second is a remix he did of a song by Trent Reznor’s new band, How To Destroy Angels called A Drowning. Justin’s remix is called Drowning Without Me.

Posted with the permission of the artists who believe in sharing their creative passions, here’s Reckless and Drowning Without Me:

~~~~~~~~~

Did ya happen to notice today’s date?

Yeah, today is a nine day. For those who are new to my blog, I have a thing for the number nine – it’s a really cool number.

Why, and why is today a nine-day, you ask?

Just add up all the numbers in the date, then add the numbers in the sum. So 16 August 2010 is: 1+6+8+2+0+1+0=18;  and 1+8=9!

Nine’s a special number and has all kinds of strange effects on numbers involving it. For example, multiply any number by nine. The result is a product whose integers also add up to nine (ex: 9 x 5 = 45; 4 + 5 = 9). Multiples of nine are kinda weird in another way – the first digit increases as the second digit decreases. For example:

9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, 81, 90. The pattern resets itself when 9 is multiplied by any number ending in 1, such as 11, 21, 31, etc.

Cool, huh?!

Which leads me to my next weird little factoid, only this one is a word.

Interrobang.

Yes, it’s a real word.

Want a clue as to its meaning?

You can find it at the end of the line that begins with the word ‘cool’

Huh?!

Yeah, that’s it.

An interrobang is a special symbol that’s the combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark. From Wikipedia:

The interrobang, interabang[1] (pronounced /ɪnˈtɛrəbæŋ/) or quesclamation mark, ‽, is a nonstandard English-language punctuation mark intended to combine the functions of the question mark (also called the interrogative point) and the exclamation mark or exclamation point (known in printers’ jargon as the bang). The glyph is a superimposition of these two marks. A sentence ending with an interrobang asks a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question.

It looks like this:

‽

It can be created in HTML or XML documents by typing ‽ or ‽ and some word processors will display it using the alt code ALT+8253 .

Just imagine – if this symbol were widely used, there would be no more confusion as to which order to place the question mark and the exclamation mark for those instances when you need both.

Pretty cool, huh‽

In recognition of Maggie Stiefvater’s stunning success with both Shiver and Linger (see my mini-review below in the ~bloghopper post), I’m featuring the songs that she wrote AND played for her book trailer videos. Talk about TALENTED!

The Golden Woods was written and arranged for Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, and performed by Maggie Stiefvater and her sister, Kate Hummel.

One Thousand Paper Cranes was written, arranged, and performed for Linger by Maggie Stiefvater and Kate Hummel.

The third song in the player is last week’s When He Thinks Of Her (in case you missed it). This somber but beautiful song by Justin St. Charles is a nice followup to the Shiver and Linger songs.

This is a quiet little instrumental by Justin St. Charles. Readers of my blog might recall my AW May Musical Blog Chain post featuring his beautiful song Leavin’ Hope, a remix of a NIN instrumental, that is the main theme song for my novel Watcher. He’s taken several NIN songs and recreated emotional and haunting remixes that are part of the Watcher soundtrack. I think I’ll be adding this new song as well.

So, for your listening pleasure, here is When He Thinks Of Her, by Justin St. Charles:

Yay! It’s finally my turn on the Absolute Write May Musical Blog Chain. There’s something to be said for being last!

Aheïla started the chain with the question, “What does your story/character(s) sound like?” She offered the following guidelines: “You can take this from any angle: what do you listen to when you write, which song summarizes your story the best, etc.”

Hmm. Well, for me, the best place to start is at the beginning.

I woke up one morning with a character in my head showing me her lonely existence on the fringes of human society. As Sunny unveiled her story, I became obsessed in the efforts to write it down. That might not sound unusual, except I’d never written anything before.

That was the beginning of a new chapter in my life, which quickly narrowed down to night after night of manic writing, generally getting only 2-4 hours of sleep before heading off to work the next day. Watcher became my life as the story poured incessantly into my head.

During that five, very unreal months, I discovered how much music – always a big part of my life – enhanced my writing. I initially wrote to wordless instrumental songs…

Well, I must confess. It was actually the Twilight score – not the popular soundtrack, but the haunting background music by Carter Burwell. It provided the eerie feel of the nonhuman creatures I was writing about, with both soft romantic interludes and violent crescendos that matched the scenes playing in my head.

Then my son introduced me to Nine Inch Nails. I was familiar with a couple of their popular songs, but though a longtime Tool fan, I’d never paid much attention to NIN. My son filled my new iPod with NIN and I discovered a depth to Trent Reznor’s music that went way beyond Closer (the ‘animal’ song).

As I was editing Watcher, I kept finding track after track of quiet and deeply emotional music by NIN. I discovered even more on the NIN remix site.

Trent Reznor, ever rebellious, makes his music available for fans to download, remix, and upload – in fact, he not only encourages it, but uploads his own remixes as well. What makes this phenomenal is that not only is it available to the public, but it’s all free as long as all the artists are credited and no one profits from it.

My ‘soundtrack’ for Watcher consists of dozens of songs and I’m constantly on the lookout for more. But what I’ve done for this post is to list the songs that are tied to a few of the more important scenes in the book. Many of them are Nine Inch Nails in origin, but there are also a few Incubus songs on this list – their mood and lyrics seem particularly suited to this story.

But before you begin, I need to add one little tidbit about some of the weirdness that entered my life while writing the story of Sunny and Nicolas.

The novel was almost complete when I discovered a song that sent chills down my spine. Why? Because the singer was singing about Nicolas – my Nicolas – who had been hammering his story at me for the last half a year. The song is called Sleeping with a Vampyre by Brigitte Handley and The Dark Shadows. It not only describes his physical appearance perfectly, but his behavior and attitude as well. It really creeped me out. Still does. Makes me wonder how many women he visits in their dreams…

You can listen to it here:

So that said, I invite you on a brief journey of Watcher through music that expresses the rollercoaster of emotions in this story. If you don’t have much time to listen to all of them, then at least listen to the theme song for Watcher. It’s called Leavin’ Hope, Still and is a Nine Inch Nails remix by Justin St.Charles. This is a sad but beautiful instrumental love song which, to me, is a perfect tribute to Sunny and Nicolas.  It’s Track #4 on the main player.

~~~~~~~~~

Be sure to check out the other participants in the AW May Musical Blog Chain. They all use and relate to music differently in their writings and offer a wonderful variety of music samples: