still here, still writing, finally getting blogger to respond...

I've had the oddest time with Blogger, when I've remembered to update, in that it seems to be... temperamental. Maybe it doesn't like me.

The next-to-last battle scene is a tough slog, mostly in trying to draw it out. I don't know how other authors implement music into their writing, though I suppose it is an ambiance thing mostly, but for me, music has become a "1st draft" if you will.

I discovered far back with the original Jurassic Park soundtrack when I fell asleep listening to it, that my imagination married to a movie score concocted an odd mix. I actually had a nightmare governed by the rhythm and tone of the music. I immediately woke up, put the track on loop and wrote exactly what I "saw" in my mind's eye for every section of the music as it dictated and guided my imagination. I've never looked back since.

The thing is, now after several years of it, I have collected over 400 movie scores, and begun mixing and matching tracks from various movies, cutting and pasting pieces from within some tracks to pieces of other tracks, all to make a new "remix" of sounds to listen to. While sometimes this is for my own enjoyment, the vast majority of the time I am cutting and pasting together sounds as a "rough draft" for my mind to plot out a scene. I then listen to these tracks for a minute or two at a time, closing my eyes and letting the music and my imagination plan out the scene to follow, then I write. It's a nice time-saver for writing as my imagination can repeatedly go over the music and sort out alternatives. And when I actually put pen to paper (as it were) instead of a genuine "first draft," those scenes are more like a 9th rewrite.

In the case of the current scene, this rewrite has yielded wonderful results and visuals that solve many problems I didn't think I could solve with how the drafts were going to go. That said, now I'm at a point where I have to ask if the scene should end or continue with more. It would drastically cut the intended scene, but I feel too much would be unnecessary. Plus, I want the final scene to be far more involving, which may be too difficult to do, if I waste all of my time on this scene. I will have to revisit this option in the rewrite I think.

David Barentine
www.wotps.com