Friday, June 2, 2017

Revising the book, revising my brain.

I made a playlist for the novel I'm working on and posted it here what seems like a decade ago. The songs were the ones I felt captured a mood or emotion I wanted, or the attitude of one of the characters. I love playlists for writing because I love music (I know, you'd never guess) so it only makes sense I've got a play list for revising, too.

Revision is a totally different animal, though. For me it's more about forcing myself through it than capturing the right feel. I need music that's hitting whatever mood I'm personally in to make me look forward to pulling the work out to pick it apart, analyze why it sucks, and try to put it back together again.

That's probably why most of the songs on this playlist are sad as fuck. And if it were a more honest playlist, I'd just drop a Joy Division album and an album by The Smiths and call it good, because I do get really obsessive about a singular sound when I'm working on something - but while there are three Joy Division songs and two featuring Morrissey, the rest are songs I like to use to come up for air when I've had a little too much of the sad stuff (yes, they're all sad too).

Anyway, this is my current revision playlist. Transmission is good for getting up and moving around, clearing the headspace, The Mutants tune is good for feeling pumped while still recognizing that, as Wheeler sings "You either run out of gas or run out of friends" (actually a great lyric for crime fiction, now that I think of it), and Trouble Loves Me is the song I imagine the movie trailer would be set to (I day dream big).

Enjoy.

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