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Audibly Inspiring: Uprising

A lot of writers write to music. I don’t, usually, though I’ve been known to plonk the headphones on if I need to drown out ambient household noise. In that case, I listen to electronica or something with a steady, monotonous beat that I don’t have to pay attention to. It’s like my white noise.

That’s not to say that sometimes music doesn’t attach itself to my writing. Sometimes I’ll hear a song and realize it’s perfect for a particular scene. Maybe not as the soundtrack, but something about it captures the essence of the mood, or the characters, or something. Sometimes a song will epitomize the theme of a book, or reflect part of a character’s personality.

Those are the songs I turn to when I need to recapture an emotion or the character’s mindset. I don’t have music for everything I write—some projects lend themselves to such pairings better than others—but I thought I would share some of my musical inspirations in a new series of posts.

First up is “Uprising” by Muse.

The first time I heard this song, it immediately attached itself to the project I was working on at the time, my novel Topaz Sky. Faith, the heroine, is a genetically engineered woman who’s just discovering the truth of the world she lives in. For most of her life, she thought she was alone in her freakiness. Then she discovers there are others like her, and they are little but pawns in a larger game.

They will not force us.
They will stop degrading us.
They will not control us.
We will be victorious.

“Uprising” speaks to that theme. The lyrics are all about breaking free of oppression, and that’s the theme of the novel. Whenever I listen to it, I feel the urge to dive back into Faith’s world.

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Embracing the Weird

My heroine with bat-like wings. Art by Mena Carson.

My heroine with bat-like wings. Art by Mena Carson.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a writer. I’ve been writing in some fashion or another since I was a kid, with four complete novels and a handful of short stories to my name. Though I haven’t published any fiction, I’ve been working in a professional communications capacity since I graduated from university. So, I’ve been writing for two-thirds of my life. And yet, I hesitate to call myself a writer, or to talk about my writing.

Why?

I like my stories a hell of a lot. I wouldn’t bother with them otherwise. I love my characters. I love my worlds. I love the process of creating, whether it’s dreaming up a new personality or a playground for my characters to explore. I even love the process of editing and revising (although, I’ll be honest, my love for that process diminishes quickly once I’m in it).

But talking about any of that makes my shoulders bunch up and I’m pretty sure I end up blushing, because so few people get it. They either think that writing itself is easy and anyone can do it, or they think I’m weird because I’m (air-quotes) “creative”.

I was a member of the RWA a few years back, and I attended the local chapter’s meetings pretty regularly. I got a lot of great information from the experts in attendance and even managed to win second place in a contest they held. As much as I enjoyed my year’s membership with the group, I had a hard time adapting to the idea that these people really did want to know about my writing, what I was currently working on, what my plans were, and so on. When I said my novel was about a superhero with bat-like wings, they expressed interest (instead of the dreaded “…oh” accompanied by glazed eyes) and asked for more details.

It really drilled home how I’d thought of my writing up to then. It had been a private endeavour—and it still is, to some extent, since I put something of myself into everything I write. But making that change from private pursuit to public author (fingers crossed) is definitely challenging, and it’s a challenge I wasn’t expecting.

I hope that as I continue along this path, I’ll be able to shed that “weird” feeling. Or embrace it. Because, really, what I write is weird. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Another Check in the Weird Column

This morning, I found a leprechaun’s hat at the end of the driveway.

Just for some context, this is not something that usually happens in my sleepy bedroom community. My neighbourhood is not mysterious (though there are some very nice nature trails about a block away). It’s not even very Irish (the street names are a combination of Scottish and French, mostly). So it was something of a “huh, what?” moment when I realized that the green thing sitting on my driveway was not just a crumpled up bit of paper, but a hat.

It seems to be about the size a leprechaun’s hat should be—small, but it would be large on one of the wee folk. Green, of course, with a black band. My daughter insisted the buckle on it changed from silver to gold as she was holding it on the drive to school, though that might have been frost melting. The kids had a great time trying to come up with reasons the hat might have been on the driveway. Where did the leprechaun go? Why did he leave his hat behind? Where’s the gold, dammit? (Okay, that was me.)

My husband, who had left earlier in the morning, would have backed his car over the hat, though he hadn’t known about it until I mentioned it. I suggested he should check the back bumper. Just in case there’s a little hatless man clinging to it.

I really hope not. We don’t need the wrath of faerie descending upon our heads.

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The Creative Side of Conflict

Chris Hemsworth

Chris Hemsworth — this post isn’t really about him, but I’ll take any excuse to post Thor.

With all the recent posturing by North Korea, I feel a bit like I’ve stepped back in time twenty years. No, wait…thirty. I keep forgetting twenty years ago was not the 1980s.

I grew up during the Cold War when the Soviet threat was a very real thing. Looking back, it was an odd sort of mentality, like there was a sleeping giant in the next room that might wake up really damned grumpy for no reason. And Canada was the hallway it would trample through in order to get to the living room where the US was having a party.

Despite that awareness, there was also the idea that the giant’s grumpiness probably wouldn’t overrule its common sense. You know, unless the partygoers started making fun of it, not laughing at its jokes, or whatever. As long as the partiers treated the giant with respect, everything would be hunky dory. It would lurk in the corner and watch, grumbling a bit, but generally letting the party continue.

North Korea is nothing like the grumpy giant. It’s more like a random angry guy on the highway, the reason my dad warned me never to flip the bird to any other drivers—you never know who’s got a gun stuffed in the glove compartment, just aching for an excuse to use it.

Analogies aside, it’s interesting to look at the conflict from a creative point of view. The Cold War—like most other major real-life conflicts—spawned so many stories, either as a focus or as a peripheral piece of the puzzle. Look at Red Dawn, or the James Bond movies. The “evil” Soviets, or the repercussions of dealing with them, were everywhere in popular fiction. It’s interesting to note, too, that Red Dawn was recently remade with North Korean invaders instead of Soviets and by all accounts, it just doesn’t work, probably because there isn’t twenty years of fear behind the remake. Though it does have Chris Hemsworth. Mmhm.

As frightening as real-life conflict on this scale is, there’s no question that it encourages creativity as we seek to explore scenarios and possibilities and find answers to the what if? questions.

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Comet vs. Mars: FIGHT!

The red surface of Mars

Mars is going to have a close encounter of its own in 2014

Despite the mention of outgassing and my subsequent flashbacks to Armageddon, I found this article intriguing. If the calculations for the Siding Spring comet stay true, it’ll skim by Mars in October 2014. If not, it could slam into our red-dusted neighbour with the impact of one billion megatons. That’s 25 million times larger than any man-made nuclear weapon ever tested on Earth.

What I find fascinating about this scenario is that for the first time in the history of humanity, we might be able to witness, record, and learn from an impact similar to that which killed the dinosaurs on Earth—and, added bonus, it won’t be our planet that’s at risk.

Not that I wish harm to poor Marvin, but better him than us.

It’d certainly be a twist on the disaster genre, wouldn’t it? Consider if a similar scenario arose after we colonize Mars (because that will happen soon—we live in the future, after all). What would the colonists do? Run for home? Stick it out? Try to survive in a world that would become exponentially more threatening?

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China’s Ghost Cities

Empty apartment buildings in China (Financial Post)

Empty apartment buildings in China (Financial Post)

This is tickling my apocalyptic sense. Apparently there are 64 million vacant apartments in China—homes built with the intention of being filled, but which stand empty instead. Builders have created entire subdivisions devoid of any sign of life, other than shrubberies, and huge apartment buildings rise side by side, without a single family coming or going from their doors.

The Financial Post reported on this as being a potential repeat of the American housing crash, but all I could see when I read the article was a post-apocalyptic world. It’s so easy to imagine this is an “after” scenario, and it jumpstarted my imagination.

What could have happened? Zombies are the popular apocalypse du jour, but a more mundane outbreak of an unstoppable virus could have the same effect. How would the survivors survive? How would the world recover?

I love finding inspiration in real world events and scenarios.