Three Places I Find Inspiration

 Happy New Year!

On this New Year's Eve day, I'm busy crunching year-end financials in preparation to go to quarterly tax-reporting. Author finances, however, are not the topic of the week at the SFF Seven. Instead we're discussing a much happier topic: sources of inspiration.

The two are somewhat tied together for me as I've spent the last two weeks refilling my creative well. I finished my revision of ONEIRA (final title to come) on December 15 and sent it off to my editor. Since then, I've taken a break from writing work - very unusual for me. The time has been consumed largely by Christmas prep, travel, visiting family, and doing business like the above crunching of year-end financials. Looking at this, I've realized that I've been relying on passive well-refilling: hoping that if I simply leave the creative well alone, that the vast water table of the universe will seep in and top that puppy off for me. 

And, to some extent, that's true.

However, I'm realizing I haven't been following my new tenet of aggressively refilling the well. That would mean finding ways to actively pour juice into that well. And that's where inspiration comes in. What are my top three?

Media

I'm putting a lot under this heading, much like my sibling-under-the-skin, Murderbot. One thing I have been doing is a full re-read of this excellent series by Martha Wells. Reading books - particularly brilliantly written ones by authors I admire - is a great source of inspiration for me. I also include listening to music under this heading. While road-tripping, I put my music library on All Songs Shuffle, which unearths interesting stuff I haven't listened to in ages. A Cat Stevens song - The Wind - turned up, so now I'm diving into a full Cat Stevens song shuffle. What an amazing songwriter, to communicate so much in so few words. Finally, I love watching movies for inspiration. I got a great idea just the other night from a movie and now I'm sizzling to write this series. Though it will have to wait, the sparkle of that excitement adds to my overall feeling of creative flow.

Nature

I'm fortunate to live in a beautiful place. My desk overlooks a spectacular view and my morning walk with the dog is replete with huge skies, distant mountains, and beauty of all kinds. I say I'm lucky to have this - and I am! - but I also sought out this place, because being outside in a beautiful place is super important to me. Just living here refills my well.

Silence

Longtime readers probably know that I'm an advocate of silence for creative flow. By this I don't necessarily mean the absence of ambient sound, though it sometimes means that for me. I'm talking primarily about the silence of the mind, the emptiness that allows creativity to flow in, that enables us to hear the voices scintillating through the veil, telling us their stories. Taking time off from the "noisier" parts of my life has been invaluable for that. 

Huh... Turns out I've been doing better at aggressively refilling the well than I thought!

Best wishes for an inspiring 2024 for us all!

Variation on a Holiday Theme

Movies. For the longest time, I took great joy in slipping away to the theater to watch whatever happened to be screening. We lived on military bases, which were only so big. My sister and I learned early the math of leaving the house and walking to the single screen theater for a matinee. Most of the movies are dusty and forgotten, now. Mostly because they deserved to be. A few still gleam in imagination. Unfortunately, all of this was before the migraine disorder dissected my love affair with the thrill of a darkened movie theater. This is the long way of telling you I don't have any holiday-ish movies for you. Screens are problematic. Whether it's the flicker or refresh rates of modern panel TVs, we'll never know. 

TV and movies went away shortly after I graduated from college. I do still go to movie theaters - well. I *did* before all of this plague nonsense. But I only go after someone I trust rates a movie good enough for a migraine. Far too few movies rise to that level. The English Patient did. Pirates of the Caribbean, too. Iron Man as well. Oh. And Wonder Woman, though I had a few plot issues with it and that is another rant entirely. What it means is that you can plainly see I'm not at all movie-literate at this point.

I realize no one asked, but it's not the holidays until Buddy Hackett freezes solid beneath the streets of New York City and has Bill Murray yelling at his corpse. Scrooged. It's Scrooged I love.

So if you want to talk about holiday adjacent music, instead, I might have some of that, but that's because I'm pagan and my definition of holiday-ish tunes may be unacceptably odd to anyone else. Naturally, Loreena McKennitt tops the list. She has two holiday themed albums, but one of them is specifically Christmas and the other is more solstice oriented and it is that one that has my affection. Nox Arcana has a creeptastic holiday-inspired album. It's not going to be chirpy, whistle-tone singers belting tunes, that's for certain. There's something about the end of the year that seems to inspire desperation in far too many people. It's as if the arbitrary time marker of 'end of the year' turns deadlines everyone had 12 months to accomplish into monsters hungry for flesh and blood. Yes. I'm thinking of my day job. And maybe I'm busy tech writing what ought to have been tech written six months ago, but who's counting? Decorating and cooking - while fun - can pile stress even higher. So I look for music that sets me to dreaming of sparkling snow drifting through the evergreens, and the stag spirits breathing steam into the frigid night. (Lest you think I miss cold northern winters, I don't. I miss the *idea* of them, but actual snow? No. Thank you. I'll deck the halls with tropical plants and a couple of reptiles, thanks. I like not having to wear socks.)

Holidays are about dreams and memories and traditions. Movies can't be a big part of my life anymore. So I rely on music to tell me the stories I miss out on otherwise.

Contributing Artists

Which artists move me varies by the day. Sometimes by the hour. Music is the most obvious and the easiest because I can pipe it directly into my skull from just about anywhere. Right now, Spotify's Nine Inch Nails play list (built for me based on my listening habits - well trained AI is all that, lemme tell you) is keeping me going.

I have no idea what it is about driving beats and angry lyrics that work for me. But here I am. Maybe because the pace is fast and I get pushed to keep up. I don't have as much room to stop and overthink.

On the other hand, I have an app called Calm. It is a meditation app at core, but for me, the greatest utility is the sleep function. The app commissions a bunch of different artists to create content for the app - all centered around focus and relaxation. My two favorite are Liminal Sleep by Sigur Rós and System Sounds: Song of the Night Sky. The last one assigns a musical note to the stars in the night sky based on color and brightness then plays the results based on the stars rising at the eastern horizon. So you know that's right up my alley.

The other artists in my life are the felines. After all. It was Leonardo da Vinci who said The smallest feline is a masterpiece. Cuillean agrees.

The Writer's Playlist

Even though I've managed to save so much music to Spotify that it won't let me save any more - what's up with THAT? 10k songs is nothing! My music tastes are wide ranging and horrify pretty much everyone I've ever lived with. So I do most of my listening (and singing) for when no one else is around. But I have come to the conclusion that music is for when I'm not writing. My writing playlists used to be game sound tracks.

Myst. ALL OF THEM. The Diablo soundtracks. Halo soundtracks. Anything moody and/or without lyrics. I dipped into Brain.fm and some of the other binaural sound tracks available. Anything to shift my brainwaves and help me concentrate and shut out the world. For along while I listened to Nox Arcana to get my fill of atmospheric, we're all gonna die music. Frontline Assembly and, oddly enough, Nine Inch Nails worked for that, too. (I know I said no lyrics. I guess I lied.)

But then science happened and now there's data pretty much proving my high school science teacher's most unpopular assertion. Music impairs creativity. Granted. One study does not a landslide make. But if you're trying to listen to the still, small voices inside, maybe consider turning down the interference?

So I'm writing silent. This is a luxury and I freely admit that. When my folks move in and I'm having to block out conversations, TV, and the sounds of other humans breathing, earphones and sound may be my only solace. Until then, I'm writing a deaf heroine. Silence is exactly what's needed.

Sing Me A Song & I'll Tell You A Story

I listen to music...all the time. When I need to sink into a mood, I have a playlist for that. When I'm not connecting with a situational mindset of a character, I have a song, an album, or an artist to get me there. When I need to drown outside noise, I have a smart-station for that. When my dog's losing her mind due to a storm, there's music for that too.

As I'm working my way through the fifth book in the Immortal Spy series here's what's in my Top 5 Playlists queue:

1. Pain is Necessary Mix: Dommin, Godsmack, 3 Days Grace, Metallica, Theatre of Tragedy, Shinedown, BVB, etc.
2. Blues Guitars & Grit: Joe Bonamassa, Beth Hart, Johnny Lang, Kenney Wayne Shepherd, Koko Taylor, Memphis Mille, Muddy Waters, BB King, John Lee Hooker, etc.
3. The Bogeyman Cometh (Opera's Bass/Baritones) Mix: Bryn Terfel, Thomas Hampson, Rene Pepe, Sam Ramey, and more.
4. Women Have Had Enough Of Your Shit Mix: Halestorm, Dorothy, Heart, Joan Jett, In This Moment, Gin Wigmore, ZZ Ward, The Pretty Reckless, Aretha, Ella, Janis, Tina, Stevie, etc.
5. We're All 12 with Dirty Minds (Classic Rock): Meat Loaf, Aerosmith, Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, AC/DC, Alice Cooper, Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Van Halen, etc.