What An Amazing February! More music & updates!

What a month! The shortest month is always full of so many events I can hardly keep up. First was the Day of the Groundhog (not the horror film), in which I simultaneously began the process of moving to a new 'writing studio' (at which I shall also eat, wash, sleep, and collect mail). Next came my child's birthday, which is no longer a big deal now that she's well into adulthood. Then, be still my quickly  anticipating heart, the Kansas City Chiefs, my hometown team since I was a little boy (I watched Super Bowl I live on TV), played in and won the Super Bowl, which was their second in a row and third victory in four visits in five years, an incredible feat! That after a 50-year absence from the final contest. 

Then their celebratory parade which followed was forever marred by tragedy when two youths who should never have had handguns decided to settle their personal dispute in a crowded place. The month continued with more moving (great exercise, all this lifting of heavy boxes of heavy books) and more writing/revising/ editing on the latest works-in-progress (more below). Lastly, comes my annual visit to doctors and receptionists to prove I am still, for now, alive.

Nothing I write next can possibly beat the month I've had so far.

In my previous blog post I spoke of how music had inspired me. In fact, I have used music to inspire my writing far more than any writing has inspired my music. As a music student I looked for texts I could set to music but did not apply them to many songs. My own music tended to be purely instrumental, although I did manage a fair setting of *Coleridge's long poem "Kubla Khan", using four singers, a woodwind quintet, piano, and a gong. Another text setting of a poem eventually lost its text when I couldn't find a singer but did find a violinist willing to play it (with piano accompaniment) for my senior composition recital.

It may be no secret that I listen to music constantly while writing and revising - anytime I'm working on a novel. I choose music which fits the story, often that which fits a particular scene, and play it over and over as I see the story in my mind and try my best to describe what happens. I've never really paused to think about how that works. It's both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing to be able to see a story unfold like a movie playing in my head. It's a curse when I can't shut it off to sleep or do other things I need to do.

In my more recent novels I've included lists of the music I listened to while writing the novel, believing that readers may also enjoy it. I suppose my music listening began with my first published book, AFTER ILIUM (2012). Began, I mean, in the sense of selecting particular music to aid my writing. For After Ilium, which is the sordid tale of a young college graduate who meets an older woman on a tour of the ruins of Troy (also known as Ilium), I listened to the CD of Secret Garden's Songs from a Secret Garden (1996), which to me provided the ideal soundtrack if the story were to be made into a movie. The sweeping, often soaring melodies, and intimate, vaguely exotic harmonies fit the setting of the story perfectly.

Another example is my MFA thesis-turned-complicated novel A BEAUTIFUL CHILL (2014). This story, what I deem an anti-romance, involves the up-and-down relationship between the new professor on campus and a self-absorbed art student. She is from Iceland, so I immediately listened to Icelandic music, or music which could be Icelandic in feeling. Yes, Bjork. Yes, Sigur Ros. But other music as well, like Miriam Stockley's album Miriam (1999), which features evocative music that put me right there in the scenes of ancient Iceland (part of the subplot). And music from other Scandinavian musicians which created the spiritual space for me to create in.

For a science fiction novel (actually a trilogy) like THE DREAM LAND, which is partly set on another world via an interdimensional portal, I struggled to find the right music. In fact, I struggled finding the best way to start the story which had boiled in me for years. It wasn't until I happened to purchase a cassette of Enya's album The Celts (1987) that I could proceed. The music was for a documentary about the Celts, but for me, well, I saw the mighty Zetin warriors on the wild moors of Tebbicousimankale in what would be the opening scene. Other music I came across which might not have seemed to fit, actually did. I found that film music works especially well: no lyrics to get into my head and all the drama I need for the scene. Video game music also works the same way. The soundtrack for Silent Running (a 1972 film about a lone gardener on a spacecraft) composed by Peter Schickele was a major influence on the writing of the first novel. I did see the movie but it was many years prior to me rediscovering the music and using it to inspire my writing. Also, the music of The Moody Blues, especially the albums Seventh Sojourn (1972) and Octave (1978), provided several cultural references (e.g., interdimensional travel, etc.) which I used to support two teen nerds becoming rulers on another planet.

You get the idea. The music is not simply a lovely background for my hobby but a key that unlocks and opens the mind. For me, it is necessary and I can rarely write new material without the right music. Yes, when I'm far enough along in a new manuscript I may write without listening to music if I have to; probably the music, having heard it previously, remains in my head. To this end, I maintain a large library of CDs and digital (MP3) tracks in every style, genre, mood, and instrumentation. I recently, in my moving, carried five boxes of CDs from one place to the next. I have as much more music thankfully on portable hard drives, flash drives, and on my computer itself. I will never run out and continually add more.

UPDATE

I finished my pandemic/family saga trilogy FLU SEASON (click for the series page) and immediately started in on a fourth book, which I dub a sequel to the trilogy. 

FLU SEASON 4: THE BOOK OF DAD is complete and undergoing revision at the moment. I expect it to be available by summer. Revision was delayed because I immediately began a fifth book in the series, following the grown daughter of the Book 4 protagonist. It is about half-way at present. I know how it will end but I set it aside to revise Book 4 and get it ready for publication. I look for Book 5 to be available in December 2024. 

Will there be more books in this series? I don't know. If a compelling plot presents itself I may pursue it. Otherwise, I try to end every book as though the reader could stop there and be satisfied. But we shall see.

*See the error on the score? Samuel Coleridge Taylor is a music composer; Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the famous poet.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2024 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

On The Road Again

My Summer Road Trip, part 1

So there I was: eating a rather inauthentic burrito in a no-star Mexican restaurant on the north side of Independence, Missouri. I sat at the south end of a long table, the other end bedecked with a tall birthday cake while various relations whooped and hollered in celebration of one of my cousins' birthday. Suddenly, between bites, I had an epiphany: I could just leave, could get up and leave the table, go out and drive far away and never return. I had my bag packed; I always keep a packed bag with me in case of errant interdimensional tangents opening up. I wasn't expecting any, however; indeed it had been years since the possibility last occurred. 

Actually, I had been planning a road trip ever since the issues of 2020-2022 made the idea disheartening and possibly inconvenient (running out of gas, quarantine checkpoints, etc., yes, the stuff of my FLU SEASON trilogy). Now I was ready to go again. As planned, my route would take me eventually northwest to Montana. I planned to stop at specific scenic locations along the way which I'd never been to in all of my youthful travels.

As my general direction sent me northeast to Kansas City to start my travel, I found myself pushed into a birthday party not of my choosing. Enduring that brief detour, I left my hometown and continued north into Iowa on a bright, sunny Sunday morning. A surprisingly unassuming bit of pasture I hadn't passed through since 2019 when I went to Canada spread out from the pavement as I rolled along. As I drove, I listened to the soundtrack I'd put together for my pandemic trilogy and little by little managed to plot out the next book.

For that 2019 trip, I had it stuck in my head to replicate the travels of my youth when my teacher-vacation parents drove me here and there at their whim while I remained ensconced in the backseat sans seatbelt. I went as far north/northwest as Edmonton before venturing south to slink back into the comforts of Montana, and onward home. In my childhood and youth, we had gone all the way to Alaska.

Not this trip, however. No, the Great White North was not my destination. I had nobody to buy me lunch there. Instead, I would travel to nearer places of childhood significance as well as revisit some places that had glittered with roughshod joy on that 2019 trip. So I began with a deliberate stop in Iowa. Because it is there.

You wouldn't know it to look at me but I once flew from Kansas City, before the vast new airport was built in the countryside far to the north of the city, all the way, non-stop, to Cedar Falls, across the river from Waterloo, in that so-called Iowa. I think I must have been around 14. I know it was summer and I was allowed to fly by myself (there were a few other passengers) on an Ozark Airlines turboprop (no longer in business). 

My purpose there in Cedar Falls was to help my great-aunt (little sister of my grandmother) and my great-grandmother (their mother) build a "dog run" in the small backyard of the house. In exchange for my help, I would be fed and perhaps get a gift later (it was a model airplane kit). My great-aunt raised poodles for show, so being a boy who liked dogs but did not have his own, I also liked that aspect. I got to play with dogs. Back home, our landlord didn't allow dogs. 

I also flew up there in March of my final college year, all coursework having been completed the previous December and awaiting the May graduation ceremony. The purpose then was for me to consider continuing in my field of study at the University of Northern Iowa, where my great-aunt had been a professor (but at that time recently retired). I consulted with a Music professor there about my musical future. The lingering snowy landscape did not impress me, however. In hindsight, I should have given it a go because you never know where you might go if you don't go, you know? So it goes.

I found the house from my youth after a day's drive, long since occupied by other people, and was pleased it looked as quaint and charming as it did during my previous visits. There was no longer the "dog run" I had helped build, yet to my mind everything else remained the same. It had been 40+ years since I had been there, after all. Yet I felt nothing. No nostalgia. This is a phenomena I've noticed when seeing other places from my childhood: my mind knows it is the same place but the emotions I expect to flood me instead evade me. (Same with seeing my cousins after many years' apart.) As I drove the neighborhood, I recognized other places from my two visits. Creepy.

On that first visit at 14, I recall spending my evening hours in the house's cute little attic, which my great-aunt had filled with bookshelves. There was a small desk up there and once I climbed up, I could hide away. While hiding away, I would peruse the books on the shelves or, more typically, sit and type on a story using my great-aunt's manual typewriter. It was one of my first long-form pieces, a rip-off of Dr. Zhivago, which I eventually turned in for a class assignment. The teacher was amazed by my 105-page double-spaced epic. However, my great-aunt constantly urged me to stop typing and get to bed, to stop the racket she was not used to - though she was happy to let the dogs bark!

Finding nothing suitable for overnight accommodations, I drove back across the state and did not find anything that had changed during the day. At the west side, I was close to my next visitation destination, the site of a week which shall live in infamy! I would get my revenge by driving there, parking, and taking a photograph of myself standing there (to prove I was there) and that would put them all to shame! They would feel sorry they hadn't embraced me into their family but sent me home like a sewer-soiled puppy.

NEXT: "Waldorf Hell Week"  and Devil's Gulch!

THEN: The Long Trek West!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

That Super Bowl

It's been only a week and still seems like a dream. Being older, I can handle dreams better now. It's been such a long time coming that for many of us in Chiefs Kingdom it still doesn't seem quite real: winning Super Bowl 54 (a.k.a. LIV) much less even getting there in the 2019 season.

For me, it brings back distant memories. Super Bowl I, back when everyone still used Roman numerals, between Kansas City and the Green Bay Packers was the only title game broadcast by two TV stations, one for the AFL and one for the NFL. Packers won 35-10 that day. But it was game on for the new AFL!

I was a little boy who played football with other boys in the neighborhood. Often I would go through the streets and backyards gathering a few boys so I could be the star quarterback to their receivers and halfbacks. If we found enough boys we could have a pick-up game in an abandoned field.

But on that day, I entered the living room and saw a football game on our black-and-white TV with the three channels available by rabbit ears. "What's that?" I asked my parents, sitting on the couch. My father turned and said, "They call it the Super Bowl." I asked who was playing and when I heard it was our team (we lived in Kansas City then), I learned my city had its own football team, the Chiefs. I was a fan from that day forward.

I missed Super Bowl II due to playing football with boys in the neighborhood, but I watched all the others. Well, except for one in the eighties because I didn't care who won so I offered to cover the shift of a coworker. But the others I watched, whether to cheer for a team or shout curses at a team hoping they would lose. Like with many Americans, it became a mid-winter ritual.

As a boy who loved playing football, I was such a fan that I went to training camp at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri just to get autographs. Trudging up from the field to the locker room at the end of a long day was Len Dawson (QB and Super Bowl IV MVP). I shyly stepped forward and asked for his autograph and he did not hesitate a bit to sign the notebook I had. Thank you!

Now, after many generations of players and coaches, some coming close and others far from it, the latest incarnation of the Kansas City Chiefs have returned to the big game and claimed the crown in dramatic fashion. There are plenty of written accounts and video highlights elsewhere if you wish to indulge in descriptions of the game. Following the protocol I had developed during the season, I avoided guacamole during the game - but chips and queso were permitted. I wore my gray sweatpants and a red t-shirt (alas, not a Chiefs shirt but still red) - the same outfit I wore when they won the game that started their winning streak culminating in the Super Bowl.

We have suffered through many bad seasons and, perhaps worse, the winning seasons that ended too soon or in unbelievable fashion (I'm looking at you 2018). But now it's happened. It's finally happened. If your team is regularly in the playoffs and if your team has been in a Super Bowl in recent years, you don't know the feeling of this moment. I even splurged on souvenir championship shirts and a cap - which I will likely never wear, keeping it clean and safe for another generation.

Congratulations, Kansas City Chiefs!

I always knew you would get there!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2020 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.