Scores for Scriveners: Fantasy Grab-bag

Just looking at the image on the left there brings me back to my early teens, reading Robert E. Howard (whose birthday is today), and getting into Dungeons & Dragons. Back during those days, I (along with pretty much every D&D kid) tried my hand at writing fantasy. There were swords and dragons and monsters and it was all super cool — until I brought a copy to school, and a friend I’d given it to let somebody else see it, and I was mortified.

Maybe that’s why I’ve never written any more fiction in the fantasy or swords-and-sorcery genres? Who knows — that’s probably for a therapist to decide.

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Scores For Scriveners: Three Kingdoms

One of the things that people have said they’d enjoy reading from me is more about music. For a very long time, I ran a regular feature on this blog, which I called Friday Music — I shared stuff that I’d been listening to recently. I may do so again, but I thought it might be interesting to also devote some time to cover the sort of music that I listen to far more than anything else: Soundtracks.

When I write, it is accompanied by scores. Usually (although not exclusively) instrumental, and taken from film, television, video games, what-have-you. I have a frankly ridiculous library to select from, and I almost always begin a project by creating a playlist, designed to evoke the “feel” of what I’m trying to write. These playlists grow as I find new, evocative material, until they are many hours and, in some cases, days long.

Yeah. I might have a problem.

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Bloggity-Blog

Last year, Warren Ellis began waxing nostalgic on a return to the long-form writing of blogging. He describes them as the “scattered archipelago of the Isles of Blogging.” He’s turned that into a post category, in which he recommends blogs he’s reading (category linked in the phrase above).

This morning, my friend Chuck Wendig posted in defense of blogging, saying that it’s better for our attention spans, for nuance and complexity, and, frankly, because it’s better to own our own online presence.

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