FPS – Soundtrack
One of the first things I do when I start writing is put some inspirational music on loop.
This music isn’t always in a style you would associate with the subject matter. I wrote The Incubus Gambit largely to the soundtrack from the video game series “Halo.” I didn’t play much Halo, but I like the music, and it helped summon a picture of the bucolic naturalist colony “Tarnkappe”.
My taste in music ranges from whatever strikes me at the moment to whatever strokes me at the moment with a side of “They Might be Giants.” (No, seriously. Not just Istanbul, but Mammal and The Statue Got Me High.) I have play lists the include Tchaikovsky, Eminem, Mila Jovovich, The Beatles, Dropkick Murphys, Indigo Girls, Jonathon Coulton, Linkin Park, Imagine Dragons, and Meghan Trainor… I’d go on but I have a 500 word limit on these kinds of things.
A bare and honest truth… music rips me apart.
There’s no telling what might happen when I put on a song. I can’t listen to U2’s Beautiful Day without being transported back to Autumn of 2001 and all the anger I had at the world. Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop the Feeling makes me happier than Peter Griffin covering Pharrell. I sob to Malukah’s haunting voice, but I can’t stop listening to her. The theme from Guild Wars (a game I’ve never even loaded) puts me in a desperate place trying to survive long enough to see the dawn, pushing forward with nothing but faith that the ground will meet my feet, or blasting away at endless throngs of Orky battlemeks until another chapter of Legiones Astartes can arrive – yeah more than one story has this kind of scene (and not necessarily these examples because my 40k army is Orks).
Inspirational music is not something I can look for. I have to find it in the place it brings me to.
As the logo implies, this rambling thought is about Flying Pirate Ships! So here’s an early share about this series: I can’t not think of the pirate ship Britannia when I hear the Silverbird themes in Two Steps from Hell’s album “Battlecry.”