The music in my mind

I've always found it difficult to write without a soundtrack. Sometimes it's just a general mix of music playing to keep the silence at bay, but other times, there's specific music that I tend to listen to that gets me in the mood to work on a particular piece, or even a particular type of scene.

Oddly, the tougher a type of scene is for me, the less likely I am to find an appropriate type of music to help me with it. For instance, there's nothing I can really do when it comes to a romance-type scene other than push through it and hope to goodness there's music that speaks to the characters for me. Because it's not something I care much for, I guess I just don't have much in the way of music that matches.

On the other end of the balance - I have a TON of music I can use for action scenes. I've actually set up, over the years, at least four different playlists for such scenes, with a collection of slightly different music in each to match different flavors of action.

Right now, the two pieces I'm working on have associated bands, with the sci-fi story being largely written to the sounds of Union Underground, while Florence + The Machine currently soundtracks Blessed. It's not precisely right, but it's close enough for something which is largely a rewrite at this point.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this, but sometime I think part of the fun of starting something new is to come up with the songs that match it's tone and characters. :)

Somewhat related, I'm always torn between amused and irritated when I realize I've taken something in part from another source. Like, the large market setting appears in a number of different stories, and a planet-size market is not unheard of either, but I realized last night that the one I wrote into my sci-fi story last week was probably unconsciously patterned on Deva, from the MYTH Inc. books. The genesis is different and the feel of the place is different. Even the tone of the story is different. But it's like... its like whenever I read about a huge marketplace, my head sort of patterned it after Deva, so it was no surprise that when I made my own it did likewise.

Progress - Untitled sci-fi (53,523) ; Blessed (20,869) .