I have several ideas for stories which involve musicians or music scenes, and thought maybe I could do the same thing I did with my dark fantasy stories and mash em up into one very complicated story. Did I share anything from that effort? Don’t think I did. Anyway, none of my other places for conceptual work are appealing to me at the moment (discord, sketchbooks, google docs), so I’m gonna do this live.
Side note, I’ve heard concepting used in this context before often enough, but caught myself wondering “why not conceiving?” Seems like it’s jargon shared by businesses and creative fields, more like brainstorming concepts to develop an idea, as distinct from conception/conceiving when you get the idea in the first place? Good enough.
Spoiler Alert: If anything comes of this idea or the ideas that it is comprised of, well, you might lose some enjoyment from revelations necessary to my thought process below. Or maybe you’ll forget anything you read by the time it comes available.
__Elements
- Electropocalypse: A novel (my husband finished a first draft, languishing in the first draft pile) that I’d like to use for its setting. Alternate version of the real world, but with all government and business being more extreme and cutthroat. Pushes the limits of “double mumbo jumbo” by including janky cybernetics inspired by old IBM and Videodrome, alongside psychic powers and demon summoning.
- Keep Austin Weird: One of my Spooktober ideas, about a gay Romeo and Juliet whose respective “families” are music/drug cliques.
- Danny Elfman and Beck: Two musicians who are genuinely creative and artistic, but whose careers were no doubt helped a lot by connection to $cientologie. Having that background in something like a creative industry mafia, maybe they had access to resources that helped fuel their creativity? Could they have taken advantage of others? Did they use the musical equivalent of uncredited ghost writing? No accusations, but it’s something that could fuel an interesting subplot, with all parts of the narrative fictionalized to avoid lawsuits. May use “The Illumination Center” from my Spooktober idea Kill the Lights.
- Back Mask: Another Spooktober idea, about a succubus figure infiltrating a record studio and causing a small music scene to blow up, disastrously.
- The Meat Puppets and Nirvana: There’s the real deal, musician types with destructive habits and dubious ethics, and there’s the somewhat less talented guy who feels tormented by the idea he’s a poser, by inadequacy. I also think of the Butthole Surfers. I get the impression those are horrible people to know, like, they’d talk you into huffing gas out of a drowned bat and drive you to a donkey show in cartel country. Or is that all image? Also makes me think of a guy I personally used to know who was a unique character, but saddled with a considerable death urge.
- Untitled Asexual Musician Story: Had an idea for a story about a young lady with unspecified disorders who gets brought into a punk/alternative band in the ’80s where her strange affect and interests garner attention. But everybody wants to do her and she doesn’t wanna be done. Feeling hemmed in by unwanted suitors, she waxes suicidal, but is saved by a vision of Karen Carpenter.
- The Question of Substance, We Must Kill the Jaguar Pope, Black Brass, Heavy Metal Thunder, Rock to Death, Poppies Will Make Us Sleep, The Choking Game, I’m Your Turbo Lover: More story ideas from Spooktober about drug culture, demons, and/or music. Might incorporate some or all of them. Maybe The Edge of Gone too.
__Initial Thoughts
- Another World. A number of those ideas relate to a separate reality that is reached at the cost of losing your identity or your life. The place where you meet Jesus or Karen Carpenter or Glasya-Labolas the Architect of Manslaughter. I should decide on a “true nature” of it, even if I never include an explanation in-story. Like I did with the angel business in Foothill Project.
- Searching for Satori. Making art can be like caging lightning. Any story about music is about making art. The other world here is obvious as metaphor for this thing, for the achievement, for whatever the best music is hinting at, prying open in us. What if there’s nothing there, or the thing you find is evil?
- The Outer Darkness. D&D used that for the place where Lovecraft-knockoff shit comes from. I sorta remember Billy Zane’s explanation of demons in Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight. He said they existed before god made the world and humans, and offended by this light, they seek to destroy it.
__The Stories
- Eruptions. Some of the stories take the form of a supernatural phenomenon corrupting or killing victims in some kind of outbreak, like a disease, before they reach whatever climax and fade away. Uzumaki-style, this could be structured like variations on a theme, each being a story to itself. Eruption stories include Back Mask, The Question of Substance, Heavy Metal Thunder, Poppies Will Make Us Sleep, arguably others as well.
- Monsters. Some stories have a monster. Back Mask, Black Brass, Turbo Lover, maybe others. A monster should be inhuman, should be an agent of the other side. Some people become monsters, like the Jaguar Pope and the guitarist in Rock to Death.
- Lotus Eaters. Often closely related to Eruptions, drug/vice fads. Heavy Metal Thunder, Poppies Will Make Us Sleep, The Choking Game, Jaguar Pope.
- Bad Love. Turbo Lover, Edge of Gone, Keep Austin Weird, Rock to Death. I had an idea for an interlude in KAW inspired by some shit from my father’s drug culture stories. The characters are invited to Mexico City by a rich kid that likes slumming with druggies. They don’t know he’s rich and it’s a visit to his family, who are shocked and annoyed at him and his friends. Their friend is a dangerous creep and murders his family while they are there. They escape getting interrogated by cops and escape the country. Made accessories? I dunno.
That’s all for the moment, may add edits.
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this is crying out to have links edited into it, but i don’t have time tonight. gnite!
Have you ever seen this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_the_Paradise
?
You can if you want, but I don’t really think you need to. What needs to be known is the effects and the known limitations (which could even be relaxed in subsequent stories). As a reader I’d say a lot of writers, particularly of the horror/occult genres, don’t really have an explanation of the “true nature” of whatever phenomena is interacting with their protagonist. I mean a “true nature” beyond Deeemons!!! or some such limited explanation.
I’ll admit that there are a couple of advantages and pitfalls with not defining the “true nature” of some supernatural event. The advantage is that you are not required to stay within the boundaries because you haven’t set them. If, for example, in the first story the phenomenon is a non-physical voice in a person’s head, the next story could be non-physical visons other people can see at the same time. If you say the “true nature” of your McGuffin is creepy because it is limited to sending a voice into someone’s head then you may be barred from the follow-up unless you create a new cause.
As a lengthy aside, an extra-dimensional being who slowly grows in power over a series of short stories (otherwise unconnected until the climax which brings a lot of the characters from the other stories together) would be a pretty good structure for a book. In the first story the creature can only project it’s voice into a single mind, but as the series progresses it learns how to manipulate the visual cortex, or even the tactile senses, making people believe they see and even feel things which are not there. Maybe smell and taste are harder for the creature to feign, so that’s the clue the affected people need to figure out that they are being manipulated (those who do figure it out). As the creature gains skill, it starts to be able to interact with multiple minds at one time. Another tell that the creature is around would be that people who are blind or deaf start to see or hear. Wouldn’t that freak some people out.
The downside with not defining the “true nature” of a phenomenon is that it does become easier for the writer to expand the boundaries to the point where the first story, with the original limitations, just doesn’t make sense any longer. Later in the series we learn that the phenomenon can shunt someone into an alternative dimension for a few hours, then release them 40 miles away on a deserted road. Which would have been a very handy think for it to do during the first story written about it. Think about how across the
Harry Potterseries*, things which were incredibly rare in the first book (An invisibility cloak, those are super rare.) become commonplace by the end of the series (Podmore borrowed Moody’s spare invisibility cloak). Yes, you can justify it, but you shouldn’t need to. Either these things are rare, or they are commonplace. They shouldn’t go from rare to commonplace in 6 years without some explanation (manufacturing shift, technology advance, something like that).Many, many series fall into this trap. I haven’t checked in decades, but there used to be a thread on USENET about how Star Trek solutions from one episode would have completely negated the plot on a subsequent episode. I’ve noticed it in Pern, Amber, Dune, and it’s one of the main reasons I had problems with the Dresden Files. Butcher is a pretty good writer, but it felt like the same story again and again (with the style adroitly called out in “Galaxy Quest” with the line, “I see you lost your shirt again.”), but the later books introduced characters, creatures, and items which Harry is supposed to have some prior knowledge of, but would have been incredibly helpful in earlier books.
Now that I’ve had my say, I’ll leave with a final comment.
My opinion really doesn’t matter. There are best selling series which do exactly what I complain about. Which shows that most readers either don’t notice or don’t care. If you want to define the “true nature” or not, that is up to you. My only point is that you really don’t have to do so, successful writers have gone both ways.
You do you.
*censored by beeb cuz personally i dunt wanna see references to this stuff, but left legible enough for thems what wanna read the complete thought.
chigau – i have not yet, tho i’ve seen hints of its existence sometimes. am i ripping it off?
flex – i would never want to end up like the x-files or other tv shows that fell to pieces from lack of a plan. it’s cool to me when there’s a sense of some coherent truth behind the mysteries you might never 100% get, less cool when it feels like it’s invented on the fly.