The Decemberists are my obsession du jour, and fortunately one that my husband does not find unspeakably annoying (unlike, say, Joanna Newsom). I’ve been inhabiting their world for several months now; as I often do with musical obsessions, buying as many albums at once as I can find, and putting them all on random rotation.
Why mention it? Because, like Kate Bush and Tori Amos, the Decemberists have become essential to this particular phase of my work, in some inarticulate way. I must have them. I think they’re eminently suitable music for any fantasy writer, in fact.
I’m not likely to forget it, but I note it here because I like to chart these things; at some time in the future I’ll look back on this period and want to recapture a mood or a thought, and I’ll have the musical key ready.
And now for the sleepwalking portion of the post; it is related to writing only tangentially, because when I woke up, I found myself at my computer.
Fortunately, I had not actually messed with anything much; I’d apparently read an email from the Viable Paradise group, and that was all. I am now going to back up everything, everything, yet again, because the idea that I might wander down and accidentally delete something makes me very, very anxious.
I don’t have much of a history of sleepwalking; I have had night terrors before, but not often; and this was the first time I had both.
I suppose it’s well timed, since I am about to write a chapter in the Not-a-Werewolf Book in which the protagonist experiences night terrors of her own, and now I have fresh memories of it–in case the ones from a few years ago had gone stale, or something. Sigh. Occasionally the suffering-for-one’s-art thing becomes a bit literal.
I wonder how your husband would feel about the Decemberists' cover of Newsom's "Bridges and Balloons."
That sounds amazing! I must immediately find it. Thanks for the heads up!