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30 questions fic meme, day 25: the food of love
25 – Music – Do you listen to music while you write? Do you make playlists to get into a certain "mood" to write your fic? Do you need noise in general? Or do you need it completely quiet?
I listen to music constantly, except when I'm at work (libraries are just so restrictive). Can't put the car into drive until my iPod is hooked up; iTunes is the first program I start up on my laptop; iPod dock on volume setting 05 (15 is the AC is on, it's really loud) while I sleep.
So, yes, I listen to music while I write, because I am always listening to music. By the same token I spend a lot of time not really listening to music or, since this is all via my iPod, listening to music I have heard a thousand times before and no longer get particularly distracted by.
I want to say that I'm sort of oblivious to mood in music, but I don't think that's quite accurate--I mean, I never noticed, say, the anger in Fall Out Boy songs, but, come on, does Patrick sound angry? No. Nor evil. Possibly into cats. But I can tell that John Darnielle is cheering up over time, and that The National are not. Anyway--what I really mean is that my mood is rarely really influenced by the mood of songs I listen to, even in those instances where I notice the mood.
I do have playlists for stories or series I am working on long-term, just as a way of creating a useful density of songs that all make me go "Hey, this is a song about Brad and Nate!" or "Aral and Cordelia!" or whatever, because listening to those songs tends to make me want to write about those characters, and I can use whatever help I can get in guiding my brain back to what it's supposed to be focused on at any given moment. That said, I tend to use the playlists mostly to collect all the songs I think are about those characters (also, possibly in a fugue state because I really don't remember doing this, most of the songs with "love" in the title have ended up in the playlist for the Aral/Jole series). I am pretty bad about demarcating "time for writing" from all the other time I spend on my laptop, so odds are pretty good that when I'm writing I'm listening to the Radio Me playlist, which is thirty hours of music on no theme at all.
As a vaguely related music-and-writing note--I get a lot of my titles from song lyrics, and continue listening to the songs afterward with no particular mental shift. The one exception is Rilo Kiley's "More Adventurous", where every time she gets to the line get loved, make more, try to stay alive it's like I've been listening to something in a foreign language and it suddenly drops into English. There's a sudden hey, she's singing my story title! moment every time I listen to the song.
I listen to music constantly, except when I'm at work (libraries are just so restrictive). Can't put the car into drive until my iPod is hooked up; iTunes is the first program I start up on my laptop; iPod dock on volume setting 05 (15 is the AC is on, it's really loud) while I sleep.
So, yes, I listen to music while I write, because I am always listening to music. By the same token I spend a lot of time not really listening to music or, since this is all via my iPod, listening to music I have heard a thousand times before and no longer get particularly distracted by.
I want to say that I'm sort of oblivious to mood in music, but I don't think that's quite accurate--I mean, I never noticed, say, the anger in Fall Out Boy songs, but, come on, does Patrick sound angry? No. Nor evil. Possibly into cats. But I can tell that John Darnielle is cheering up over time, and that The National are not. Anyway--what I really mean is that my mood is rarely really influenced by the mood of songs I listen to, even in those instances where I notice the mood.
I do have playlists for stories or series I am working on long-term, just as a way of creating a useful density of songs that all make me go "Hey, this is a song about Brad and Nate!" or "Aral and Cordelia!" or whatever, because listening to those songs tends to make me want to write about those characters, and I can use whatever help I can get in guiding my brain back to what it's supposed to be focused on at any given moment. That said, I tend to use the playlists mostly to collect all the songs I think are about those characters (also, possibly in a fugue state because I really don't remember doing this, most of the songs with "love" in the title have ended up in the playlist for the Aral/Jole series). I am pretty bad about demarcating "time for writing" from all the other time I spend on my laptop, so odds are pretty good that when I'm writing I'm listening to the Radio Me playlist, which is thirty hours of music on no theme at all.
As a vaguely related music-and-writing note--I get a lot of my titles from song lyrics, and continue listening to the songs afterward with no particular mental shift. The one exception is Rilo Kiley's "More Adventurous", where every time she gets to the line get loved, make more, try to stay alive it's like I've been listening to something in a foreign language and it suddenly drops into English. There's a sudden hey, she's singing my story title! moment every time I listen to the song.
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Reading that while taking a drink is not a good idea. Especially when person reading used to be in bandom and knows what you're talking about.
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