"Seven, I said. I prefer it to hello; it breaks the ice."
Item One: It had been my goal, on and off for the decade or so, to locate a full copy of the "The Story of BJ and Rachel" set that Moxy Früvous played way back in 1998. I'd found a partial copy on Napster back in the day, and I loved it to death. The gist of it is that Moxy Früvous arranged their songs into a rough plot line and wrote ridiculous narration around it. I finally managed to find it on an old show-trading forum a couple of weeks ago, and finally got around to listening to it tonight. It's full of dated jokes and ironically-awkward storytelling and wordplay and it is embarrassingly obvious how much it influenced my early writing. I'm actually more embarrassed at how many of the jokes I didn't get back in high school. (This is also the concert that taught me the word "proselytize.")
Which actually makes a good set-up for Item Two, which was going to be the point of tonight's post:
Item Two: I just dropped my sign-up for bigbang_mixup because I wanted to write original fiction and all the listenable mixes with an original fic option were snapped up too quickly for me. (I am a horrible, horrible hipster.) So! I was thinking it might be fun to do something similar and just outsource it to you guys. One of the things I wished the mixers had done was give a rough plot outline or nudge the writer in the direction of some characters from the songs. My idea goes something like this:
Once upon a time, apple_pathways and I had a game we called "Surprise Music Battle!" and I kind of killed it by requesting that we come up with mixes that told a story, which turned out to be too time-consuming and complicated. In an attempt to undo my curse, this shall be "Battle me with Surprise Music!" in which you give me a song you think would be fun written into a story somehow (whether it's diegetic or thematic or character-driven or... whatever) and I will do my best to tie all the suggestions together into something coherent (hopefully plot-wise, but I'll settle for theme if you guys really try to kill me.) I'll post it in a couple of weeks, between when I die trying to write my Yuletide fic and I when I die trying to write my Ladystuck fic.
Which actually makes a good set-up for Item Two, which was going to be the point of tonight's post:
Item Two: I just dropped my sign-up for bigbang_mixup because I wanted to write original fiction and all the listenable mixes with an original fic option were snapped up too quickly for me. (I am a horrible, horrible hipster.) So! I was thinking it might be fun to do something similar and just outsource it to you guys. One of the things I wished the mixers had done was give a rough plot outline or nudge the writer in the direction of some characters from the songs. My idea goes something like this:
Once upon a time, apple_pathways and I had a game we called "Surprise Music Battle!" and I kind of killed it by requesting that we come up with mixes that told a story, which turned out to be too time-consuming and complicated. In an attempt to undo my curse, this shall be "Battle me with Surprise Music!" in which you give me a song you think would be fun written into a story somehow (whether it's diegetic or thematic or character-driven or... whatever) and I will do my best to tie all the suggestions together into something coherent (hopefully plot-wise, but I'll settle for theme if you guys really try to kill me.) I'll post it in a couple of weeks, between when I die trying to write my Yuletide fic and I when I die trying to write my Ladystuck fic.