100 Sentences About Musa Hawthorne
Characterization exercise for a writing project I've been working on that I'm currently calling Destructive Harmonics. It's a slice of life series about a very famous, very quirky all woman metal band who live in a Gothic Revival mansion that doesn't always obey the laws of geometry and have a manager who's the daughter of an unsuccessful supervillain and knows martial arts. I actually designed D&D-style fantasy versions of these guys before they were a rock band, and some of their quirks are the results of traits of the originals crossing over.
Also, for this one in particular: Laugh of the Medusa was a Seattle-based "angry girl" alternative rock group active in the mid to late 1990s (when Musa was in her late teens through early twenties). The lineup consisted of Musa (lead vocals, guitar), Yuri (bass), Lotus (guitar), and Sage (drums).
Maenad got its start in the mid-aughts. Membership consists of Valerian (lead vocals), Lilja (lead guitar), Yanang (rhythm guitar), Musa (drums), and Violet (bass).
Venus Envy is a Canadian all-woman punk band active in the late 1980s and 1990s that I made up for an earlier project. They consist of Kate, Dani, Billie, and Zandra.
Warnings: lots of drug/alcohol references, a bit of cursing, and one instance of racist and misogynist language.
For someone who's smoked as long as she has, Musa has a pretty well preserved sense of smell. Musa enjoys making perfume more than she does actually wearing it - there's just something so fabulously alchemical about mixing all the essential oils and things together. Nineties girl-rock makes her feel nostalgic. Not counting their manager, Musa's the only member of Maenad with a college degree. She went to university in the late nineties, after Laugh of the Medusa broke up and she was feeling in need of a lifestyle change.
Back in the nineties, a bored music journalist manufactured a feud between Musa and Courtney Love that was equally surprising to both of them. She gave herself mild hypothermia performing at outdoor concerts on more than one occasion - sure, it doesn't usually get terribly cold in Seattle, but 52 degrees Fahrenheit and drizzling is not the sort of weather in which you want to run around in fishnets and a nylon slip for three hours. Musa claims to have understood the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Metal Gear Solid 2 is her favorite video game. Roger is actually one of a succession of pet rats named after famous drummers.
Someone once told Musa that she'd be able to find beer in Mecca - not that it's likely she'd ever have to, given that Musa's solitary Kemetic and all. Musa gets cold rather easily, especially when she's sober. Her hair's been "natural" for her entire adult life, although she did bleach it blonde during her Laugh of the Medusa days. Although Musa doesn't think Erica's stupid - writing a best-selling trashy novel without a ghostwriter requires a certain ability to keep it together - she doesn't think she'll ever understand her sister's brand of logic. House of Leaves is her favorite work of "serious" fiction. She tried to teach herself to play the theremin for a song she wanted to do with Medusa, but the band broke up before she got very far.
As far as Musa knows, she's not related to the author of The Scarlet Letter. There's been controversy among fans and journalists over what color her eyes actually are - they're dark hazel. In the six months surrounding Medusa's breakup, Musa was in the worst psychological shape of her life. Musa once punched a guy in the face for calling her a nappy-headed ho - not because she considered sex work and natural hair to be such terrible things, but because she resented the idea that assumptions about her sex life and the choice she made to live with the hair the gods gave her should be grounds to insult or dismiss her. She considers herself a feminist.
Musa's a bit of a Japanophile. Her interests in anime and manga developed more out of her interest in Japanese culture in general than the other way around. When she was very young - before she'd even moved to Seattle permanently - Musa got to see Mia Zapata perform. Very early in their career, Laugh of the Medusa opened for Venus Envy. Once, Musa and the other girls from Medusa took a bunch of herbal hallucinogens they'd acquired from Billie Jiang and tried to discover their spirit animals.
If Musa ever got magically transformed into a cat, one of the first things she'd do would be an attempt to find out if catnip is as much fun as it looks. Withnail and I always reminds her of Medusa's last months. When she was at university, Musa stopped bleaching her hair and started hennaing it. The majority of the recipes Musa knows how to make - at least the ones for things more elaborate than grilled cheese sandwiches or ramen - contain some sort of alcohol. She even puts a little mirin in her yakisoba.
Even if she is the oldest, Musa doesn't consider herself the team mom - "team cool aunt who's a bad influence" is more her style. Musa doesn't plan on ever having children - apart from the difficulties of combining motherhood with Maenad's incident-prone sort of rock stardom, she wouldn't be surprised if any baby that managed to survive nine months in her body came out with three arms and the ability to shoot lasers out its eyes, even if Musa spent the duration of the pregnancy sober. Her usual romantic pattern is: friendship + mutual attraction --> friends with benefits --> embarrassing epic crush that dare not speak its name. She doesn't do much conventional dating. While at university, she worked for a while as a student librarian.
The phrase "substance free" always makes her think of Gnosticism. Musa can read hieroglyphics. During the time between Medusa's breakup and the formation of Maenad, Musa joined a taiko group. "Women In Rock" books written before 2007 tend to depict Laugh of the Medusa as a bunch of young Hole wannabes if they mention the band at all, but the group's artistic importance has been reassessed in the wake of Maenad's success. She has the reputation of being a good listener - or at least, she tends to attract drunk or upset people who want to vent.
In operatic terms, Musa's a mezzo. She's worn glasses since she was nine. Maenad isn't the first band Musa played the drums in - just the best known by a wide margin. If you don't count Bellhaven Taiko, Musa first played the drums in the gothic progressive metal band Ontological Mystery, but the lineup that included her only lasted a few months before the frontman threw a fit and fired everyone. Her interest in Ancient Egypt dates back to elementary school.
If she had to choose, Musa would find vegetarianism easier than going low-carb. When Violet had just joined the band, Musa was the first of the other members the girl was on friendly terms with. She enjoys drinking tea, but it does absolutely nothing to keep her awake when consumed in normal quantities. One of the negative effects of Musa's high tolerance to pretty much everything is that it takes more caffeine than the FDA recommends an adult consume in a day just to get her moving in the morning. There is Musa/Amy Winehouse fanfiction online - Musa knows about it, but hasn't read any of it due to her (usually perfectly merited) distrust of any links Yanang sends her.
Musa knows more of Lilja's backstory than anybody in the band except maybe their manager, due to the guitarist's habit of choosing Musa as the preferred audience for her semiannual drunken emotional breakdowns. Much as her own family can drive her crazy, she still prefers them to what she knows of Lilja's. Once, Musa inadvertently got her hands on some pot laced with quite a bit of angel dust - it made her a bit on edge, but nothing dramatic happened. She once claimed to have sold her sense of shame for drug money at some point in the late nineties. Although she's still fairly lightly built compared to someone like Val, Musa has gained a noticeable amount of weight since her Laugh of the Medusa days - age plus fewer hard drugs and more real food will do that too a person.
Sometimes Musa wishes her sister wrote about anything but fictional celebrities who were not inspired by anyone living, honest, she swears. Most of the anime Musa watches would, in tvtropes jargon, be classified as Mind Screws or Widget Series. Moe fandom isn't really Musa's thing, but she knows enough about it to be the only member of Maenad not surprised by Violet's popularity among college-age Japanese males. Violet's attempts to fuss over her are, on the whole, at least as endearing as they are annoying, even if the last thing Musa wants to deal with when she's drunk off her ass is a chirpy little girl waving a big glass of water and a bottle of vitamins at her.
One of Musa's great-aunts was a chorus girl in an "all colored revue" in the forties. A large part of her fondness for elaborate cocktails comes from the fun of mixing them up. There have been online rumors of her death on two occasions, and a handful of claims that she was terminally ill. This gives Musa the most false reports of her premature demise of anybody in Maenad - but then, she is both the oldest and the most notoriously hard-living. She's the oldest member of Maenad, by five or six years, but she was the youngest in Laugh of the Medusa by about ten months.
She likes jewelery, but goes more for little arty pieces - particularly if they're Asian or Ancient Egyptian inspired - than big chunks of sparkle. Her non-alcoholic culinary repertoire comes from the time she spent doing the breakfast shift at a friend's macrobiotic cafe in Seattle before Medusa took off. Despite being a big old lush, she's willing to eat health food if it's seasoned up enough, especially if someone else cooks it. Moonflower, the hippie neighbor lady who babysat Musa through much of her childhood, was in some ways a stronger influence than Musa's own mother was. The koi were as much Musa's idea as Violet's.
Moonflower was Musa's first guitar teacher, which resulted in Musa learning a number of sixties rock and folk songs. If for some sadistic reason she had to choose, Musa would rather be sober the rest of her life than give up music, but she wouldn't be gracious about it. Musa can play the piano reasonably well. Switching from vocals to drums was, in part, a mental health thing - when she's in certain kinds of bad moods, singing about it only digs her deeper, but she uses a different mindset when she plays the drums, which tends to pull her out of her angst - and hitting things can be therapeutic. She owns a couple of Jonathan Coulton albums.
Great-Aunt Saffron - the former chorus girl - actually has more interest in Musa's music than anyone in her immediate family. While she doesn't harbor any deep repressed desire to switch jobs with Val, Musa still likes to sing. Musa studied Japanese for a couple of years in college. Grant Morrison is one of her favorite comic book writers, not in spite of the weird and silly stuff but at least occasionally because of it. Sometimes she wonders what kind of fanbase her life would have if it were an anime.
Even if opiate tolerance isn't supposed to work this way, Musa credits at least part of her insane drug tolerance to the poppy tea Moonflower gave her when she got sick as a child. During the nineties, she got in the habit of carrying stuff around in her bra or the tops of her stockings flapper-style - thrift store negligees don't tend to have pockets. One of her odder side projects was a reggae group she started with the ex-bassist from Ontological Mystery, that specialized in covers of death metal songs. The reggae group was going to be called Cannabis Corpse, but it turned out that the name was taken. Hathor's her favorite deity, mostly because of the music aspect.
She's more of a Japanophile nerd than a roleplaying nerd, but she knows at least a little about the more popular systems and universes. Tzeentch is her favorite Chaos god, with Slaanesh a close second. Musa's taste in video games tends towards the quirky and cinematic. Sometimes Musa thinks she'd find Lilja's moodier moments harder to deal with if she didn't have Lotus as a base for comparison. School wasn't hard for her, but once she reached her teens, Musa was kind of an underachiever in classes that didn't interest her.
Musa met Yuri on the Greyhound to Seattle. Erica's novels have led to awkward situations when reviewers asked Musa and her band mates about things their fictional expies had done. Part of her interest in unusual instruments comes from exposure to Moonflower's sitar records in her childhood. She likes her chocolate almost any way, but prefers it bittersweet. Sometimes Musa wonders if Violet would snap spectacularly if pushed just a bit too far.
Musa enjoyed college chemistry, even if it did have a higher theory-to-practice ratio at first than she would have preferred. Unlike Valerian, Musa seldom thinks of herself as stupid - a total fuckup at times, yes, but that's not quite the same thing. The "depressed lemmings" nickname for Maenad's fanbase came from something Musa said in an interview. Someone at uni once accused Musa of "trying to be white" because of her otaku tendencies, which made Musa wonder how someone who didn't know the difference between Europe and East Asia made it into college. During her pre-Kemetic days, Musa liked to tell inquisitive missionaries that she was a Jenova's Witness.
Also, for this one in particular: Laugh of the Medusa was a Seattle-based "angry girl" alternative rock group active in the mid to late 1990s (when Musa was in her late teens through early twenties). The lineup consisted of Musa (lead vocals, guitar), Yuri (bass), Lotus (guitar), and Sage (drums).
Maenad got its start in the mid-aughts. Membership consists of Valerian (lead vocals), Lilja (lead guitar), Yanang (rhythm guitar), Musa (drums), and Violet (bass).
Venus Envy is a Canadian all-woman punk band active in the late 1980s and 1990s that I made up for an earlier project. They consist of Kate, Dani, Billie, and Zandra.
Warnings: lots of drug/alcohol references, a bit of cursing, and one instance of racist and misogynist language.
For someone who's smoked as long as she has, Musa has a pretty well preserved sense of smell. Musa enjoys making perfume more than she does actually wearing it - there's just something so fabulously alchemical about mixing all the essential oils and things together. Nineties girl-rock makes her feel nostalgic. Not counting their manager, Musa's the only member of Maenad with a college degree. She went to university in the late nineties, after Laugh of the Medusa broke up and she was feeling in need of a lifestyle change.
Back in the nineties, a bored music journalist manufactured a feud between Musa and Courtney Love that was equally surprising to both of them. She gave herself mild hypothermia performing at outdoor concerts on more than one occasion - sure, it doesn't usually get terribly cold in Seattle, but 52 degrees Fahrenheit and drizzling is not the sort of weather in which you want to run around in fishnets and a nylon slip for three hours. Musa claims to have understood the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Metal Gear Solid 2 is her favorite video game. Roger is actually one of a succession of pet rats named after famous drummers.
Someone once told Musa that she'd be able to find beer in Mecca - not that it's likely she'd ever have to, given that Musa's solitary Kemetic and all. Musa gets cold rather easily, especially when she's sober. Her hair's been "natural" for her entire adult life, although she did bleach it blonde during her Laugh of the Medusa days. Although Musa doesn't think Erica's stupid - writing a best-selling trashy novel without a ghostwriter requires a certain ability to keep it together - she doesn't think she'll ever understand her sister's brand of logic. House of Leaves is her favorite work of "serious" fiction. She tried to teach herself to play the theremin for a song she wanted to do with Medusa, but the band broke up before she got very far.
As far as Musa knows, she's not related to the author of The Scarlet Letter. There's been controversy among fans and journalists over what color her eyes actually are - they're dark hazel. In the six months surrounding Medusa's breakup, Musa was in the worst psychological shape of her life. Musa once punched a guy in the face for calling her a nappy-headed ho - not because she considered sex work and natural hair to be such terrible things, but because she resented the idea that assumptions about her sex life and the choice she made to live with the hair the gods gave her should be grounds to insult or dismiss her. She considers herself a feminist.
Musa's a bit of a Japanophile. Her interests in anime and manga developed more out of her interest in Japanese culture in general than the other way around. When she was very young - before she'd even moved to Seattle permanently - Musa got to see Mia Zapata perform. Very early in their career, Laugh of the Medusa opened for Venus Envy. Once, Musa and the other girls from Medusa took a bunch of herbal hallucinogens they'd acquired from Billie Jiang and tried to discover their spirit animals.
If Musa ever got magically transformed into a cat, one of the first things she'd do would be an attempt to find out if catnip is as much fun as it looks. Withnail and I always reminds her of Medusa's last months. When she was at university, Musa stopped bleaching her hair and started hennaing it. The majority of the recipes Musa knows how to make - at least the ones for things more elaborate than grilled cheese sandwiches or ramen - contain some sort of alcohol. She even puts a little mirin in her yakisoba.
Even if she is the oldest, Musa doesn't consider herself the team mom - "team cool aunt who's a bad influence" is more her style. Musa doesn't plan on ever having children - apart from the difficulties of combining motherhood with Maenad's incident-prone sort of rock stardom, she wouldn't be surprised if any baby that managed to survive nine months in her body came out with three arms and the ability to shoot lasers out its eyes, even if Musa spent the duration of the pregnancy sober. Her usual romantic pattern is: friendship + mutual attraction --> friends with benefits --> embarrassing epic crush that dare not speak its name. She doesn't do much conventional dating. While at university, she worked for a while as a student librarian.
The phrase "substance free" always makes her think of Gnosticism. Musa can read hieroglyphics. During the time between Medusa's breakup and the formation of Maenad, Musa joined a taiko group. "Women In Rock" books written before 2007 tend to depict Laugh of the Medusa as a bunch of young Hole wannabes if they mention the band at all, but the group's artistic importance has been reassessed in the wake of Maenad's success. She has the reputation of being a good listener - or at least, she tends to attract drunk or upset people who want to vent.
In operatic terms, Musa's a mezzo. She's worn glasses since she was nine. Maenad isn't the first band Musa played the drums in - just the best known by a wide margin. If you don't count Bellhaven Taiko, Musa first played the drums in the gothic progressive metal band Ontological Mystery, but the lineup that included her only lasted a few months before the frontman threw a fit and fired everyone. Her interest in Ancient Egypt dates back to elementary school.
If she had to choose, Musa would find vegetarianism easier than going low-carb. When Violet had just joined the band, Musa was the first of the other members the girl was on friendly terms with. She enjoys drinking tea, but it does absolutely nothing to keep her awake when consumed in normal quantities. One of the negative effects of Musa's high tolerance to pretty much everything is that it takes more caffeine than the FDA recommends an adult consume in a day just to get her moving in the morning. There is Musa/Amy Winehouse fanfiction online - Musa knows about it, but hasn't read any of it due to her (usually perfectly merited) distrust of any links Yanang sends her.
Musa knows more of Lilja's backstory than anybody in the band except maybe their manager, due to the guitarist's habit of choosing Musa as the preferred audience for her semiannual drunken emotional breakdowns. Much as her own family can drive her crazy, she still prefers them to what she knows of Lilja's. Once, Musa inadvertently got her hands on some pot laced with quite a bit of angel dust - it made her a bit on edge, but nothing dramatic happened. She once claimed to have sold her sense of shame for drug money at some point in the late nineties. Although she's still fairly lightly built compared to someone like Val, Musa has gained a noticeable amount of weight since her Laugh of the Medusa days - age plus fewer hard drugs and more real food will do that too a person.
Sometimes Musa wishes her sister wrote about anything but fictional celebrities who were not inspired by anyone living, honest, she swears. Most of the anime Musa watches would, in tvtropes jargon, be classified as Mind Screws or Widget Series. Moe fandom isn't really Musa's thing, but she knows enough about it to be the only member of Maenad not surprised by Violet's popularity among college-age Japanese males. Violet's attempts to fuss over her are, on the whole, at least as endearing as they are annoying, even if the last thing Musa wants to deal with when she's drunk off her ass is a chirpy little girl waving a big glass of water and a bottle of vitamins at her.
One of Musa's great-aunts was a chorus girl in an "all colored revue" in the forties. A large part of her fondness for elaborate cocktails comes from the fun of mixing them up. There have been online rumors of her death on two occasions, and a handful of claims that she was terminally ill. This gives Musa the most false reports of her premature demise of anybody in Maenad - but then, she is both the oldest and the most notoriously hard-living. She's the oldest member of Maenad, by five or six years, but she was the youngest in Laugh of the Medusa by about ten months.
She likes jewelery, but goes more for little arty pieces - particularly if they're Asian or Ancient Egyptian inspired - than big chunks of sparkle. Her non-alcoholic culinary repertoire comes from the time she spent doing the breakfast shift at a friend's macrobiotic cafe in Seattle before Medusa took off. Despite being a big old lush, she's willing to eat health food if it's seasoned up enough, especially if someone else cooks it. Moonflower, the hippie neighbor lady who babysat Musa through much of her childhood, was in some ways a stronger influence than Musa's own mother was. The koi were as much Musa's idea as Violet's.
Moonflower was Musa's first guitar teacher, which resulted in Musa learning a number of sixties rock and folk songs. If for some sadistic reason she had to choose, Musa would rather be sober the rest of her life than give up music, but she wouldn't be gracious about it. Musa can play the piano reasonably well. Switching from vocals to drums was, in part, a mental health thing - when she's in certain kinds of bad moods, singing about it only digs her deeper, but she uses a different mindset when she plays the drums, which tends to pull her out of her angst - and hitting things can be therapeutic. She owns a couple of Jonathan Coulton albums.
Great-Aunt Saffron - the former chorus girl - actually has more interest in Musa's music than anyone in her immediate family. While she doesn't harbor any deep repressed desire to switch jobs with Val, Musa still likes to sing. Musa studied Japanese for a couple of years in college. Grant Morrison is one of her favorite comic book writers, not in spite of the weird and silly stuff but at least occasionally because of it. Sometimes she wonders what kind of fanbase her life would have if it were an anime.
Even if opiate tolerance isn't supposed to work this way, Musa credits at least part of her insane drug tolerance to the poppy tea Moonflower gave her when she got sick as a child. During the nineties, she got in the habit of carrying stuff around in her bra or the tops of her stockings flapper-style - thrift store negligees don't tend to have pockets. One of her odder side projects was a reggae group she started with the ex-bassist from Ontological Mystery, that specialized in covers of death metal songs. The reggae group was going to be called Cannabis Corpse, but it turned out that the name was taken. Hathor's her favorite deity, mostly because of the music aspect.
She's more of a Japanophile nerd than a roleplaying nerd, but she knows at least a little about the more popular systems and universes. Tzeentch is her favorite Chaos god, with Slaanesh a close second. Musa's taste in video games tends towards the quirky and cinematic. Sometimes Musa thinks she'd find Lilja's moodier moments harder to deal with if she didn't have Lotus as a base for comparison. School wasn't hard for her, but once she reached her teens, Musa was kind of an underachiever in classes that didn't interest her.
Musa met Yuri on the Greyhound to Seattle. Erica's novels have led to awkward situations when reviewers asked Musa and her band mates about things their fictional expies had done. Part of her interest in unusual instruments comes from exposure to Moonflower's sitar records in her childhood. She likes her chocolate almost any way, but prefers it bittersweet. Sometimes Musa wonders if Violet would snap spectacularly if pushed just a bit too far.
Musa enjoyed college chemistry, even if it did have a higher theory-to-practice ratio at first than she would have preferred. Unlike Valerian, Musa seldom thinks of herself as stupid - a total fuckup at times, yes, but that's not quite the same thing. The "depressed lemmings" nickname for Maenad's fanbase came from something Musa said in an interview. Someone at uni once accused Musa of "trying to be white" because of her otaku tendencies, which made Musa wonder how someone who didn't know the difference between Europe and East Asia made it into college. During her pre-Kemetic days, Musa liked to tell inquisitive missionaries that she was a Jenova's Witness.