V I B E S

I listen to the same music over and over and over again. From project to project I'll have different playlists, but then I'll listen to the same thing for the duration of that project, more or less. Whether there's any truth to it, I think about the music as a shortcut into the writing. Even more so, whether consciously or subconsciously, I channel the vibes of the music into my work. 

Right now it's a YouTube playlist with some Skyrim tracks, some Donkey Kong Country relaxation mixes, a Zelda rain/waves/night mix, and a Final Fantasy 6 loop of calm and relaxing tracks. I must need the calm. Calm helps in marathons, and this project is certainly that. 117k words in and I'm only just scratching the surface of the larger story. 

For my YA Sci-Fi novel it was the Fez soundtrack. That atmospheric gamer-synth style felt right for a story set on the moon, even if it wasn't the type of music my main characters would be listening to. After 3-4 drafts, the final one (so far) coming in at 144k words, I've probably listened to that soundtrack all the way through hundreds and hundreds of times. Though I also went through a phase during that project with a lot of Grimes, Purity Ring, CHVRCHES, and Bjork. 

For the YA summer camp cult story I wrote from about April to October in 2020, it was almost exclusively Donkey Kong music. Writing about high school must have transported me to my own youth. I was already nostalgic for Donkey Kong in high school, so there was a meta-nostalgia element with that. And DK carries into this current project, more for the familiarity than anything else. 

For one reason or another, it has to be video game music for me. In writing Portal Bound, the YA fantasy/sci-fi story that I feel is probably the closest to being publishable, I listened to a lot of Nintendo lo-fi. It would branch off into DK and Zelda more usually, but the mixes were more diverse. Again with the nostalgia! But I think it works. 

The V I B E S must be strong. The music is like hitting yellow arrows in MarioKart. No matter how sluggish or spun out I am, queueing up the soundtrack will launch me into the project. 

Do I need to branch out? Probably. Will I? Are there more DK mixes out there? Time to go turn over some rocks. 

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