Riling up Emotions, Sustaining a Mood
I began writing Forever Urtth in earnest in December 2021, a few months after moving out west from my hometown of Baltimore. Over those proceeding 3+ years of writing (mostly during the early morning hours before starting my day job), I learned a lot about my creative peccadilloes: A) I needed to fall in love with my main character for the story to hold together, B) I needed to show (and have) compassion and love for all my characters, C) I had to embrace the meaningful emotions within and use their force as fuel for my story and D) to sustain a mood and tone over the duration of 100K words, I needed a song—or a small cadre of songs—to serve as reminders, guideposts … e.g., ‘how this song makes me feel is how I want to feel throughout the hacking and finding of the paths that takes me from start to finish with a blind optimism that those emotions would color/saturate the tone of the story.
One of the things I’ll always remember about this time in my life is waking up before dawn seven days a week, tired as shit, barely coherent, but excited—vitalized—wanting to do justice to Sloan and her dad and to the story. In those bleary hours, I’d meander down to the kitchen to make coffee and click play on one of, say, five(ish) songs that were on permanent rotation in my YouTube playlists. These were my mood setters, my reminders, my guides that riled up the right emotions and reinforced the direction I was going in.
One of those songs—perhaps my favorite of the bunch—was this particular version of Brian Jonestown Massacre’s ‘If Love is the Drug.’
The discordant tonality it starts with … eerie, flatline(ish) … but also as if you’re tuning in to something about the pick up … And it does: riotous, rebellious but also with grace … hopeful, despairing, a drunken past of fights and fire and screwups … but also filled with hope and longing, yearning, striving, wanting something (someone) more … I really couldn’t find a more perfect analogy for the ‘hero’ of my story. To me, that’s who Sloan Slagg is. She walks around with a ‘small cadre’ of songs in her head but I think this one plays more often than any other.