Nothing.

Have a great weekend!

Just kidding—sort of. I don’t write to music. I used to, but I haven’t done so for a couple of years. However, I do use music to warm up before a writing session. I’ve noticed that I play the same set of songs when I’m working on a particular project, and that held true for Threaded Through Time, Book One (I’ll drop the Book One from this point forward).

I’m an avid computer gamer, and we gamers are treated to fantastic soundtracks. I often buy game music, so it’s not surprising that my warm up music for Threaded Through Time consisted of songs from the soundtracks for two brilliant role-playing games: Dragon Age: Origins and Divinity 2: Ego Draconis.

The Dragon Age: Origins soundtrack was composed by Inon Zur. One of my favourite tracks is Ruins of Ostagar, the song I most associate with Threaded Through Time. The moment I hear it, the characters are there. It’s almost as if listening to the song is my way of calling them to me, which is useful when I’m working on multiple projects.

Other songs on the Dragon Age: Origins soundtrack that I sometimes played: Dragon Age: Origins, The Chantry’s Hubris, Mages in Their Chantry, and The Betrayal. But Ruins of Ostagar was the only song I played every time. I’d be embarrassed to tell you the iTunes count for that one. You can listen to the tracks, including Ruins of Ostagar (it’s near the bottom of the list), at the official soundtrack site.

I also listened to tracks from the Divinity 2: Ego Draconis soundtrack, composed by Kirill Pokrovsky. Pokrovsky gives away his soundtracks for free on his website, which is incredibly generous of him.

I played two songs religiously when working on Threaded Through Time. Fly, Dragon, Fly is an energetic piece of music that really gets the creative juices flowing. Festival of Immortals is a wonderful piece of music that’s pleasing to the ear. I’ve linked to the two songs on YouTube:

Fly, Dragon, Fly
Festival of Immortals

I’ve been saying that, “I listened to,” and, “I played,” but I started the first draft of Threaded Through Time, Book Two this week, so I’m listening to and playing them again.

Two final notes:

1. Fly, Dragon, Fly and Festival of Immortals were also part of my warm up routine for The Salbine Sisters.
2.  The tone of the music doesn’t have to relate to the tone of the project (and often doesn’t).

If you game, I recommend Dragon Age: Origins and Divinity 2 (buy the Dragon Knight saga, which contains both the original game and the expansion). Both are excellent games that I’ll play numerous times.

Now have a great weekend!

I spent part of this week trying to decide what non-Rymellan project to start next. The sheer number of ideas in my “to-write” file was overwhelming, so I narrowed the choices down to five and spent at least an hour brainstorming each one. As a result of that exercise, I dropped two of the five ideas (for now) and decided to write the remaining three stories in 2011. Of course, if an absolutely brilliant story idea strikes me and demands to be written now, I’ll do what I can to squeeze it in.

In my last post, I said there would be false starts, so I won’t add anything to the WIP page just yet. By sometime in February, I should know whether the project I’ll start next week has legs.

On a related note (no pun intended), I love music, and it’s not uncommon for story ideas to hit me while I’m listening to my favourite songs. This recent news item didn’t surprise me:

Music Produces a Natural High, McGill Study Finds (Montreal Gazette)

Enjoy your weekend!

Thank you, Mr. Kunzel, for several delightful and entertaining evenings. You will be missed.