Hello, readers! After a long, unexpected hiatus, I’ve returned to the fold, and I hope to stay for a while. I’ve been on and off my medication for a few months now, and the result has been a widespread range of ups and downs that hasn’t really allowed me to focus on anything creative at all.
I haven’t written anything for The Broken in a while; the last attempt was in May, and when what I’d been writing failed to save, I kind of stopped for a while. I’m at around 20,000 words, which is a little less than ⅔ of the projected length, so I’m not disappointed, although I’ll have to pick up the pace if I’m going to get this book out by the end of the year (stretch goal).
That being said, I haven’t been completely complacent with regard to my writing. Earlier this year, I dusted off my compositional skills, opened Logic Pro X, and lay down a few tracks. It’s been exciting, because I haven’t written music in almost ten years, and what I’ve come up with – whilst perhaps not gold-record-setting – is (in my humble opinion) pretty damn good! The vocals (me) suck, and the production needs some work, but I wrote five songs that are actually pretty okay.
Why did I turn to writing music, you might ask? The answer is not just to satisfy a long-standing desire to compose, but in fact to accompany my upcoming novel. In The Broken, we follow the rise and fall of a mid-90s Nu-Metal band, and in writing a sequence that involves them writing their first songs, I realized I needed to know what those songs sounded like. I could guess; I could extrapolate from contemporaneous bands; but nothing would be the same as actually writing their music itself.
I had originally intended to write through their entire first album, and whilst this isn’t out of the question, I so far have completed a 5-song “EP”, with the following tracks:
- Get the Fuck Out
- Leave You Behind
- In the Fields
- Psychosis
- What’s Left
Each song is around 3-4 minutes long, in the style of Korn/Slipknot/System of a Down, and despite being almost entirely digitally produced, I think they came out pretty okay! You can even listen to them here on SoundCloud!
And whilst you enjoy some music, I fully intend to get back to writing The Broken, and hopefully have it completed by the fall, at which point I can send it off to my editor!
C.M. North 