Jul 12, 2018
Miscellaneous book art (made in google drawings and GIMP)
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Miscellaneous book art (made in google drawings and GIMP)
PUBLISHED
Finally! After a day and a half of formatting, the ebook is ready to buy! I hope to have a slightly updated version tonight, as well as the paperback, but here it is!!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711MGSNT
If you spend your whole life waiting for the perfect idea to drift by, you'll never see it. Grab something stupid. Make it work
Me, when trying to explain why everything I do sucks
Making Contest Work
The book is published and the contest is on and I’m super excited to have come this far, but to go any farther I’m going to need help!
I need readers and I need buyers and I need reviewers. If anyone wants to buy the book, links are here: Ebook, $3.00, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711MGSNT Paperback, $8.00, https://www.amazon.com/dp/1521276307
Pretty pretty please buy it and if you buy it (thanks) pretty pretty please leave reviews! If that’s too much-- and I know that it’s graduation season, so I totally get it if it’s too much-- pretty pretty pretty please reblog this and help me get the word out! I want this more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life and I know I probably won’t win but I want to try my very best and reach as many people as I can
--Matt Cantor
buy it buy it buy it
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711MGSNT for ebook!!!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1521276307 for paperback!!!
new covers
New book(s)
So it’s been a busy few months. And I’ve been keeping mostly to myself. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I’ve been doing a lot of writing-- and most of all, I’ve been doing a lot of editing. It’s hard to know when to stop, when something is “done”-- or as “done” as it’s going to be. There comes a point where you have to cut yourself off and step back. So I’ve cut myself off and I’ve stepped back, and luckily enough, I like what I’ve seen. I’m proud to unveil the second edition of Making Stupid Work, corrected for all the issues in the first, with added content, a few fun new illustrations, and of course an admittedly teen-romance-y new cover. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1983349003 More than that, though, I’m proud to unveil the first edition of the sequel; Consistency. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1717738966 Enjoy!
(Note that at the moment, these books are only available in paperback. I’m hoping to come out with the ebooks in the next few weeks or so, schedule depending)
(Edit: link to book 1 was broken in first version of the post. Hopefully now it’s fixed)
Earlier today I saw a post talking about how music can inspire scenes involving a writer’s OC, oftentimes in quite vivid detail. The post went on to rather humourously illustrate how such scenes can be so fleshed out in our minds while the music is playing, and completely gone by the time we actually sit down and try to write them.
I got a good laugh from this, but I also got a bit of an idea. I haven’t posted much in a while, and technical stuff can be fun to talk about, so I figured why not write about how music fits into my process.
A quick disclaimer, I have no interest in dictating to other people how they ought to do this or that, and any examples I use as “what not to do” are really examples of “what doesn’t really work for me”. There is no one right way-- and if there is, I certainly haven’t found it.
Anyways, music and writing.
Whenever one medium inspires a certain choice in another, it can be helpful to examine which came first. For example, in my current project, the Making Stupid Work series (the second of which is very nearly done), I started writing long before music played in. The characters of Matt and Ellie Cantor, their situation, the general tone of the books began formulating in my mind on a train-trip from New York to Boston after a failed attempt at pitching my previous work at a writing convention. I had just spent roughly two-and-a-half years pouring my whole life into the Silent God series-- all my time, my ideas, my emotional energy. Everything. And on the train-ride back, it really felt as though the entire project had just culminated in failure.
I was miserable, I was frustrated, I was-- naturally-- self-doubting. And to be honest, it wasn’t entirely because of my rejection. A lot of the negative feelings I was experiencing during that time came from the nature of the project itself. Silent God, particularly in that earlier incarnation, is a very intense, very “broody” sort of work-- the kind of thing that one kid in your creative writing class who thinks he’s “deeper” than everyone else turns in as a final project. Whether the piece was good or not is an open question, but the overarching point is that it hurt to write. I had characters in serious emotional pain, a twisted version of the pain I had felt in parts of my childhood-- alienation, loneliness, self-hatred. One of the things I learned over the course of the project is that I am bad at writing pain. The only way I know how to do it is to hammer it into the reader, again and again and again, at every opportunity, and in doing so, I just brought it even closer to the surface in myself.
Long story short, I was in a dark place on that train-ride. I considered quitting writing altogether, but I decided to give it one last shot. That last shot was Making Stupid Work. I went into that new project certain about two things; it would start on a train, and I wouldn’t put too much of myself into it. Cheap and cheerful, you know the drill.
And that’s how it started. I sat down in the library-- the next day, in fact-- and within the span of a few hours I had my first chapter. It was sassy, it was silly, it was stupid. I hadn’t been aiming for stupid, but that’s where I ended up-- particularly after what had been my favorite line in the chapter, “perfect, egg-smooth legs stuck out of her dress like a pair of pumpernickel baguettes”, led to exactly none of my early readers taking it seriously.
So I went on and on, writing and writing, aiming for stupid and just trying to get something done that didn’t make me hate myself. Matt Cantor was a goof. Ellie Cantor was a badass. Mum was adorable, at least some of the time. And then THIS happened:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCXsRoyFRQE
Caravan Palace’s “Wonderland”. It was a strange thing actually, because I had this music shown to me by two completely unrelated people within the span of about two days. Fate? Maybe. All I know is that I listened to it and I loved it and then suddenly one of those people mentioned that this song reminded them of Ellie Cantor.
Everything changed in an instant. Don’t get me wrong, I had loved Ellie’s character plenty up to that point. She was fun to write, and a lot of my readers felt that she was just as much fun to read. But when I drew the line between Ellie and “Wonderland”, she stopped being just a fun character for Matt to play off of. Now she was a tune. Now she was a rhythm, now she was words. I remember listening to this song one night as I was walking home from work-- headphones jacked into my cell-phone, data-plan screaming in pain-- and thinking to myself that Ellie Cantor was actually the point of all this. I didn’t want her to be scary, I wanted her to be terrifying. I didn’t want her to be cute, or pretty, or hot, I wanted her to be soul-achingly beautiful. I didn’t want her to be clever or smart, I wanted her to be a genious. And most of all, I didn’t want her to be cool; I wanted her to have majesty. I went back and I edited and I edited and I edited and slowly, she started to become all of that, at least for me. The way she spoke, the things she did-- even the rhythm and sound-scape of the text describing her changed.
Why was this effect so profound? I think part of it can be attributed to the sheer awesomeness of Caravan Palace. Maybe even most of it. But at least a little bit comes from the awesomeness of music itself. What I believe-- the whole point of this article, in fact-- is that music is one of the most powerful factors in establishing a “Cult of Personality”, for both real and fictional people.
My favorite example of this is, nerdily enough, from the video game Destiny-- specifically, the Taken King expansion. The character in question is Oryx (the Taken King), and he’s a pretty interesting guy. Over the course of the story, you bump into him, and he’s scary-looking-ish:
Spooooooopy. But pretty standard sci-fi/cosmic horror fare. He and C’thulu probably play bridge or something. If you read the grimoire about him, the “Book of Sorrows”, we learn a lot more about Oryx, his character starts to really take shape and become compelling. We learn about his childhood, about his loss, his struggle, his fear, his fall. We learn about the sword-logic, about his drive to decide “the ultimate final shape” of the universe, and the cross-galaxy quest he goes on to achieve it, obliterating all that would stand against him. It’s pretty well-written, and gives the character some nice depth. But none of it really hits home until after you’ve read all the stories, and you go back into the game to play some more and you hear this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7RBOW1NqHw&t=18s
Holy. Shit. Michael Salvatori, color me impressed. I first heard this song before reading any of the grimoire, while just playing the game itself. But when I heard it again after, when I drew the line between this and Oryx, between this and his story, it stopped being just a story. It became a legend. This song, when I heard it again, did for Oryx exactly what “Wonderland” had done for Ellie Cantor. This wasn’t a monster, this was a god, a creature laying claim to the universe, claiming to be truth itself. Oryx became those blaring horns, those pounding drums, that building sense of dread as you try and try to wriggle out from under the absolute fact that this world-- that all worlds-- run on blood.
Or maybe Destiny isn’t your cup of tea. Maybe you’re more of a Harry Potter lover. JK Rowling’s text is fantastic, make no mistake. Her depictions are vivid, her plots are scrumptious, her adverbs adverb adverbially. People flocked to her books long before the movies were made-- in fact, the movies were made in part because of all the people flocking to her books. But I think I’m not alone in saying that this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Li0SWlwe34
completely changed the way I read the books. It’s called “Hedwig’s Theme” (which I didn’t actually know until trying to find it for this post), but I would argue that it goes a lot further towards establishing the “Cult of Personality” for the Harry Potter universe as a whole.
Simple thought experiment. Take two groups of 100 people each who know nothing at all about Harry Potter (how? whatever). Each group reads the first Harry Potter book. Now take one of the groups and play this song for them. Don’t show them the movie-- hell, don’t even show them the movie-poster in the background of this video. The other group, don’t show or play them anything. Now have both groups read book 2. I’m willing to bet that both groups will like it-- love it, even. I’m also willing to bet that the people in the group that heard the song will like it or love it a lot more. This isn’t to say that the book doesn’t work without that music-- of course it does, that’s why the music exists in the first place. But the music does something to that story. It shifts it, or spreads it, perhaps, into a different part of our brains. Harry Potter starts to inhabit a new space, where the mischief and mystery of the world aren’t just words on a page, they’re sounds in our head, bits of flute and clarinet reminding us that there will always be surprises in Hogwarts, around every corner.
Okay, wow, this is getting long.
My point is that the moment I became really serious about Making Stupid Work-- about making Making Stupid Work work, rather-- was the moment that music came into the mix. Ever since then, the writing has taken on a life of its own, so to speak. It lives in a place a tiny bit outside of my regular self, and all I have to do to get there is slap on my headphones, cue up some Caravan Palace, and jam out.