I know for your current fic, one of the cool parts is you using your music knowledge for the AU. How do you go about research in general and deciding which real-life musicians and songs equate to their Jayvik counterparts?
Hello!! Thank you so much for the ask. I hope you're prepared for the absolutely Biblical yap session you've inspired. I've been chewing on this for hours. I hope that somewhere in this yap I answer the thesis of your question because I'm pretty sure I've talked around it.
The short answer? Chaos and listening until something hopefully sticks.
The long answer:
A lot of my general ideas and vibes came from like general Music History knowledge from college, as well as having also taught high school Music History.
So I knew from the beginning that I wanted the piece they created to either be based on something from the Romantic Period (19th Century) because it's characterized by really emotional and programmatic pieces OR something like VERY contemporary. Early ideas were something from Bartok or Stravinsky. I particularly like Russian composers from the Late Romantic just as a general rule. (During this time, nationalism became a Thing(TM), even in music and national song styles happened. The Russians cooked every time. So much hidden political protesting in their music.) I also really love Rachmaninoff but wasn't super familiar with him beyond his really famous works (both of his piano concertos).
This is all a really long way to lead me to how I got here. I did some Googling, like any good researcher, and found a couple reddit posts with some links in the r/ClassicalMusic community. I did a lot of listening. At this point, I was going into PYETM with a dream and some Vibes, and really, it was the vibes that spoke to me here, and it's how I settled on the Rach Cello Sonata.
I listened to a couple different recordings at this point. These were also suggestions from several Reddit posts/Google searches to give me a head start. Even if the music is the same, the expression is different performer to performer, and it's really the music that started to develop the plot rather than the other way around. I heard the way the conversations between the piano and the cello developed throughout the Sonata have shaped so much of the plot arc and pacing. Every thing from the minor-minor-Major-Major movement cycle to the antagonism and longing.
I have listened to the pieces in this fic .... too many times to count. The first several times, I just approached it as taking notes about my own thoughts and reactions. I really treated it like college, where I was analyzing pieces. Just so many so many hand written notes.
Then, I found this really great article to supplement my own opinions and also just to double-check myself, which pointed me in the direction of some of the descriptions I used. I really like that it was written by someone that isn't necessarily a professional musician, and the lay-people terminology helped me bring it to life in a way that (I hope) is accessible to people who aren't necessarily musicians either.
The rest of the music featured, like the guitar piece and the Brahms and the Bossa Nova vibe session, followed pretty much the same process. Lots of deep dives into classical music and latin/latin jazz music communities and listening to various pieces until one stuck out and I got that "lightbulb" moment, followed by double-checking my work with Wikis or articles as available.
I hope this has answered your question and that this information has actually been interesting. I could yap about the background work for this fic forever.
Put your emptiness to melody is positively one of my favorite fics out there and im very very impatient so could we get a prediction for the next chapter pretty please? I have been going on ao3 multiple times a day to check if it was up yet 🙂
Hello! Apologies for the delays. It really isn’t my usual MO. I will say that I’ve been working behind the scenes on something really scrumptious for the Big Bang event, so my PYTEM progress is slowing down. I do have chapters 14 and 15 mostly outlined and the rest of the fic is mostly down in my head. I just gotta lock in and actually write the damn thing. HOWEVER, I’m a teacher in my day job and I promise that, barring another instance of The Curse™️, another chapter WILL be written before I go back to school. This is a self-imposed deadline, but I’m pretty sure my group of writer friends will actually teleport to my living room and murder me if I don’t. So I suppose that means the clock is ticking for me truly. Soooo by August 6th?
I have not-girl bossed too close to the sun. The AO3 curse spares nobody.
I thought I was invincible when I wrote the entirety of wtt(hjcrotm) without a single bad thing happening to me. But I, too, am a victim of AO3. Beware. None of us are exempt from the curse. It’s now been over a month since I’ve posted a chapter and I have learned things about myself that cannot be unknown and been places is my own mind I wouldn’t go with a gun.
Anyway, I hope to post Chapter 13 of pytem soon. Stay safe out there and may the curse pass you over.
