Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Going down again

I think at this point, since the sad has still not really gone away, that it's safe to say I have entered the annual season of the winter blues. My "coping" yesterday and Monday consisted mostly of playing video games and rolling in self-pity. Today, I decided it might be wiser to go with the special (albeit expensive) sunlight-mimicking light bulb in my desk lamp, a little bit of exercise, and forcing myself to do some writing-related work, even if I couldn't quite get directly to the writing just yet. And music. Music usually helps a lot, too.

So far this morning, I have constructed a final timeline for Crowmaker, to aid in this whole "planning the rewrite" stage. No, really. It's the final timeline. It's not at all like the first five. I really mean it, this time! I put this one into OneNote, in a nifty table format that is easily tweaked and played with and seen all at one time for the big picture effect instead of scrawled haphazardly across and in the margins of several sheets of paper. (Some lined, some the back sides of letters from the boys' school in SC... One of them was even pretty yellow!) So I feel productive. And more, I think I can go back to the outline I was working on and fix the stumbling block I'd tripped over there that sent me scrambling for a working timeline to begin with. Yay.

Musical (re-)discovery this week is The Hooters. One day last week, the boys and I were having supper. The husband was working late, so it was a pretty casual affair, which means we were listening to assorted songs of our choice at full blare and talking about music. (I have no idea what food was actually involved; I don't remember.) While listening to The Killers, I was reminded that I had intended to sometime compare their song "Uncle Jonny" to "Johnny B." by The Hooters. So we decided right then would be a good time. This involved digging up an old cassette version of One Way Home, but we had a good discussion about the similarities and differences between the songs, with their guys named Johnny and their approaches to the subject of drug addiction.

And then, of course, I had to rewind the cassette and play "Satellite" and "Karla with a K," just because I hadn't heard them in ages. At which point I was reminded how much I really liked pretty much every single song on their albums. Michael was bopping along with the music, so I explained to him about televangelists and some of the related scandals and had him listen to the lyrics of "Satellite." He grinned. And he asked me to play it again the next night.

So yeah. The Hooters are on tap on Rhapsody today. I didn't link any of the songs, but I'm willing to bet you can find them on YouTube if you try hard enough. I couldn't possibly pick a favorite, but in addition to the above, I'm also inordinately fond of "Where Do the Children Go" and "South Ferry Road." And "Day by Day." OK, and of course "And We Danced."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh god, "Where Do the Children Go?"

YES.

Pretty much every song on Nervous Night... Now I have to go digging them up. <3

Lori Erickson said...

I *knew* I'd had the "ZOMGawesome" conversation with someone about that song. I should've known it was you!

And it has Patty Smyth, to top it all off and make it even better.