Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards for 2018

It's almost March 2019, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2018. Naturally I'll disagree with some of the Oscar winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go!

The Robbed Award

Going to the movie that got no play last year

and is just as good as whatever won Best Picture

THE FLORIDA PROJECT

Top Ten Videogames of the Year, 2015

Nothing expresses how Three-Stooges-goofy I find ranking art than my own attempts to do so. After Twitter friends said they wanted to read about my Top Ten Games of the Year, I tried and failed to order them. In recent years I've tried keeping lists like this just to remind myself how great videogames are as a hobby, and every year I come up with impossible ties. 2015 was the year of the most goofy ties yet.

Below you'll find:
-A tie between Tenth, Ninth, Eighth, Seventh, and Sixth Place.
-A tie between Fifth and Fourth Place.

-A tie between Third and Second Place.
-And a game that's unlike any of the other nine, and yet I think is my favorite thing I've played this decade.

There is no objective superiority between any of the tied games. Hell, there isn't even a respectable objectivity in the games ranked above and below each other, because it turns out comparing art objectively is ridiculous. Ask me what I think of Awards Culture sometime for a fun rant.

Aside from revealing how goofy ranked lists are, this is my attempt to celebrate 2015 as a year where so many companies created such different pieces of great interactive entertainment. These were necessary escapes from some terrible health problems, and some enriching narratives that gave me great times with friends. The leaps videogames have made in narrative, in the ability to present art design, and in refining mechanics makes it one of my favorite respites. It's so great that I end the list with a bunch of Honorable Mentions. The Honorable Mentions are not ranked because Shut The Hell Up.

Three Positive Things in Three Days, and Cheating

This wasn't my best week. Starting Monday and hitting hard Tuesday, my body started rejecting my new medication. I've only gotten some clarity in the last day or so, and am struggling for productivity. I see the doctor for the next consult on Thursday.


In related news, Ross Dillon cheated recently. He was tagged in a Facebook game to post "three positive things for three days," and he posted nine all at once. He's a man after my own heart.

I read his list minutes after finishing a short story and was quite exhausted. I played along. No reason not to be positive here for the span of nine items.


1. Marathoning the first season of Lost.
2. A writer I respect saying he was compelled to stay up late to read to the end of a story he beta read for me.
3. Ice cream cakes.
4. Homemade ice cream cake substitutes.
5. Grilling hamburgers.
6. People who smile when the rain reaches them.
7. Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic.
8. Telltale's The Walking Dead game.
9. Hearing the version of the ending theme of Naoki Urasawa's Monster, an instrumental song which always creeeped me out, and finding the lyrics inspirational and reassuring. 

I confess just listening to For The Love of Life cold won't have the same effect.

The Perfect Song - #fridayflash

The author finds the perfect song. The search is laborious, infinite, and instantly forgotten in a melody inspirational and nonintrusive. Whatever muse sprang these rhythms into our world gave them merit without demanding attention, and thus the author can work to it.

The author puts the perfect song on loop and begins to type what will surely be the greatest opening paragraph in the history of the novel.

The author’s web browser blinks with an IM. GChat is never truly closed in publishing. Or perhaps it’s a tweet, or a new Like on a half-clever Facebook post from a few hours ago, the last dying gasp of approval for memes past. The author checks the trivial interruption, which ought to take only a few seconds, and the end of the key sentence is still in his mind. Somehow, by no fault of his own, he has soon opened Tumblr, Reddit, and least defensibly, Youtube, chasing links that ask for so little of his time. All with that perfect song on loop in the background, reminding him to work. Eventually he may pause the perfect song to better hear the funny cat video his second college roommate posted, though he’ll unpause it out of guilt shortly later.

The author screws around for so long that, once he realizes his errors, his mind now associates the perfect song with screwing around. Perhaps it was never perfect. Perhaps he was never perfect, but that matters not, for the song is no longer the anthem of victorious words. It causes him only to dwell in how he let lunch time get here without meeting his morning word count.

And so the author opens his music folder and searches for another perfect song.

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards 2013

It's March 2014, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2013. If all the griping on Twitter is any indication, I'm once again happy to have skipped the Academy Awards. Naturally I disagree with some of the winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a sizable democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go.

The Robbed Award
Going to the movie that got no play last year
and is still on my mind more than whatever won Best Picture

Beasts of the Southern Wild

The Too Little/Too Late Award
Going to the movie I missed by several years,
but have now seen and wish I'd been on the bandwagon for at the time

Lawrence of Arabia

Lit Corner: My Contribution to the Tree of Life/Branching Out Story and a Contest!

This summer Samantha Geary is running a big writing experiment. She's organized and hosted 26 writers to assemble a short story, each composing 150 words, one after another. Each entry is to be inspired both what was written before and by Audiomachine's new album, Tree of Life. Each writer gets a spot in the batting order and a musical track to inspire where their bit of the story goes.

Huh. When I put it that way, it sounds grotesquely commercial. I promise it was a friendly artistic endeavor when I joined. Old college buddy of mine Beverly Fox is also contributing. It's taken on quite a life.

I wrote the second entry. I had to go early because this summer is a brutally busy time for me, and Sam was good enough to let me sneak in. I tried to earn my spot by contributing some unusual plot elements for the next writers to play with. I hope you'll enjoy what I did to the horse. 

My entry was inspired by this lovely song:

Also, every comment you leave on any of the chapters enters you to win a copy of Tree of Life as well as works by several of my co-authors.

You can read the first entry here, and my follow-up right here. Then it gets nutty.

Bathroom Monologue: Death Becomes They

People have died for as long as imagination has existed. Death is a franchise that services every religion and spirituality, but it's more of a commerce thing. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died, he became a set of box seats at an undisclosed opera house. When Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup died, he became a song – I can't tell you which because of afterlife copyright issues, but it's a good one. Underrated, actually.

Many artists become works. Ella Fitzgerald became a tune that homeless children in Hudson, New York used to entertain each other, while Rodney Dangerfield became a Yo Mama joke. It's hard to become your own eulogy, and thus it's a prized afterlife.

But it's not the only option. William Penn became a doorstop, which seems blasphemous to some, unless you were privy to some of the conversations he let drafts into.

Albert Einstein became an equation, and not the one you'd expect. He became "2 + 2 = ?" on the first test that a young boy was taking. That boy is a physicist now. There's a bureau looking into whether that's permissible.

Lao Tzu became a road, but one that cannot be walked.

You don't have to be famous for your death to mean something. I'm fairly certain the telegraph, electric battery and iPad were built out of people you've never heard of. A funny kid who never did more than sketch clouds became the kite Benjamin Franklin flew to test his theory of lightning – or he turned into the folk tale about it. I'll have to look that up.

Often the living do the dead wrong. A river of starvation victims became an ocean of grain – though because there is no reincarnation, live people must harvest and deliver that grain in this life. They must or they dishonor what the dead become.

Many people die angry or hurt, which is why there are so many bullets in the world. Every modern war has been a thunderstorm of the deceased yelling about their unfair shake. Anyone would rather become vengeance, but you can't become an intangible. That's just not possible. Your physicality begets a physicality, and it's your lot to become a bullet fired at the wrong person. The living don't even know how unhappy murder makes the world.

You can make the dead sing in sowing a better world from their contributions, or you can make them regret they ever existed. It is all in how you use their memory.

Bathroom Monologue: The Produceds

"My partner and I began our careers with a plan destined for failure. We would hire the worst playwright, to write about the most offensive material, performed by the least competent singers and dancers on Broadway. It was a bombastic production for which everyone in town presumed we had to have a good reason, and so everyone in town bought shares. I believe we sold over two thousand and five hundred percent of the holding interest in our production. When it flopped, we'd keep all the money they gave us, that we'd spent almost none of on the awful show, and walk away rich. Maybe go see Turn Out the Night.

"The calamity was that we hit it big. A musical comedy about Hitler was exactly what the scene wanted – the avant-garde, the nouveau richesse, and the pre-hipsters all ate it up. Our box-office overflowed such that we wound up owing ungodly amounts of money to ungodly amounts of investors.

"My partner tried to blow up the theatre. I wasn't part of that, no matter what he says. I was upset, but upset to misdemeanors, not felonies. My spirits lifted after I got a call from New York.

"Actually, I got nineteen calls before nine in the A-M. See, when you get the single biggest hit in the musical world, everyone wants to work with you. By Thursday I was co-producer on three projects for which I'd never have to visit a building. I was signing my name in exchange for checks, and my new friends wouldn't let me go to jail because they needed me. They squeezed out fat checks, and bags of money as door prizes, and some sums coming pre-laundered.

"You see, I thought bankruptcy was the only option. But there's another option. There's not returning investors' calls, and when people corner you on the street, saying another investor they hate took too deep a slice and needs to be consulted, and forwarding people to lawyers who only tenuously exist, until you've got another play out. And another. And another, until something you didn't really help build is a smashing success that will forever have your name in the playbill.

"According to the blogs, I'm a genius. They're begging me to direct next year. I had a producer burn me a smoke signal using hundred dollar bills. It's a play about Native Americans. It's about as tasteful as broken glass.

"So I'm thinking about directing. I'm also thinking about how many shares I'll sell."

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards, 2012

It's almost March 2013, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2012. If all the complaining on Twitter is any indication, I'm once again happy to have skipped the Academy Awards. Naturally I disagree with some of the winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a sizable democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go.

The Too Little/Too Late Award

Going to the movie I missed by several years,

but have now seen and wish I'd been on the bandwagon for at the time

Big Trouble in Little China

The Raddest Scene Award

Going to the raddest scene in a motion picture

Raid: The Redemption, the brothers face Mad Dog

For the Shorties, OR, The Terminus/Validation Award

Going to the short film I wouldn’t shut up about all year

Paperman

The Best Soundtrack Award
John's already used the "going to the obvious thing-award" joke,
so this is embarrassing

Raid: The Redemption

The Dark Horse Award

Going to the movie that was way better than you all led me to believe it would be

Lockout

You're Actually All Great At This

Going to the best ensemble in a motion picture,

since a great cast is way more impressive than a single great performance

Silver Linings Playbook

The Frank/Nixon Memorial Award

Going to all actors who performed as well or better

than Frank Langella did in Frost/Nixon

For the fifth year in a row, No One

The "There's No Such Thing As The Best Movie of the Year" Award

Seeing as there is no such thing as a best movie amidst a field of
comedies, dramas, musicals, period pieces, speculative fiction, animation,
blockbusters and an international film market we're both not watching enough of as it is,
the award that simply goes to whatever movie brought me
the closest to both crying and laughing last year 

The Secret World or Arrietty

 
Other great movies I was too unambitious to invent awards for:
Robot & Frank, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Delhi Belly, Safety Not Guaranteed

Movies of 2011 Awards
Movies of 2010 Awards

Bathroom Monologue: What Now Was Inland

They were half a generation beyond the end of oceans. Half a generation since the elders had seen one, and half a generation since the young could only imagine them. It was half a generation, down to the very day of conception, when the tides of fermented blood rolled across ancient shores, turning parched deserts to dripping beaches.

Upon this gory tide rode a ship. It flashed no bearing and collided with a sandbar that, for half a generation, had been a popular hill. It rose, and it shuddered, and they fled, and they sang warnings inland. Its hull heaved for breath, and every groan of its sundry structures contributed to the songs of the natives, until warnings turned to invitations.

There was not a soul aboard, nor a husk through which a soul might have conducted seaworthy business. Yet there were many fine armors, which the middling and young shared and donned, not for war, so much as for fashion as only new varieties can afford. Beneath decks lay exquisite weapons, spears that made the air bleed, and swords with epic poems etched along their edges, verse honed to unparalleled sharpness. These, the natives beat into ploughshares, and rapidly set about tilling and sowing before the gory tide could dry up. Already it was fleeing into the horizon, as though happy to be rid of the vessel.

They stripped, too, the skin of the ship, and fashioned it into new bodies for their elders, so that Grandpars and Grandmars could join them in the fields. They stripped the bones of the ship’s mighty underhauls, which they fashioned into the outlines of new houses. When, at last, the ship was naught but an empty indentation in a sandbar, every individual, young and middling and elder, scooped up a handful to keep in memory. They pocketed their handful of the ship as they set to work.

For this culture didn’t trust the ship had been a miracle. If it were a miracle, then there would be two more, for miracles always come in threes. One miracle is happenstance; two miracles a coincidence; three, a confirmation. More, none alive had ever witnessed, and none dead had spun songs about.

The uncertainty of miracles meant labor, raking the scabs over the desert, tilling and churning, and planting the warts and rust from the former hull, along with the thumb bones of their ancestors, which had been set aside for just such an occasion. All this planting meant making music.

So they spun songs of who built the ship, who raised its marvelous hide, who operated its great oars and gills, and every song of every sailor was at the behest of a hero. They spun many songs about this hero’s journey, about the madness that had driven him to jump overboard, or feed himself to the ship so it might still live, or his pursuit of a love that had launched a thousand such ships. None was particularly good, and none was repeated, thus disqualifying them from truly being songs. If it’s only sung once, a song might as well be an errant miracle.

They sang to work, which is the duty of song, to render long labors brief, and render brevity pleasant. They erected fine homes of the ship’s vast bones, and they patched every elder’s new body, and they marched the rows of their uncanny crops in numbers only songs had ever referenced. It could well have been the music that caused their crops to sprout.

They smelled the wrong rain coming. First a few seedling squelched, and then rows belched brine. By noon their fields showered blood upward, so many geysers as to terrify the elders. Their entire culture was sprayed, and their entire world flooded by bounty. Sandbars disappeared beneath viscous waves. The middling sang the young and elders into their new homes, with solid ceilings, and the pores of their windows fastened shut, and their rich floors rose. The riding tide lifted every home from its roots, settling them to bob like corks in global liquor. Some elders fell into the maelstrom, nerves feeble beneath their shells, yet their shells were as buoyant as the hero’s ship had once been. It was the first opportunity in half a generation that anyone had to drown, and not a soul took it.

That begat their song of the hero’s journey, not of his lust or violence, but of what they had done with the flesh and bones of his ship. They thanked him for moisture, and for the clothes, and for the homes, in choruses that echoed across the ocean that climbed until their heads stuck in the clouds. Then they sang about the clouds, and in them.

Please Don’t Be This Artist

In 2010 I saw a great movie that went totally under most people’s radars. Even I barely watched it, but caught the trailer and was intrigued enough to put it on my Netflix list. Among the movie’s many strong points was its soundtrack, which mixed ambient sound, classical music and modern instruments, turning some scenes very cheeky and others downright disturbing. I was excited to hear it over and over, to write to it, and to promote it to others. This is how I respond when I like music.

I’ve spent the last two years trying and failing to buy this soundtrack.

I won’t name the movie or its distributor because I don’t want to single out its composer for derision, nor will I name that composer. The day after I saw the movie, I searched for the soundtrack through Google, Amazon, and eventually tried iTunes and Youtube. I couldn’t find it for sale or streaming anywhere. I even resorted to the forbidden areas of the internet, without luck.

Figuring it had limited distribution (if any), I tracked down the composer’s recording label. Their website was a post-modern mess, so minimalistic that it took me what felt like an hour to find a contact feature. They never messaged me back, but I did find the composer’s social networks. When I discovered his Twitter account, I was elated.

He didn’t respond to any of my tweets, and I found that he’d set his account to Private, so I couldn’t read anything he said. I sent him a request to follow him.

It was 2011 before he accepted my request. In 2011, I still hopped on the opportunity. I tweeted at him that I enjoyed the score very much, and was there a way to buy it?

There was no response that day, week or month. A month later, I tweeted at him again. I couldn’t DM him because he wasn’t following me, but I didn’t mind that. It was also then that I noticed his account only tweeted every few months, when his music showed up in something. At that point there would be a single tweet, telling his hundred followers to go watch this movie or show. Because his account was set to Private, no one except his hundred followers ever saw this. It couldn’t show up in any keyword searches or conversations. And never in his accounts history had he actually responded to anyone about anything. He was unilaterally marketing to almost no one.

Within the last month I entered the most desperate and stupid ploy. Seeing that he’d tweeted within the last three minutes, I sent him one more @ message asking if his work might become available eventually. He’s never replied to it. Good chance, he never will. And that's fine - it's clearly a lost cause, and I'll leave him alone.

Maybe he doesn’t know how Twitter works. Maybe he can’t get the rights to sell the soundtrack and is too frustrated about it to talk to potential consumers. Maybe he’s almost blind and can barely use screens, or maybe he’s in a cult, or maybe he’s secretly a dog. I don’t know and I don’t want to judge this individual, but to judge this public appearance.

Specifically, everyone: don’t do this.

Maybe you’re so busy that you can’t reply to every fan comment, or you can’t check into social networks daily. That happens. But come on, the least you can do is:

1)      Don’t hide your promotion.

2)      Don’t refuse to engage with people who need help buying your stuff.

Now ideally, there’d be a 3), and to me, 3) is the most important.

3)      Be courteous to the people who like your art.

But I understand that 3) is tough for a lot of people for a lot of reasons, and nobody can sustain that all of the time. Even the nicest people have raw days. You’ll have a lot more, though, if you do the above.

Another Surface

You may have noticed the weird story I posted yesterday. It was surreal even for my tastes, and came about when a certain track came up while editing. Ed Harrison's "Surface" is perhaps the most stirring song on the preposterously evocative Neo Tokyo. With your assistance, I'd like to play a little experiment.

Writers, readers, general thinkers: load up the song below and close your eyes. In a few minutes, please share what this song brought to your minds. I doubt it'll be what my Surface was, but am keenly curious for just what you get out of it.

Music for Editing

This is a follow-up to Music for Writing. Because it's easier on me minute-to-minute than composition, editing my work often takes more hours of a given day. I can do more of it before my syndrome kicks back. Between January and March I got my beta readers' copies back and set about editing my first full novel in several years, and so amassing a supportive musical library was pretty important. I can't edit in silence anymore than I can compose; I need to block out the real world to tinker with the fictional one. Like Music for Writing, I'm hoping to share how certain music helped in this process. Please share your own favorite artists and albums in the Comments. You never know who you might help.

1. God is an Astronaut’s Discography

Though an egregious repeat from Music for Writing, I have to tip my hat to these folks again. I honestly don’t remember a single track that I listened to, though I went through five albums in just one day of editing. No band I know organizes an album with such consistency and flow, and no band I know is quite so useful at blending into the background of my thoughts.

Whereas in composition they could set sweeping or oppressive moods, here, with the volume turned down slightly, they became an excellent tool for keeping me alert. The trick is all its musical valleys lulled me into relaxing, and moved so slowly that I wasn’t conscious of how they carried back up, so that sometimes I managed to excite myself psychosomatically. There are so many siren-like moments in those songs, none as jarring as a police car, rather exhilarating in precisely the way I need when trying to convince myself to streamline one more fight scene.

2. Roque Banos’s Machinist OST

This album is more of a scalpel than a knife. You do not edit a love scene to “Trevor’s Lair.” Alright, maybe you do – and if you do, let me read that sucker. But I only turn this on for scenes of loneliness, eeriness, Horror before Horror arrives, and old-fashioned mystery. Banos channeled old Twilight Zone and Hitchcock soundtracks, even importing the wonderfully ridiculous theremin that strikes me with a suburban sense of unease. Though I wrote about a prison rather than suburbia, there were four particular chapters what Banos’s vibes drew me into the proper frame of mind to revise. It’s also just plain fun to read your creepier material out loud with this playing in the background.

3. The Final Fantasy 13-2 OST

However lame it makes me seem, “Paradox” was the battle theme of these edits. Not editing during fight scenes, but the rallying track I’d put on as I paced my room and convinced myself to spend more time at the computer. By about the 0:50-mark, the inspirational swells goaded me into trying to get these characters out alive. Worked every humiliating time.

At four discs, this was clearly a collaboration effort, though resting primarily on the compositions of Masashi Hamauzu, Mitsuko Suzuki and Naoshi Mizuta. I had to trim out the high number of vocal tracks from my playlist as lyrics only distract me (though some of the English lyric tracks are hilarious). Whatever you think of the franchise, it has a great history of music design, and this is one of the strongest entries. Both the “Knight of the Goddess” and “Paradigm Shift” tracks were useful at gearing me up to resume writing after short breaks.

4. The Vanquish OST

I’ve played and beaten Vanquish, and I’m still surprised there was three CDs of music in the game. Masafumi Takada and Erina Nawa’s three-disc compilation that scored an unusual Japanese action game, relying on some military themes, some rock and techno, utilizing many of the same slow-to-fast patterns and percussive rhythms even with synethetic instruments to mimic ambient sound patterns popular in Hollywood war films.

The first track (naturally titled “Title”) is like splashing water in my face. On several 8:00 AM’s, I queued it up directly after splashing real water into my face, relying on Takada and Nawa’s tunes to carry me editing into noon. For a three-disc set it follows remarkably well, and I seldom realized I was on another disc until I paused. I discontinued using it not because the music got stale, but because I associated it so strongly with marathon sessions that I began to resent it. I recommend listening, but in moderation.

5. Michael Giacchino’s Lost OST

Giacchino makes sweet and sweeping use of his orchestra, which is particularly calming when played at low volumes. It seeps into the background, blocking environmental noises and coaxing concentration the best of anything I’ve used since Akira Yamaoka’s Silent Hill albums. 

Giacchino earned bonus points from me with his penchant for punny track titles (“The Eyeland,” “Thinking Clairely,” “Charlie Hangs Around”). There are certain songs that benefit as strongly from association as anything I can recall, with “Locke’d Out Again” always pulling me into the emotional space of watching Terry O’Quinn in full pathos. That’s a handy tool.

6 & 7. Uyama Hiroto’s A Son on the Sun and Supergiant Games’s Bastion OST

In the final week of editing my nerves were shot and Writer’s Burnout was alarmingly close. I’m used to going to bed with my hands shaking; it’s less comforting to wake up with them doing that. My neuromuscular syndrome didn’t want the book to end, and I applied every trick I could to get around it. One of the best things I did was dump all my old music, which I’d spent months of emotionally attaching to long hours of work, and try new albums set at very low volume, as though overheard from another . Does music from other rooms calm anyone else? I have a serious mental compression issue there; it puts me in the headspace of leaving a party that’s gone too long, sitting out the rest of the evening and kicking the shoes off my swelling feet.

Okay, so I’m crazy. At least I own it.

I bounced between these two albums in particular. They have little in common other than not sounding like normal music, and having no words (tracks with words, naturally, were pruned). Bastion is a patch-work of Cajun, Middle Eastern and Asian influences, while Hiroto’s tunes are the most tranquil stuff. For me there’s a less rational common denominator: many of the early tracks on both albums keenly sound like the end of a day.

If you haven’t disregarded me for babbling about imaginary parties and days ending, then hopefully you’ve figured out why this kind of music is so damned useful to an overstressed mind. I couldn’t fool myself or my syndrome into believing the work was over, or even convince myself the work was as close to being over as it was. I could, however, use breathing and music to let myself know that this would be alright – it would only be a few pages, a few changes per page, a few alterations per song. At my sickest in months, I sat back in my chair and worked at the pace I could manage. The music helped. I can’t ask for more than that from music.

5 Musicians Who Made Me a Better Writer

Music is the one art-form I’ve resisted learning much about. It’s part of a long-term personal study to test if ignorance really is bliss, but it’s also because purely unconscious reactions to music are so helpful to my writing process. If tracks can elicit or sustain strong emotions for me, I have a much easier time writing the related plots out. Today I’d like to share five musical influences that have made much of my current novel possible.

1. Hans Zimmer

When the six-armed homunculus stood atop the prison, swatting pteradactyls from the sky and out into the monsoon, Hans Zimmer was there.

Nobody does bombastic music quite like Zimmer. He’s so good at the “big” sounds that I just assume soundtracks like Lord of the Rings belong to him. But fine, he didn’t compose “Minas Morgul.” The Dark Knight and Inception soundtracks have stuck with me longer for writing anyway. I keenly remember sitting in the theatre for Inception and thinking, “I need this track. I can put this on and finish that vampire story as soon as I get home.” And a week later, it worked like a charm.

Along the way he’s also had temporary hits with me – soundtracks that helped for a few months. A League of Their Own, The Last Samurai, Sherlock Holmes and Pirates of the Caribbean all have their catchy bits. I’d do jumping jacks if Zimmer scored any film adaptation of my books. Partially because that would mean it’s a big budget movie and I might hit the bestsellers list thanks to it.

In case you’re wondering, the homunculus fight song was “The Dream is Collapsing.”

2. Igor Stravinsky and those other Amazing Old Fellas

I’m uncultured. I first heard Stravinsky mentioned on the now-defunct Games For Windows podcast, when Shawn Elliot asked if videogames would ever have their Igor Stravinsky, the game designer who was great at everything he tried.

“Bullshit,” I told my speakers.

Then I listened to Stravinsky’s work. While not every arrangement stirred me, he had an astounding batting record. I played his discography and discarded plot ideas. I composed arguments set to “Duo Concertant for Violin and Piano- IV. Gigue” – The way one beat of violins ends and another picks up/I can hear where one person stops and the other picks up in bickering.

And just like that, there was a chase scene to “Moderato alla breve” from Symphony in C. At least two dramatic reveals came from “Allegro moderato” from Symphony In E Flat.

He doesn’t have the one great theme that I keep going back to like other classical composers. Even in revisions, when I have to walk around thinking over a problem, I’ve gone to “In A Major, Op. 92- 2nd Movement- Allegretto” from Beethoven’s 7^th. I adore Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and am always trying to get fightscenes to work with it. Probably my all-time most inspiring song is Ode to Joy. I’m a sucker for the immutable greats. But Stravinsky’s work has somehow served as more versatile inspiration. I go to each symphony and movement less frequently, but the overall body is an inspirational toolkit.

3. Akira Yamaoka and Silent Hill

Akira Yamaoka is quite possibly the most talented sound designer I’ve ever witnessed. He composed the soundtracks for the Silent Hill videogames up until and including the Homecoming installment, and provided the score for the first Hollywood adaptation. He composed tracks to draw eeriness from a foggy screen, the somberness of sitting at the bedside of a dying lover, and terror from being chased by a giant wielding a meat cleaver. Part of his charm is an unmatched ear for ambient sound, and a similarly unmatched talent for blending it with traditional instruments, so that a guitar and the screeching of a steel door harmonize, as do static and a cello. Industrial sounds are as natural as any instruments, so that once you’re used to his style, there’s no novelty. This is just the way the music expresses itself.

Just as the Horror games benefitted from association with masterful music, the music has since taken on the benefits of association with that series. But I don’t write ripoffs of Silent Hill to this music. I summon it for frantic scenes, or ominous, or even serene ones. As creepy as Silent Hill gets, Yamaoka imbued it with some of the most tranquil songs I’ve ever heard to reaffirm places where you were safe. I’ve probably listened to the most hours of his music, both while writing and not.

My record is nine straight hours of one tiny track, “Silent Heaven,” looping as I wrote, went to bed, woke up the next morning and kept going to a breakthrough. Something in that track completely synched with this malicious disembodied voice I was writing into a character’s head. I’ve never had another experience like it. I presume the dorm mate downstairs hadn’t, either.

4. Ed Harrison

I have been trying to track this guy down. I think he’s got a tiny network on LinkedIn. He composed NeoTokyo, a soundtrack for an indy mod of Valve’s Half-Life. So he didn’t make a videogame soundtrack; he made the soundtrack for a fan-made spinoff. And it’s incredible. The music tops Bladerunner for noir and futurepunk feel. If he somehow reads this, please shake your own hand. You’ve got two, after all.

The album quickly became another toolbox for me. Songs latched onto and abetted particular instances of plot.

Walking the halls of the prison lost in thought? “Tachi.”

Encountering an alien creature larger than anything on this planet? “Out.”

Discovering the one room of people who not only need his help, but deserve it? “Beacon.”

Recently revising those scenes in the novel I’m left thinking, “It wouldn’t have come out this way without that song.”

5. God is an Astronaut

Being so uncultured, I don’t listen to many full albums. I just pull the songs I like and junk the rest. God is an Astronaut is a rare exception; I’ll pop in one full album and let it go. The music is so carefully constructed that the tracks move elegantly into one another, at least elegantly against each other. There’s nothing jarring about writing to All Is Violent, All Is Bright.

I sheepishly admit that if that album does go to a wildly different place at the end, I haven’t noticed. By the end I’ll have gone where I wanted in the prose. More times than with any other band or composer, I’ll finish a short story or chapter and realize the music ended a long time ago. God is an Astronaut delivers me into emotions that I can’t pull up on my own, but I can sustain. It’s like kite launching.

And if I surface from unfinished fiction, I’ve had great luck with hitting PLAY again and closing the deal. Enormous thanks to friend and podcastmate Max Cantor for introducing me to them.

So this is the music that’s meant the most to my writing in recent years. Please let me know what works for you. I'm always curious to expand my influences.