Demonic Orchestra

I miss composing music, but there is no space to set up my equipment amongst other things – I lost Cubase around ten years ago and I can’t afford to replace it.  I have learned in the past two years how to read music, but I am still not au fait with it to the point of any real confidence. 

In the past few weeks I have wanted to compose music more than anything because my mind is literally torturing me with tunes and songs that need to be made – particularly instrumental music.

It’s getting very loud in my mind and there is nothing I can do about it right now.

I love instrumentals and the kind of music that is in my head is tango music, circus waltzes and similar sounds to my biggest musical inspirations Nox Arcana and B&B Project!

I did do composition for rock music and alternative too, but it is mostly classical or instrumental for me really.

I have four tunes that keep repeating themselves in my head and they do so at length and they get excessively loud at times and give me really bad headaches because I am ignoring them.  It is exhausting to hear it, it tires me out and it comes to me mostly when I am in bed trying to get to sleep – that’s when it is their loudest!

What is even more annoying is the visuals I get when this happens – I don’t mean real visuals, nothing like hallucinations or anything like that, no – what I mean is, the scenery in which the music wants to be played.  The music seems to demand being played in my stories, as parts of movies or something, it shows me what must happen for the perfect habitat for my music to reside.

I sometimes wonder if I am crazy…

“A perfect habitat for my music to reside”, that’s crazy talk right?

My compositions are like living breathing demons, well, if you heard the music and saw the imagery, you’d wonder if they were demons too…

The music that wants to be born in recent weeks sound like Halloween background music for Halloween waltzes or tangoes… it’s not something you’d usually hear at say The BBC Proms.  Instruments such as the accordion, bandura and violin lead the music here. 

Some of the music sound like a demonic nursery lullabies or music boxes, instruments such as glockenspiels, glass harps and glass bells lead the orchestra.  This tune in particular has decided to set its scene in my horror story which you’ll know as boat 1, this story is about ghost children.

I need to compose again, I need these tunes to be heard, but it’s difficult right now.  So I guess, I will let the demonic orchestra from Hell send me mad then?

It perhaps would be fun to do collaboration with other horror writers about a musician being sent mad by demonic music that he must compose; a sort of musical Arabian nights meets the devil! 

Stop, no more ideas brain, please, I am drowning in ideas!

Maybe this is the devil’s idea for a certain writer? 

Happy reading!

Reflections of consequence

Upon reflecting at my notes for new stories, I realise that around a third of everything I plan to write is vampire based.  So this is a revelation because I thought I wrote vampires more than any other subject, but no, it is second to fantasy.  Horror is actually not within the top three subjects I write about but is actually fourth, behind dystopia. 

The poetry I write is really just a means to fulfil the frustrated composer and song writer in me.  Poetry is a way in keeping me sane from the loss of composing music via Cubase, I no longer have Cubase and there is a void in my heart because of it.  I can’t read and write music properly but I have been trying to learn recently, so I can try and learn to cope without Cubase, as I miss it a lot.  I have no desire whatsoever to be a singer though; I just love making music and writing lyrics.

I think about music as much as I think about my stories, but I have learned to give up music for various reasons.  Occasionally ignoring it can make me go literally insane enough that I have to blurt out poetry just to shut the thoughts up in my mind, but it is starting to get quite loud in my mind lately.  Not sure how long I have before I will give in and sell stuff just to get another type of music software to help me.  I bought a glockenspiel last year hoping to sate my need for music and around once every eighteen months I notice I buy a new instrument just to try and sate the musician in me, but I think my brain is getting wise to these distractions.

I do believe that if you are creative and you have many outlets, to ignore any one of those outlets for too long can both make you go nuts, but also seep into your other creative works and make you resent the attention you give them, because you are ignoring the other.  All creative outlets are both food and poison for the other ones, depends on whether or not they feel neglected or not, a bit like a polygamous lover, you know?

I am an Artist, Gardener, Musician, Writer; I do sing and I used to like acting in drama classes at college, I do voices too.  It is strange that since I totally gave up practising my voices, that I have been getting a lot of illnesses that affect the throat, some spiritual healers tell me they are not surprised, because it is the throat chakras way in responding to this creative neglect.  I suppose too then, that when I don’t write for a while, the migraines I get in my head are to do with the stories having a civil war in my mind too?

I’m very spiritual, so to me, everything happens for a reason and I believe that sickness can be caused because you are neglecting a spiritual or creative part of you.  I think love and freedom has a lot to do with a person’s overall health and I suppose that it is this reason that I am ill.  I don’t have much love and I never had much freedom, I don’t mean to sound whiny but it is true and therefore, it is unsurprising that I have autoimmunity issues.

I am very unsurprised that a vast majority of my illnesses are ear, throat and stomach related.  Because throughout my life I have heard things I do not like to hear, I have never spoken about what has happened to me and I hold back when trying to stand up for myself verbally, I also ate things I never wanted to.  So when you reflect on things like this, you can plainly see how it can all make you ill in those parts of you.

I find myself a lot, saying to people I don’t want to hear this, it is not kind, I don’t want to hear this, it is too negative.  I am such a sensitive person, I don’t like hearing negative things spoken all the time, I don’t like hearing another person’s distress.  I lost my hearing when I was a teenager in my right ear, because I kept hearing things I didn’t like, now I still hear things I don’t like and gradually I am losing hearing in the left ear too.

I either have to become harder and more tolerant to what I hear, or completely isolate myself from society altogether, lol.  If I chose the latter, it will surely affect the health of my heart due to a lack of connection and love?  So I will have to learn to harden up and become tolerant to the negativity around me, I don’t know how I will do that, but it needs to start happening soon, or I won’t be able to hear music anymore, let alone play it.

Anyway, happy reading and I will post again tomorrow, thank you for being here!

Sunday Word Count 6

Sunday word count time!

Unfortunately I hit “The Wall of Shame” again with this amount of words done towards a novel this week.

7896 words

Well at least it is better than last weeks!

Here is how it is broken down.

25^th August – 1564 words – not bad considering the week before I hardly wrote a thing per day.

26^th August – 867 words – quite low about two pages.

27^th August – 2919 words – excellent, I should have more days like this!

28^th August – 832 words – hmm, low again.

29^th August – 879 words – I am not happy with the way the novel is going if I have to be honest – which I do!

30^th August – 835 words – low again, getting bored with this particular novel, so I probably may be like this for some time until this draft is complete then start again for the 6^th attempt!

31^st August – nothing – well I was getting bored and sometimes it’s best to step away if this happens for a small while and then get back to it at a later date.  But I had other ideas I was working on, so this day and the other low days really should have been filled up doing the other novels, not just concentrating on just this one and thinking about my new musical instrument all day!

So the summary is this, quite low word count with quite low quality writing for much of the week!

My excuses are;

There are no excuses for such poor quality word counts and writing other than the fact that I was bored with the one particular story I was working towards!  So, I should have moved onto another story that I am writing which captivates me better – which I did not do!

Why?

A new musical instrument entered the house on the 28^th August and I fell in love with it.  I have never seriously learned an instrument before and this is one where I intend to seriously learn it – I have done approximately fourteen hours of self-taught (via YouTube) lessons since, this averages to three hours per day; plus I am trying to learn music theory and notation, something which I have never done before, trying to learn the names of the notes I am playing and how to read music so that I can eventually write music!

I have always had this desire in my life and it was never as strong as it is now. 

I thought if I don’t learn to read and write music now, then I probably never will and so I decided that never is NEVER going to happen! 

I write a lot of poetry, but I also write a lot of songs, the songs I rarely post on my blog and my brain has always taunted me with music that should go with the songs – it is getting torturous lately, to say the least, so this is why I have to learn music professionally.

I have always been like this with music, so it is astounding why my brain has to literally send me loopy in order to get me started on taking music more seriously.  I suppose I always used my left hand disability as an excuse?  “I can’t because my left hand, what if they want me to demonstrate the music”?  Whine, whine, and whine!

I started to practise by ear only when I was very small on my grandmother’s piano around the same time I started to learn to read and write – so music has been with me for a very long time, if not longer than writing!

I am excited by learning musical notation because I have learned that each musical instrument has the same basis and therefore once I learn where the notes are for each instrument I have previously played I could in fact learn the same tunes on every instrument.  I don’t know musical jargon yet, but I am getting there!

The types of music that are in my head vary in genre from mostly classical, jazz and rock but especially classical!  I hear so often these days that “classical music has no future” and I really want to stick my middle finger up at people who say that!  I believe it does and if anything it is hearing this regularly which has spurred on my insanity to prove them bloody wrong!

In fact I am under exaggerating here, I am practically getting psychotic about showing people they are wrong about classical music becoming a dying force in the world.

I do have some music still available from my old floppy disks from 2000 that I composed by ear on Cubase with my keyboard, I don’t know if my computer or modern technology can upload it here on the blog successfully, but I think I will try!

I think I will upload my storm music.  Or try.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work here, sorry – I tried.  MP3 floppy 20yrs old, don’t know how to convert that, can anyone comment below if they know how – please?  

Also and I don’t mean to pick on the poor chap, but Henry doesn’t go back to school until the 3^rd of September, so perhaps my writing will improve from then onwards?  If it doesn’t then I am a rotten mother who uses her kid as an excuse, which I think I am that anyway!  Talking of which Henry been trying to get me to become music teacher for him, despite it being the lame leading the lame at the moment, lol.  He hasn’t the patience to learn for more than 15 to 30 minutes a day like I do.  He is too addicted to Robot Wars, Ryan’s toy review and now WWE wrestling!

I wanted to say that the writing I am clocking up every week is purely towards novels I am working on, it is not research notes, synopsises, plans, blog posts, daily pages like 750words.com or anything else that I might be working on – so I don’t have lazy writer syndrome, if you are interested in seeing just how much I do write per day, let me know in the comments below and I will give you an entire summary of all my work in just one week and one week only! 

Anyway, those are my excuses for this week and I am sticking to them!

Carnival of Lost Souls

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Carnival-Lost-Souls-Nox-Arcana/dp/B000FOT9EE/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1436560945&sr=8-4&keywords=Nox+Arcana

A lot of my work comes about because of the thoughts that come to my mind when I listen to certain music; my inspiration changes with each kind of music I listen to, this is why I love instrumental music, particularly that from Nox Arcana.
I have all of their albums, they are essential for me to work effectively. Never before has a band affected me in such a way as Nox Arcana. Their music is exactly the kind of atmosphere I need to set my brain into for my work in fantasy and horror writing and art.

I might very well review each album or song separately someday, but the most listened to album for me is this one – Carnival of Lost Souls.

The amount of fantasy horror I’ve thought of. I have even thought about a comic series because of this music, this along with (sorry, something not Nox Arcana related) = The Honky Tonk Merry-go-round by Patsy Cline. Oh the things I have dreamt, thank you Nox Arcana, very much for this one. Johnny Depp is going to love you all the more if he ever reads my stuff and found out his new nightmares were inspired by you. *insert evil laugh here*.

Since I lost Cubase many moons ago, my computer isn’t hooked up with music composing software anymore (and I can’t read or write music, but I can play by ear and compose – with the software). My music was similar to Nox Arcana, that’s why I love it so much. I think the band must be within my soul group or something? Anyway, once I figured out how to configure my old Microsoft XP files onto my new computer (perhaps in Neverwhere) I will load up my old music and share it. Otherwise, if I really am in Neverwhere with that then my old music has been lost in the ethers of time forever. *Insert forlorn pierrot here*.

My creativity really is controlled by the type of music that’s around me at the time. In the times of no music, I tend to write flatly and that’s only suitable when I am writing non-fiction or essays.

Now being deaf, I rely heavily on vibrations, lip-reading and my two hearing aids and I am not looking forward to the day that my consultant said is in the near future, that I will lose my hearing altogether. Unfortunately at the time this was said to me, the consultant in question told me that there is nothing they can do to repair my hearing if the worst case scenario crops up, thankfully I know someone in the ENT department abroad who says that’s utter tosh. So fingers crossed that I will never lose my hearing completely.

I don’t know what I would do without my Nox Arcana!