Those 10,000 Words Just Sort Of Vanished
One of the least known or most forgotten facts about Tupac Shakur, besides the fact that he was a huge Kate Bush fan (not shitting anyone, watch "Tupac: Resurrection") is that he was born in New York City (112th Street and 7th Avenue in Harlem). He's so associated with the west coast (mostly due to his role in the fued with Bad Boy Records on behalf of Death Row Records) that nearly no one considers him a New York City artist.
But the saddest irony of his death is that he never abandoned the East Coast despite being killed over being said to do so.
Why on Earth do I mention this? What on Earth does this have to do with my novel? Just about everything.
Tupac Shakur has provided the theme song to my novel. It only took 26 days to establish what song best fit the mood of the story and oddly enough it turns out that it's Tupac's "My Block". The lyrics to the song itself had nothing to do with five white twenty and thirty somethings trying to survive after a storm surge floods New York City but the theme of block identification is so crucial to my novel this year that it fits too perfectly.
It only took almost 40,000 words, but I finally came up with the equivalent of a title song for the novel in the following passages:
"The entire trip out of Greenwich Village had been a trip down memory lane for Beth. Sloggin away from the river on 10th Street, she took a look at the buildings where she and her boyfriend had strolled on many a sunny summer night, including just a few month prior. Turning up Hudson Street, she remembered the smells of pies and fresh baked bread coming out of the bakeries. When that piece of her neighborhood turned into Ninth Avenue and continued to head uptown, she thought about the times she had rode her bicycle to work when she had come in late intentionally just to watch the families play on the sidewalks or the artists and philosophers chatting away under umbrellas with mid-morning beer and wine in front of them and their hands gesticulating widely.
Greenwich Village had given way gently to Chelsea north of 14th Street as it had so many times in the past as Beth’s cohorts argued away. That had been why she had been so preoccupied and hadn’t bothered to stop them. She knew the borderline was not as well defined as most people would think it would be between the bohemian West Village and the ritzier Chelsea. Beth knew that despite the difference in the clientele at the restaurants and bars, there was one thing that remained the same – the people who had not been driven out for decades.
No matter where you looked in New York City there were always two New Yorks, the new New York with its gentrification and the old New York with the three generations descended from immigrants. She had a jealousy of this fact because it was something she would never be a part of in New York City. It was something she had left behind in Boston, walking the same streets that her grandparents had played in the 1930s. She had played with the same people’s grandchildren. It was like the generations were united by the same buildings and the same roads and the same families and the same memories. Nothing seemed like it could ever sever this connection. Some families moved away and some new ones moved in to be taken into the living, breathing block. People died but the block lived on, the city couldn’t be killed.
But what was the most depressing about the past few hours was that it had become obvious that the city could be killed. If you took out all of the people at once, the city was no longer the city. The neighborhood were no longer the neighborhood. The blocks were no longer the blocks. New York was nothing more than a lost city. It might as well have been Atlantis despite only being buried under feet of water and not miles. It hadn’t taken a volcano burying it in yards of ash to turn New York City into Pompeii. And while New York City had the advantage of having been evacuated by-and-large before its death knell could have been sounded and the people could return, it would never be the same again.
The people who had stayed behind had already begun to reshape the city in their own way and it hadn’t always been for the best. But they had begun to stake claims to their new surroundings even if it was just temporary. Or those who hadn’t relocated had begun to re-establish their old social orders like they had in the building that had provided temporary shelter. Maybe it was harder to break down the real New York City than just a little disaster. Maybe the real city would be resilient despite how many people from the new city left after losing the place they had chose to temporarily hang their hat. Maybe the city would start breathing and pulsing again once the system had the water removed from its lungs and maybe it would be a stronger city without all of the hangers on – herself included."
There's nothing about lullabyes in there but that's the whole title theme of the lost city in a nutshell.
---
I actually almost established the complete sountrack for my novel this year. I'm sure that there's a thread on nanowrimo.org to list this but I haven't run across it yet.
Most of the tracks are by New York City artists or are about New York City. This is partially for inspiration and partially because I feel guilty about destroying that piece of the United States for word count in a novel that almost no one will ever read.
These aren't in a good order or anything but here they are:
"Emerge" by Fischerspooner
"My Block" by Tupac Shakur
"Points Of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer" by Linkin Park & Jay-Z
"Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)" by Jay-Z
"I Run Shit" by DMX
"He Got Game" by Public Enemy
"La Vie Boheme" by Johnathan Larson (a track actually demographically correct?)
"New York" by Ja Rule
"New York City" by They Might Be Giants (way too upbeat to be influential)
"New York City Boy" by Pet Shop Boys (another demographically correct song?)
"New York Minute" by Don Henley (definitely fitting)
"Perfect Day" by Lou Reed
"Sleep Tight In New York City" by Black 47
"Super Bon Bon" by Soul Coughing
"Beth" by Kiss
"Total Eclipse Of The Heart" by Bonnie Tyler
"Lullabye" by Ben Folds Five
"Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel)" by Billy Joel
"Lullabye" by Concrete Blonde
"My List" by The Killers
"Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel)" was actually the song I heard on the radio that inspired the whole novel this year. It was the line at the end that goes, "someday we'll all be gone...but lullabyes go on and on...they never die...that's how you...
and I...live on and on," that inspired the immortal neighborhood idea. Anything can kill off humans but a city takes more to take down.
I'm sure that there's some Interpol or something that I could listen to in order to inspire me as well but I'm too busy trying to frantically write currently to really put much thought into the theme music for the novel - hence my google-esque search of Rhapsody for New York songs (though I got rid of many of the ones that came up).
That list is as much of a mish-mash as the novel itself. No wonder the writing process has been such a mess this year. Priority number one for next year needs to be getting my musical acoompaniment house in order before starting.
---
I guess it's better late than never on the soundtrack since it has helped me to write 4,390 words today after I was ready to give up the ghost yesterday. That sentiment is how "My List" by The Killers ended up on the soundtrack with its chorus mantra - "don't give the ghost up, just clench your fists!"
That and I'm taking off any rules that I had as far as when I wrote. I used to only write when I had time to get a good flow going (crap, I am listening to too much rap) which was usually about an hour. But since I haven't seemed to be able to get any chunks that large except for the evening, I'm now writing in as little as 15 or 30 minute blocks.
Whenever I have time to boot up my laptop, it's getting a workout. Today I had six separate writing sessions including three sprints during the drive home from Detroit this afternoon.
For anyone else reading this who needs a last push, there's a thread called, "4 Days. What Are You Doing To Help Yourself Finish" in the NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul forum.
Hopefully they'll be more helpful.
Ordinarily at this point in the month, I'm about 6,000 words ahead of where I am now ready to finish around the 28th. This year, I'm trying to urge myself on so I don't how much encouragement I have for everyone else.
Remember how I said that I was going to reach 50,000 over the long Thanksgiving weekend? What I meant to say was 40,000. :)
But the saddest irony of his death is that he never abandoned the East Coast despite being killed over being said to do so.
Why on Earth do I mention this? What on Earth does this have to do with my novel? Just about everything.
Tupac Shakur has provided the theme song to my novel. It only took 26 days to establish what song best fit the mood of the story and oddly enough it turns out that it's Tupac's "My Block". The lyrics to the song itself had nothing to do with five white twenty and thirty somethings trying to survive after a storm surge floods New York City but the theme of block identification is so crucial to my novel this year that it fits too perfectly.
It only took almost 40,000 words, but I finally came up with the equivalent of a title song for the novel in the following passages:
"The entire trip out of Greenwich Village had been a trip down memory lane for Beth. Sloggin away from the river on 10th Street, she took a look at the buildings where she and her boyfriend had strolled on many a sunny summer night, including just a few month prior. Turning up Hudson Street, she remembered the smells of pies and fresh baked bread coming out of the bakeries. When that piece of her neighborhood turned into Ninth Avenue and continued to head uptown, she thought about the times she had rode her bicycle to work when she had come in late intentionally just to watch the families play on the sidewalks or the artists and philosophers chatting away under umbrellas with mid-morning beer and wine in front of them and their hands gesticulating widely.
Greenwich Village had given way gently to Chelsea north of 14th Street as it had so many times in the past as Beth’s cohorts argued away. That had been why she had been so preoccupied and hadn’t bothered to stop them. She knew the borderline was not as well defined as most people would think it would be between the bohemian West Village and the ritzier Chelsea. Beth knew that despite the difference in the clientele at the restaurants and bars, there was one thing that remained the same – the people who had not been driven out for decades.
No matter where you looked in New York City there were always two New Yorks, the new New York with its gentrification and the old New York with the three generations descended from immigrants. She had a jealousy of this fact because it was something she would never be a part of in New York City. It was something she had left behind in Boston, walking the same streets that her grandparents had played in the 1930s. She had played with the same people’s grandchildren. It was like the generations were united by the same buildings and the same roads and the same families and the same memories. Nothing seemed like it could ever sever this connection. Some families moved away and some new ones moved in to be taken into the living, breathing block. People died but the block lived on, the city couldn’t be killed.
But what was the most depressing about the past few hours was that it had become obvious that the city could be killed. If you took out all of the people at once, the city was no longer the city. The neighborhood were no longer the neighborhood. The blocks were no longer the blocks. New York was nothing more than a lost city. It might as well have been Atlantis despite only being buried under feet of water and not miles. It hadn’t taken a volcano burying it in yards of ash to turn New York City into Pompeii. And while New York City had the advantage of having been evacuated by-and-large before its death knell could have been sounded and the people could return, it would never be the same again.
The people who had stayed behind had already begun to reshape the city in their own way and it hadn’t always been for the best. But they had begun to stake claims to their new surroundings even if it was just temporary. Or those who hadn’t relocated had begun to re-establish their old social orders like they had in the building that had provided temporary shelter. Maybe it was harder to break down the real New York City than just a little disaster. Maybe the real city would be resilient despite how many people from the new city left after losing the place they had chose to temporarily hang their hat. Maybe the city would start breathing and pulsing again once the system had the water removed from its lungs and maybe it would be a stronger city without all of the hangers on – herself included."
There's nothing about lullabyes in there but that's the whole title theme of the lost city in a nutshell.
---
I actually almost established the complete sountrack for my novel this year. I'm sure that there's a thread on nanowrimo.org to list this but I haven't run across it yet.
Most of the tracks are by New York City artists or are about New York City. This is partially for inspiration and partially because I feel guilty about destroying that piece of the United States for word count in a novel that almost no one will ever read.
These aren't in a good order or anything but here they are:
"Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel)" was actually the song I heard on the radio that inspired the whole novel this year. It was the line at the end that goes, "someday we'll all be gone...but lullabyes go on and on...they never die...that's how you...
and I...live on and on," that inspired the immortal neighborhood idea. Anything can kill off humans but a city takes more to take down.
I'm sure that there's some Interpol or something that I could listen to in order to inspire me as well but I'm too busy trying to frantically write currently to really put much thought into the theme music for the novel - hence my google-esque search of Rhapsody for New York songs (though I got rid of many of the ones that came up).
That list is as much of a mish-mash as the novel itself. No wonder the writing process has been such a mess this year. Priority number one for next year needs to be getting my musical acoompaniment house in order before starting.
---
I guess it's better late than never on the soundtrack since it has helped me to write 4,390 words today after I was ready to give up the ghost yesterday. That sentiment is how "My List" by The Killers ended up on the soundtrack with its chorus mantra - "don't give the ghost up, just clench your fists!"
That and I'm taking off any rules that I had as far as when I wrote. I used to only write when I had time to get a good flow going (crap, I am listening to too much rap) which was usually about an hour. But since I haven't seemed to be able to get any chunks that large except for the evening, I'm now writing in as little as 15 or 30 minute blocks.
Whenever I have time to boot up my laptop, it's getting a workout. Today I had six separate writing sessions including three sprints during the drive home from Detroit this afternoon.
For anyone else reading this who needs a last push, there's a thread called, "4 Days. What Are You Doing To Help Yourself Finish" in the NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul forum.
Hopefully they'll be more helpful.
Ordinarily at this point in the month, I'm about 6,000 words ahead of where I am now ready to finish around the 28th. This year, I'm trying to urge myself on so I don't how much encouragement I have for everyone else.
Remember how I said that I was going to reach 50,000 over the long Thanksgiving weekend? What I meant to say was 40,000. :)
posted by incendiarymind at 8:18 PM
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