Thursday 17 February 2000

Pic of the day: For a change, this is not a picture of today, though the weather is similar. This is from February last year, found by accident on a zip disk. A sweet memory.

Felt rather awful this morning and called in sick. I feel better now in the evening, though. Only my throat worries me now. I've reached the end of the C vitamin box and the yoghurts. And I've got some sleep. Right now I'm playing some relaxing music on my infamous new stereo: Sweet memories, a CD with Richard Clayderman. This character was popular when we were young. Basically it is piano music, and in this case a collection of evergreens.

I do not know for certain if I have two or three of this CD. This depends on whether it was just Old Friend who borrowed it or another female friend too. I suspect the latter, but I am not sure. If so, someone still has one, and they are welcome to it. I'm not big on Clayderman myself, mainly I buy mood music just to try to please the "chicks".
(Someone has informed me, gently, that I should not refer to women as "chicks" unless I also would accept the converse, namely being referred to as a rooster - or a shorter synonym for same. I guess this is generally good advice. But actually, I must admit that some of the things young men do are not all that different from the rooster grandstanding in the hen yard.)

Even with timid instrumental music like this, I find it hard to write with the music on. Perhaps this is because I am so extremely one-sided in my brain. No, not like that. I mean, you have probably heard about how we have two brain halves. And these two have slightly different function. Also, they control our right and left arms, legs etc. (For some reason, the right half controls the left side of our body, and the other way around. Don't ask me why. I just work here.) Anyway, on a test I scored 10 out of 10 left brain. That's very unusual, actually. But one possible effect of this is that I am very bad at multitasking. Yes, I can walk and chew gum at the same time. But listening to songs while writing confuses me. Instrumental is better, or languages which I don't understand. The worst is songs in the same language that I am reading or writing.

A funny side effect is that I never managed to concentrate on other things during school, when the teachers were doing their antics in the front of the classroom. Other pupils could daydream or make intricate drawings or debate carefully with each other. Me, I found my mind glued to the teacher. I guess this explains why I did reasonably well in school, despite actively avoiding my homework. (Another factor was my curiosity that made me read the school books before the school even really started.)

So anyway, I don't really have any background music here. I often have played some kind of music prior to writing, and it sets the mood. Sometimes, the mood selects the music instead.

This works for writing fiction too. I looked in one of my plastic bags of CDs, and found that this album or another had already been associated with some fictive story I was writing. It is strange how I can put on a record and suddenly a novel I was writing comes back to me. The way I do it is that I play the song(s) again and again while the story builds up inside me. Playing it in the background while writing is only feasible if I have played it very often, so it sort of fades into the background noise. :)

I haven't been writing any fiction today, though, despite being home from work. I often do when I have a vacation, but this isn't really much of a vacation. (I did get to play some Daggerfall, though.) Right now the only stories that come to mind are Daggerfall fanfic. And in that case, I am more likely to roleplay it than write it. :)

It is strange when I take the time to look through some of my unfinished tales. I have some on floppies, while older ones are in binders. There are stories from back before I got my PCs. Stories written on a manual typewriter about the same age as myself. Stories that take me back in time ... back to a more innocent time, despite all.

A few of the stories are light fantasy, filled with puns and strange creatures and funny magic. Others are like text versions of superhero comics, dwelling on the problems of the extremely gifted. Heh. And then there are slice of life stories, mostly about overly religious young people and their vain search for love and true humanity. And a few stories about young men obsessed with computers, and their slow descent into madness. Or combinations of the above. Ahem.

It's not like all (or most) of it is autobiographic. But yes, there are some elements that - if nothing else - call forth memories.