Sunday, April 22, 2007

a novel idea, or two

"this is what you get" - girl falls in love with rock star who barely notices her. (status: complete - an agent is looking at this)

"everything is perfect" - girl punk rocker and guy heavy metaller fall in love and make strange and new music. also, she unearths deep secrets from her family's past. (status: first draft complete, it is resting so i can look at it again with new eyes)

"not named yet" - girl singer-songwriter with difficult family past yet upbeat fortitude meets guy singer-songwriter with death obsession. (status: about 50 pages, a little of each story, new and just developing)

one day, maybe i'll consider novels without rock music in them. i guess this all has to get out of my system. the best part of this is picking the soundtrack to each scene as i write. i discovered that in 1996 there was a secret radiohead show at the troubadour. the set list is online, and so i created a playlist from it, and was able to play that over and over as i wrote a scene of my heroine attending this secret show and discovering real music finally (she moves from the spice girls to radiohead in the course of one summer).

on itunes right now: "how to disappear completely"
so fucking beautiful ..... "i'm not here, this isn't happening."

8 comments:

Lisa said...

I love that, moving from Spice Girls to Radiohead in one summer.

Yay for your books! You have been prolific lately.

Have you ever read Bongwater? I'll lend it to you if not. It's kind of good.

amyonymous said...

bongwater? never heard of it. sounds like summer reading to me. everything, at this point, is summer reading. i'm going to have to read a book a day to get through my stacks of stuff.

Anonymous said...

hi amylola,
do you mind if you put our dot-project campaign at your blog :)

amyonymous said...

done. it's in my list of links. and later i will mention it in a post.

KEMENTERIAN DESAIN INDONESIA said...

great!!!... thanks very much amylola
waditya :)

Anonymous said...

Am mightily impressed by your work rate. For some time I have been toying with/planning a novel about a guy in a public school indie band struggling to write songs for his second album whilst he discovers his father (who disappeared at his birth) wrote a book about chimpanzee art. Unfortunately, it'll be some time before this one becomes a reality. Not only am I picking the soundtrack, but trying to write some of that as well... In which case, please don't flood the market for rock music novels

amyonymous said...

samuel. i've written these over the course of two years, at night and on weekends. i appreciate your belief that i will flood the market, but that seems highly unlikely! AND i will buy your book when you finish and get it published, because it sounds so good! i wish i could compose the music to go along with my characters - i do lyrics but no music.

Anonymous said...

A late reply... thanks for the minor encouragement. i have a habit of working with plots that sound wacky and intriguing, but turn out to be more conservative in the end (my first languishing and unpublished novel was about the one man who refused to take his trousers off when nudists took over the world). I don't know how Radiohead compose, but personally I've discovered that it's almost impossible to write music around words, so I start with a loose tune, and see what happens from then on... The main character in the chimpanzee novel will no doubt share this method