And now, for the seventh segment of things that make you stop, stare, and get the creativity waterwheel churning. Or at least, in this case, make you stop and stare. And marvel at coincidence.
Yay, just hit my minimum NaNoWriMo quota for today. Shall return to that soon after ingesting some nice painkillers for my tiredness headache. Thought it was time for a silly little blog. This is one I should have scribed a few days ago, as the event occurred a few days ago, but instead wrote my little post about book covers as a bit of a time saver. I was meant to be doing other things – most pressingly, I wanted to do more preparation for choir. After writing my previous post, I had one last barrel through the music for our concert, listening to the files while following along with the sheet music. The concert was yesterday, Mendelssohn’s Elijah. This is the main cause of my tiredness – didn’t get back from the cruisy post-concert party until four. The performance sounded really good, I think, though I’m not sure how successful we were when it came to breaking even.
Anyway, before I had my last lone music practice, and before I wrote that last blog – might even have been the day before that, I can’t remember exactly – I was having a bit of a chat with Mum, who was busy trying to come up with a band name for her book. Decided that sounded like fun and started to “help,” looking up a few random band name generators. After the both of us reading out a huge number of potential names that fluctuated from meh, to strange, to ridiculous, to what the? – for some reason a great many of them seemed be connected with nether regions in some way, with particularly high usage of the term “rectum” – I came across this generator, designed to tell you the name of your first hit single.
Decided to give it a go, choosing “rocker” – closest style to describe my tastes, the other options were emo, gansta, and country star – and typed in my name. The hit single title Ireceived kind of stopped me in my tracks. Not that I was moving particularly fast. Being in the lounge room. Sitting on the couch. And all.
But yeah. The single name.
Brand New Fantasies.
Though I’m aware the intended meaning of these particular “fantasies” probably isn’t on par with my own interpretation, one of the greatest motivations behind writing my ridiculously-long novel was that I was so tired of going to a library in search of a new fantasy novel, picking one from the shelf at random, and finding after only a five second browse of the blurb that it was essentially the same as every other fantasy novel I’ve read. I tried to steer away from quests and spells and swords, and wrote my novel in semi-rebellion, attempting (as I’m sure many of these writers were trying to do with their own stories) to create an entirely new fantasy, one that is difficult to compare with the Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, or any other of the well-known titles.
Unpublished, I’m not yet able to tell if I’ve succeeded. Perhaps I’ve failed as miserably as all those books I so irritably shoved back onto their shelves. Perhaps these authors did actually succeed in creating a brand new fantasy, and I was foolish not to investigate further than their front cover and blurb. If that’s the case, it’s the blurbs that let them down. Bad blurbs are bad, no?
I’m really going to need to write an awesome blurb to eventually sell this thing.
dollthermometer 