Rediscovering the groove.

Perfect porch perch weather is perfect.

It's something I have to do every time I start a new project.
The right atmosphere to encourage the muses. The right music for white noise. Rarely does the same music work for more than one project.
This time, I couldn't even stay in the same genre of music. Perhaps because this project is in a different realm than my most recent works. It strays back into the universe of the Doctrine and Alliance, political foes constantly at each others' throats, though its cast of characters is entirely removed.

It has no name just yet, and it's shaping up to meld together a couple ideas that had been gestating on the back burner. One based on a dream I had decades ago about the reclamation of a military base by the indigenous locals, and an unrelated story about a genetically modified assassin whose xeno-genetics overload its psyche--the ensuing bloodbath of a killing spree lands it in a maximum security intergalactic prison. It seems my writer brain has decided that one event is the precursor, the trigger, of the other.

There's something about analog writing.

The combination should make for an interesting writing journey, since the reclamation story had a pair of assassin arch-rivals lurking in the shadows trying to best one another. Sort of ... black ops, white noise.

So I broke out the closest pen and a notebook and settled onto the chaise lounge on the porch with the window open. The weather was surprisingly cool and breezy for late summer, but you won't hear me complaining about it.
I got more written-- fleshing out a thorough overhaul of scenes written from dream sequence memory long ago-- than I expected. I don't know if the steady white noise of crickets and cicadas was to blame. Later in the afternoon when it got too muggy, I fortuitously stumbled upon a "Rainy Mood" app that creates the perfect ambiance for this story when overlaid with traditional Japanese Koto and Flute music through Spotify.

 Given the name and moniker I'm using for one of my assassins, I'm not terribly surprised that this particular combination of sounds is conducive to the mood of the writing. Also, the planet where this clash of forces takes place is a very wet rainforest-jungle sort of atmosphere, and I am absolutely having fun wreaking havoc left and right...

It's a relief to realize that I've managed to find that almost perfect combination of sensory inputs that satiates the muses and gets them to open up enough to make the words flow. I have to rediscover it anew each time I embark on a new project and unearth new muses whose skeletal remains require some assembly before reanimation is possible. I never feel like I'm creating so much as I am recreating, taking discarded shards of inspiration from a thousand different places and recombining it into something that, one day, might give off some glimpse of beauty.
I feel like Doctor Frankenstein. Mind you, that's pronounced "fronkunsteen."