As you can see from the progress bar, the draft for DESCENT is moving along steadily. I write faster the further I get into the book, and especially once I reach the last quarter, so I expect to be finished in another two weeks or so. Then it goes off to the developmental editor, and I get to move on to the next project while I wait for the marked-up draft to get back to me for changes.
In unrelated news, I had an experience the other day that definitely marks me as a child of a certain time. There was a song on the radio I hadn’t heard in a long time, one that was popular when I was a poor teenager who had to make his own mix tapes from the radio. This involved keeping the boom box in my bedroom ready with a blank tape, and hit the red button whenever a song came on I wanted to record. Invariably, the start and the finish of the song would be cut off because I had to tape over the yakking of the DJ, who would talk into the beginning and start talking again at the end.
It was strange because I hadn’t heard that song in at least twenty years, but I still remembered exactly where the song cut off on my mix tape. Then I realized that I could not only remember where the song ended, but also the song that came after it on the tape. I must have listened to those home-baked mix tapes on my knock-off walkman constantly for those associations to still be lodged in my memories almost forty years later…
Yes! When the song finishes and you feel weird because you’re expecting the next song but it doesn’t come. More recently I had a soundtrack CD that had a particular live track on it – when I spooled that album up in the early days of streaming, the service had substituted a different live version of the same song and for some reason I was so disoriented by it that I had to turn it off.
Music – like scent – leaves powerful impressions in memory. I remember any number of favorite albums as single entities, rather than collections of singles. I once bought a remastered album that had additional songs added. I never quite liked that one as well as the old cassette I knew by heart. The new songs just messed up the flow and structure of the whole.
Waiting (im)patiently for Descent and Scorpio!
Marko, you’re gonna leave us hanging? What was the song?
Back in the 70’s I had the Who’s Next album on vinyl which I played continuously, and near the front of Baba O’Reily there was this short skip in the track. Even now when I’m listening to a new remastered LP of it or on radio I expect that skip in the song at that moment to happen in the back of my mind.
Yes – I even heard of a guitar teacher that would sometimes play along to the skips on his records as a joke with students
Happens all the time with me. The funniest ones are when it happens with those songs that were promoted on TV for the… music subscription services of the past. Lifetime/Columbia or whatever. They would play snippets of a bunch of songs in order and whenever I hear them even now, I hear the portion that was played in those commercials and my mind automatically jumps to the next snippet they played after the part I just listened to.
Came here to say exactly this.
Completely agree about the mix tapes. Even now when I have a playlist in Spotify (called “80s Mix Tape”) of songs that I enjoyed when I was a teen and had on my mix tapes, there is a certainty that a particular song will follow the one that I’m listening to only for me to be surprised when that isn’t the case. It’s amazing how much, and how accurately, we remember from those days.
I used to do the same thing! I’d get so frustrated with the talking of the djs 🙂
I greatly admire your skill and discipline, sir.
Seems the sequence of oft-heard, long ago songs are forever with us: hear one, you know what came next. My forever playlist was imprinted in me at an NSA facility 50 years ago. The opening bars of Michael Nesmith’s “Joanne” herald the imminent arrival of the Beatles “Norwegian Wood.”
I have done the exact same thing; I was so proud of the mix tapes I made. Then after I got a DSL internet connection, i searched and searched for a particular song and then wait for 2 hours for it to download. I am happy to learn that the new book is almost ready, I have just gone back and read the first three books in the series.
So many memories are triggered with music. So wonderful that you were transported back to a very different time just by a song.