How a musical interlude helped shape a madman
||| Lately, I’ve been working on the various elements of Louisiana Hydra’s marketing plan. I’ve finished the final editing of Louisiana Hydra and am now preparing for its Spring 2024 release date. And I can say without reservation that marketing-related activities are by far my least favourite thing associated with this project.
Today, I’ve decided to invest some time in what I consider a compromise to doing the actual work I am learning to loathe. I am going to write (which is a thing I like to do) a little blurb on a strategy I developed to keep myself ‘out of the weeds’ while creating my storylines and how that strategy eventually resulted in the inspiration for a few of the more unusual conversations that took place in Hydra. I read somewhere people like to understand the author’s process, so here I am, explaining that and, by extension... marketing myself… whatever.
My wife likes to tease me when the mild symptoms of my ADHD and OCD occasionally leak out into the public space. Not surprisingly, when I began writing more purposefully, I realized I needed a strategy to combat the mental see-sawing between obsession and procrastination that has become part of my everyday life. Luckily for me, my early years were flush with a wide array of music one could easily and completely escape into. That music has become and remains my go-to ‘safe space’. All my hyper-focused, impulsive tendencies quickly fall away as the favourite of my five senses sucks up all my mental bandwidth. Kind of like my reset button.
So, when I find myself stuck in a scene, or there is a particular exchange of dialogue I’m finding difficult to smooth out, I step away from the MacBook, queue up my favourite playlist, and out the virtual door I go. How long I’m gone depends exclusively on how much cleansing my mental palate might require. Maybe a little. Maybe a lot. Different every time.
As a bonus, this little coping mechanism did result in the occasional and completely accidental inspiration. It didn't happen often, but in one particular case, it felt a little like one of those stories you hear songwriters talk about, how something just came to them seemingly out of nowhere. Now, I’m not saying I had a Keith Richards moment of waking up with the legendary ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ ringing in my ears, but for me, it certainly was a very satisfying moment.
Just prior to one of my musical interludes, I was agonizing over the tone of the first meeting between my two main protagonists and my main antagonist. It was a big moment and presented a chance to expose a little bit of what made this man the monster our dynamic duo had been searching for. I didn’t want to leverage the usual trope of my bad guy being a product of the mean streets, part of an abusive family etc, etc. I imagine that bad guys can just as easily be born out of wealthy, privileged backgrounds with loving, supportive parents as anything else. Sometimes, people are just evil. So I needed my bad guy to tell a story about a life lesson he learned from his Daddy that really helped guide him in life. Of course, the story would be less Norman Rockwell and more Hieronymus Bosch.
In 1973, Elton John released Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Some would say, myself included, that album was arguably his finest work. On that album, there is a song titled Sweet Painted Lady. Bernie Taupin penned the lyrics. It's a pretty little song describing sailors returning from the sea and the ‘sweet painted ladies’ waiting for them in the brothels. The relationship between the sailors and the ladies is dealt with in a pretty matter-of-fact way. No winners or losers. Just business. This was the song that showed up on my playlist that day.
Anyway, for those of you who don’t know yet, the main bad guy in Louisiana Hydra came from a family behind an empire built on ports and shipping, so this song and its business-as-usual attitude to the darkness that might emanate from a brothel seemed like a good way to demonstrate the tilted view of life my bad guy needed to have. I like to think it worked, but that is certainly your decision to make. Not mine.
The fact is, there are several musical references throughout Hydra. Some are fairly obvious. Some you’d probably only pick up on if you were familiar with the song. Placing them there was just a small thing I did to entertain myself. What do they call it? Easter eggs? I might run a contest one day to see who can pick five out of the book. Maybe put a Louisiana Hydra coffee mug up for grabs.
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