Litanie des Saints (Dr. John)

Week 1 of the group creative experiment is over and oh, MY! Y’all are awesome, and thank you for playing! So here’s the week’s wrapup for Week 1 of the music-prompt group creativity experiment.

Peach’s haiku: Heartbeat in a tango gave me shivers.

Baby’s Black Balloon “The Collector”: OMG the detail! dark-haired gypsy queen who never did understand the difference between herself and real royalty and black-velvet spider lashes and Virginia Slim Menthol Lights and the old Lafitte’s instead of Café Lafitte’s. I am in lurve with this piece.

Danielle Yockman, a scene from work-in-progress Seducing the Assassin: So we’re three pieces in and I’m already seeing a trend: detail, visceral, sensual. Feeling the night and sucking in jasmine air.

Astrid Cruz aka @artistikem “Yerba Buena”: The juxtaposition of music that comes from an extraordinarily humid climate and walking into a story that takes place in what seems to be a very arid heat was jolting—in a good way!

Babette James, a scene from work-in-progress As Clear As Day: I’ve been reading snippets of this in Romance Divas chat, so I was unprepared for a long snip and great progress, lady. Looks like you really made some headway. Congratulations.

Galendara, artist, with a variation on Pieta, The Mother and the Wounded Daughter: Genius. Genius.

Jenn Topper, “Jean-Baptiste Foulon is a Brilliant Liar”: A beautiful assistant with her Series 7. The ending? Love! I adore the conversational first person (as opposed to the distanced first person), when the storyteller talks directly to the reader. It may be my favorite point of view. The man’s name even feels significant. I think I’m missing a joke.

Guy LeCharles Gonzales, “Thinking About New Orleans”:  You gave me melancholy. *sniffle*

And so here’s what it did for me: Chapter 15, The Proviso. NSFW (but you probably knew that).

Excellent! Thank you, all, and the next track will post at 9:00 a.m. Central. Follow on Twitter with #mojogce

Group creativity experiment: Intro

UPDATE: “End of the week” means Wednesday evening, April 7.

On the Ides of March, Mind on Fire blogger John Remy (@johnremy) orchestrated a project wherein artistic types were given a prompt to create something based on the prompt (in this case a randomly drawn Tarot card). It could be anything.

I couldn’t participate, as it was short notice and I didn’t have time, but I’ve been building the playlists for my books and it got me thinking about how much I depend on music to inspire my writing, keep me enthusiastic, pump me with adrenaline, and pretty much feed my subconscious what it needs to do my job for me.

So now I’m totally ripping him off and putting a different spin on it: music. I’ll post one track every week for the next three or four weeks (as long as people are interested), and see what you come up with. With John’s permission, I’m going to copy and paste his rules:

1) Each week, starting Thursday, April 1 (April Fool’s Day!), I will post a track that played a significant role in my books.

2) Use the track as a spark for some kind of creative activity. It can be a sketch, a paragraph from your novel, a tweet, a photo, an interpretive dance, a poem, a political blog post, a video. The activity can even change from week to week. The only requirements are that:

a) you leave some element of the project undetermined until you hear the track, and

b) the final creation has to be done by the end of the week, and

c) it has to be linkable.

3) I will then post links to everything everyone created by the time I post the next track the next week.

4) The Twitter hashtag will be #mojogce if you care to keep track that way.

I have a cross-section of readers from the Mormon lit crowd, genre romance, and independent authors of all variables. I’m curious what that intersection can produce and anyone can play, even if you don’t think you’re creative (and you would be wrong anyway).

I’ll be drawing from these playlists: The Proviso, Stay, and Magdalene.

Have fun!