About My Writing
Through the ever-evolving soundtrack I curate for my own life, I use music as the inspiration for the stories I put down on the page.
“Track 6:” Viv
Get me out of here. Same route. Same routine. Same run around the city.
Get me the fuck out of my own mind. Skip. Next. Nope. I keep tapping my phone screen over and over. I should make a new playlist- this one is tired. I’m bored and I’m blue and I want to see something new.
“Renton-” She plucks the phone out of my hand, effectively canceling my privileges as D.J. “It’s two minutes and thirty seconds of your life. Just let it play.”
“Isn’t that sacrilegious or something? Coming from you.”
“Depends. Sometimes a song is just a song.” She clocks me staring at her. “Fine- yes, a song is never just a song, but I will murder my only child if you hit next one more time.” Fair.
“Track 5:” Take Away the Sad
This place we go could break our backs, Edie thought. She flicked the ash from the end of her cigarette in an effort to stop the overgrowth of thoughts that had sprung up in her mind like wildflowers.
“Was it worth it all?” Roxy, the youngest, poured herself another glass of wine from the spigot attached to the box of red blend the girls procured from the convenience store before heading out to the river. “We missed every proper spring break to ‘tour’ in the back of Gaby’s retched station wagon.”
These heartfelt songs, all we got, what we’re living for- ‘were.’ Edie made a mental note that their university years were due to become past tense in just nineteen hours time.
Turn the Record Over: Vol. 3
Music and writing have always gone hand in hand for me. Music inspires the writing; I write to the music- the circle goes on and on. Often, it’s a line in a song that unlocks something in me. And usually, though the song says one thing- it makes me think of something else entirely…
“Track Four:” You Have Stolen My Heart
‘I don’t know if you know, but I feel you in me. Inside of my years inside of my bones.’ It was unseasonably warm the November we moved into Red Cliff Manor. Fifty-five and sunny, the only cool that came in was brought in off the water from the breeze in the mornings just after dawn or under the moon in the middle of a sleepless night.
‘I remember the colors, your mysterious eyes. Part of me stays in the room where we met.’ A year ago, to feel that voice echo inside me would have terrified me.
It did terrify me.
But now? Now I didn’t want to leave the Manor. It was home. So were the grounds. The cliffs and the waves and the old shack that looks over all of it.
Even the star jasmine that wrapped around the old tree in the backyard. Its vines, choking the life out of that tree. Maybe that’s why I found it a kindred spirit. Though I don’t know which I was. The star jasmine, or the tree.
“Track Three:” Kampfire Vampire
“Don’t-” They all bellowed.
Honestly, I’m grown, and they think I’ll burn myself on the dying flicker of a campfire, of all things. “Don’t be scared-” such children they are sometimes. I swear it. And you know I tell them all the time, ‘to leave yourself open…’ but here they were. Same tradition, same time every year leading up to the 31st where we make proclamations about the year to come, and they’re still banging on about their plans and this and that.
Dreams- bullshit scene.
I tell them, ‘Rules are made to be broken,’ but it’s like they don’t hear me. They just rattle on around me and now the voice in my head is a ghost singin’ songs like, ‘Boy, stay away from the campfire-‘ just because I lean in towards the heat while everyone else stays so safely away from it.
“Track Two:” Run
We’re too big for this place. It’s all I could think about lately, how we’d outgrown it here. How small this town was. Large enough not to be noticed in, small enough that we could afford it.
“I miss the smile that used to be on your face,” he said the other day.
We weren’t getting too big for this place.
I was.
And unfortunately, it was starting to show.
Pack your bags, we’ll make an escape… I asked him that the week before he noticed my smile had faded. But he didn’t correlate the two.
I said, ‘I’ve got some money and old 80s tapes.’
The 80s tapes were true. I’d picked up a boombox from the thrift shop and collected cassette tapes at every garage sale I passed.
The money… well, that was dwindling.
“Track one:” Keep the Light On
I never wanted a fortress. I just wanted a home. To put my worries and failures, and make them not alone.
This has become my routine.
Lock up the yard. Secure this compound I’ve found myself living in.
Repeat these words over and over again.
Day after day.
Look for a hand reaching out, thought everybody knows- to keep the light on.
But no one ever comes.
And there are certainly no other lights on. Not in my area anyway.
Turn The Record Over, Vol. 1
Side A
Track One
Mary Was a Diamond
“Mary was a good girl with fire in her eyes.”
“She cursed like all those sailors did, and she turned out just fine.”
“Oh, Mary Please, come back home…” I whispered under my breath as the rest of them raised their glasses in her honor and downed their drinks. I ran the same phrase over and over in my head while my eyes glazed over, the ice melting in my glass: come home, come home. Come home.
Track Two
A Girl Named Go
“Sitting at a red light in tupelo, I fell in love with a girl named Go-“
He stopped me right there. “Now, son,” I already had a hunch these weren’t the details the Sheriff wanted from me. But when he asked me how I landed here, falling for Go wasn’t just part of the story, it was all of it.
Track Three
Baby
“He likes zombies, and the apocalypse. He's got some black magic up in those fingertips.”
Her name was Alice, and for some reason, she wouldn’t leave me alone. She has been following me around the Depot for the last fifteen minutes. And lately, due to recent events, the Depot felt more like the Mos Eisley Cantina we grew up watching on film than a place to buy provisions. But this wasn't a movie, and the Depot had become increasingly dangerous over the last few months since The Event had passed. In short, this was neither the time nor the place to make friends.
Track Four
The Queen of Lower Chelsea
Did you grow up lonesome and one of a kind?
Were your records all you had to pass the time?
Mae has been drawn into a peculiar want ad in the Sunday Paper. She’d been sat there for ages, re-reading its curious list.
Did you grow up dreaming of a different era, and a time to live?
Mae still enjoyed getting the paper delivered on Sunday’s, despite the world around her going fully digital. Even before she started doing this, Mae found something familiar in the routine of putting on a pot of coffee and sitting in the nook of her sunniest room with the print spread out on her lap.
Track Five
I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous
Becks (Rock Writer):
Let’s begin at the beginning:
Lucy (Drums):
We’re lovers and we’re losers-
Prufrock (Frontman):
We’re heroes and we’re pioneers-
Wyatt (Bass):
We’re beggars and we’re choosers-
Prufrock:
Skirting around the edges of the ideal demographic-
Jay (Guitar):
We’re almost on the guest list, but we’re always stuck in traffic…
Track Six
Romeo and Juliet
A lovestruck Romeo sings the streets a serenade, laying everybody low with a love song that he made… Finds a streetlight, steps out of the shade, says something like, "You and me babe, how about it?"
This was not Romeo’s standard pick up line, but Romeo was not in his normal state.
Until quite recently, actually, he was courting a young lady he thought was surely his forever. Of course, she was the cousin of the young woman he originally wanted… but that’s beside the point. Because once he saw young Juliet, Romeo’s heart was suddenly healed. Or, at the very least, numbed by her good looks and all of the free wine at the party where they met.
Turn the Record Over, Vol. 1
Side B
Track Seven
The Trouble with River Cities
Float like a sparrow, a T-top Camaro…
Is the wind done blowin’ you down? Do you need oxygen? Do you need out of your room?
This was becoming a very unhelpful routine for her. Lying on the grass in her fenced-in backyard, eyes shut tight; she had been repeating those words over and over while the sunshine washed over her.
While this was a peaceful place, no noise or congestion outside of the occasional car passing by, the relentless questions in her head she couldn’t seem to solve provided her with no peace at all. This routine was simply a distraction, delaying any and all decisions.
Stay? Or go?
Track Eight
Ghosts on the Boardwalk
“Oh, you say you're lonely… pulled away by the tide and lost at sea.
… All you sense is something so heavy… that you can't breathe.”
There was a voice, warm but bleak, swelling in my brain like rain through a storm grate. It caused, or at least I think it caused, the thumping that was hammering my chest. It was so loud it made me nervous, the voice would fade, and the thumping would rise up in its place. I could hear its echo in my eardrums, and it was starting to throb at the base of my skull. There was something else too, another pain, there was something pulling at my feet. I was desperately trying to identify it, but I couldn’t see a thing.
Track Nine
Beach Front Property
Said, "It's the end of days." And we’re just hoping for the beach front property.
Everyone and everything had gone insane after the power went out.
For six months, there was no power.
Anywhere… in the entire world.
Take away the power for people’s phones, internet, access to their money, refrigeration for food, their jobs… the world turned lawless. It was like something you read in history books about the old west.
It’s still hard to wrap my brain around how quickly things changed. One minute we were staying in, watching HGTV in our sweats and eating takeout… the next, everything went dark.
Track Ten
L.A. Freeway
“Pack up all your dishes, make note of all good wishes-”
“Good wishes?” Quinn was sat in a pile of her clothes on her bedroom floor. She was surrounded by empty duffle bags they’d intended to already have had packed up with her belongings.
Things had gotten decidedly more contemplative for Sadie and Quinn during their second bottle of red, which incidentally, is when the joint they’d been smoking since their first bottle of red, had finally started to kick in.
A fit of laughter rippled through them.
“You’re right,” Sadie took a drag, holding the smoke in, before casually blowing it back out. “Fuck good wishes.”
Quinn folded up one of her summer dresses, unsure if that’s the sentiment she was aiming for. She loved wishes; birthday, good, or otherwise. There just weren’t any good wishes left to note about this place. Quinn had arrived alone in Hollywood two years ago with a dream, but woke up in a nightmare alongside an artist named Kale in a shitty Valley apartment.
Bonus Track
Favourite Ex
“It was open and closing, and hopelessly hoping for sure…” It was only my first cocktail of the evening, and the words were already streaming out of me like vomit. The elegant woman across from me, Evie, I believe she said… was cornered by my unnecessary nostalgic recap of what was once ‘Camden and I.’
“We were here, we were ghosting,” I plucked a tiny appetizer from a passing tray and a backup glass of champagne. It was going to be a backup drink type of evening. “Both of us coasting on, just give a little more-”
Evie interrupted me before I could embarrass myself any further. In her floor-length ruby red gown, she waved her perfect French manicure in the air about the room. “I’m sorry, who was it again that you know here?”
I looked down at my own nails, hand-painted a sparkly hot pink to contrast against the gold and black dress I’d chosen to wear. The polish was aptly titled, ‘Don’t Be Sea Salty.’ I decided there couldn’t be a more fitting color than that to wear to the wedding of your favourite ex-boyfriend.
