Remember how I was going to write and write and write today? Well, a bit of back pain put a damper in that plan, so I wound up writing on my laptop in bed for a good bit of the day. If you’ve ever written in bed, you probably know that writing in bed isn’t conducive to writing at breakneck speeds, but by golly, I tried anyway. It didn’t work too well. I could write at close to my typical rate but only for a few minutes at a time. This was unacceptable, but I still managed three thousand words while lying in bed, mostly on my back with my laptop on my thighs.
Then the back pain subsided for awhile, meaning it was time to write for real. I put on the magical writing album, Shake the Sheets by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and went to town. The result? 3200 words in 40 minutes. Repeating this timing resulted in similar results but with different albums in my testing of potential magical writing albums. Now I have just over 20,000 words to write tomorrow. This is manageable. I think I can do this.
But instead of writing, let’s talk music. The two test albums were The Rural Alberta Advantage’s Hometowns and Andrew Jackson Jihad’s Can’t Maintain. Neither of these albums is very long, making them ideal for magical writing to happen; I can time word wars around the length of the album. The latter album turned out to be much better than the former for magical writing goodness. While there are some good fast songs with strong beats from Hometowns that are great for writing, it’s like Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga in that about half the songs are great for magical writing and the other half, while good songs, don’t have the magical writing vibe to them.
Can’t Maintain, on the other hand, has a lot of potential. I’ll have to give it another listen while writing tomorrow, but it may become my second magical writing album. The loud fast beats and folk punk influences make it great for my fast-paced word wars, especially since my writing tends to go more quickly if I write to faster music. The length is just right, too. At just under half an hour, I can queue the whole album, hit play, and time a half hour writing session that way. Shake the Sheets also has this advantage for a 40-minute writing session at 39:52. I can write for eight more seconds to a different song.
I’ll definitely be testing out some more candidates for magical writing albums and expanding the overall magical writing playlist before NaNo. It’ll be key for getting me through those days where I don’t want to write at all. Any candidate suggestions are welcome.