I am listening to a playlist called Colt, which is the name of a character in a story I’m working on. It started as Fan Fic and I fell in love with the characters I invented and decided to change the “real” guy because I want to actually include this in a collection. No, I do not think Stephen Colbert would recognize Ivan Colt as bearing any resemblance to himself, except of course C-o-l, which is a tribute, all right?
I wrote about this story under a title like “The problem with Fan Fiction.” It’s in Facebook too.
Nearly all my fiction is acted out in my head, and I’ve said so many times, it’s a shame authors don’t get to cast the movie versions of their work. The Atonement of Ivan Colt is no exception. Unless it makes it into the apocrypha of the Literary legend I leave behind (good alliteration), no one will know how many times I’ve seen a Robson Green lookalike beat a Stephen Colbert lookalike because he is enraged at a trashy little ho’s adoration. Sometimes the Robson Green character is played by Willem Dafoe and the Stephen Colbert one by Johnny Depp.
Anyway, to get to the point: I make music mixes to listen to while I work. The songs all reperesent something from the story — characters, relationships, actions, even themes. The “soundtrack” for Walking Among the Dead has about fifty songs on it. But the one for The Atonement of Ivan Colt is this:
Like most others, this has some incongruous juxtapositions. There are also a few little specifics, like Snow Patrol’s Run which in my mind always runs with the closing credits! I’m loving this mix. I’ve heard it about six times today. Problem is, it made me get the story back out when the one I am currently working on is the one with the alcoholic woman trying to get to North Carolina but having blackouts in which she appears to be having an ongoing affair with a Texas-born college professor who was recently struck by lightening. (I think he’s having a mid-life crisis. In my mental movie, he is played by Tommy Lee Jones and the female character is either Cathy Bates or Nicole Kidman.) I need to come up with a country soundtrack, but I only know a few country songs.
Okay, it’s almost 10 pm and I have work to do.
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