How It Starts

...always, is with music. Which means:

A Rope of Thorns Playlist (Take One)
"Blackest Crow", Angi West
"Pharoah", Crooked Still
"Ash", Murder by Death
"I Was a Photograph (Blake’s Song)", Kasey Anderson
"Temazcal", Monsters of Folk
"Cross Bones Style", Cat Power
"Black River Killer", Blitzen Trapper
"The Bachelor", Patrick Wolf
"This Night", Black Lab
"Dust", Augustana
"Coo Coo", Janis Joplin
"The World is Falling", Mirah
"A Forest", Bat for Lashes
"Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin’-Geddon", Marilyn Manson
"Howl", Florence and the Machine
"Sin for a Sin", Miranda Lambert
"Noon as Dark as Midnight", Lucero
"From a Shell", Lisa Germano
"Until the Night is Over", Timber Timbre
"Story of Isaac", Suzanne Vega
"For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti", Sufjan Stevens
"Train to Jackson", Jeffrey Foucault
"Big Black Nothing", Connor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band
"One More Cup of Coffee", Bob Dylan
"Poison Girl", Chris Whitley
"Undone in Sorrow", Crooked Still
"Horse Head Fiddle", 16 Horsepower
"Oh Death", John McCutcheon
"Damned to Hell", John Butler Trio
"The Desert is on Fire", Murder by Death
"I Still Love You, Judas", StillWater
"Sweet Religion", Imogen Heap
"Two Silver Trees", Calexico
"Tiger Mountain Peasant Song", Fleet Foxes
"Troubled Water", Cat Power
"Just the Right Bullets", Tom Waits
"Dirty Hands", Bear McCreary
"Sinister Grains", Anoushka Shankar
"Freedom Fighters (Choir)", Two Steps from Hell
"New Divide", Linkin Park
"Remember Me as a Time of Day", Explosions in the Sky
"Consecration 448t", Wovehand
"And Then You", Greg Laswell

Went back over the last couple of chapters of A Book of Tongues, too, trying to hammer out an accurate profile of where Chess is, exactly, at the end of that whole stagecoach-wreck. I'd vaguely thought about doing a time-jump, say a year in the future, so that we could emerge into a startlingly different world of cults and anti-cults, but...no, I think that'd risk losing momentum, and I need to capitalize on all Chess's immediate vengeance-bent energy, before cutting the legs out from beneath him and showing him how counterproductive it is. Like I said to sovay, a big part of this book has to be about Chess being forced to take responsibility for the fact that all he ever creates is collateral damage, deal with his various Bad Mommy/No Daddy issues, and damn well grow up--in and around the whole "saving the world as we know it" part, of course. As ever.

Also: It's official--Monday (not Tuesday), I go into the hospital. 11:30 AM. Which should be real fun, coming as it does immediately after a day-long trip to Sudbury and back, but fuck it, such is the kingdom. It's in motion, and by this time next week...

Etc.