You see, about a year ago, I was approached by Michael Wells on Authonomy.com. I’d bantered about a bit in the forums with him, but the idea he had come up with was truly a flash of inspiration and I jumped at the chance to be a part of it!
He asked for contributions to an anthology based on the songs on his i-pod. Mike set up a website to collate the stories and organised everything. He set his I-pod to shuffle and gave each of us a song title. We had to write a story inspired by the song, but not using the lyrics or title.
The song I got was “The Authority Song” by John Mellencamp. Initially, I was inspired to write a rambling story about an immortal wanderer who saved some native people on a planet far, far away… sadly, while the concept was good, the film “Avatar” had arrived on the scene and dealt with the concept in a far better way, so I pulled the story and shelved it.
The second story I submitted was a shorter piece of SF that explored the concept of where sentience comes from. I slipstreamed it with a touch of fantasy and “I, Dragon” was born.
You might recognise the title a little as I bowed deeply to the Master of SF, Isaac Asimov by twisting his short story collection title, “I, Robot” and referring to concepts he created within the story.
Anyway, it was accepted for the anthology and after some intensive feedback and editing from my fellow writers included in the project, became a passably good story.
It is now available to buy and as well as “I, Dragon” you can read stories from some truly wonderful writers, including J.D. Revene, Peter Morin, T.L. Tyson, Greta Van Der Rol, Heikki Hietala amongst others.
40 authors over 12 countries and the money raised through the sale of the book goes to 9 different charities; only publishing expenses go to the publisher and everything else goes to the charities that we picked as a group.
So, do those charities a favour – go and buy a copy.
I promise that you won’t regret it – the stories are eclectic, but interesting, covering so many different genres of fiction as well as some non-fiction offerings.
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| Words To Music. Cover Artwork by Bradley Wind |
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Now, about that muse mystifier. It’s based on Mike’s anthology inspiration concept…
Follow these instructions carefully:
1) I want you to put on a random CD from your collection / plug yourself into your MP3 Player / Computer… however you prefer to listen to music.
2) Press play then skip it nine times.
3) Write down the third word of the title of the song you get.
4) Press play again. Skip again, this time 12 times.
5) Write down the first word of the title of the song you get.
6) Press play again. This time, skip it four times only.
7) Write down the fourth word of the title of the song you get.
8) Write a flash story (250 – 1000 words) including those three words in some way.
NB: If the song titles you get on steps 3 & 7 only have one or two words, then skip the music once more to get the words.
Have fun!
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