Tag Archive | Alice in Chains

Moonchild Manuscript Soundtrack a.k.a. Table of Contents

Music permeates just about everything I write, and I often think of my writing in terms of music. So naturally, a full-length book manuscript is like a full-length album. A concept album, perhaps.

This is especially true for MOONCHILD, the memoir manuscript I’m revising (as in completely re-envisioning, you can read about this writerly overhaul and the revision process here and here). There is so much music in the text of the book. Always music. And discussions about the meanings of the songs that are incorporated into the story, an exploration of where music and life and self intersect.

Pretty early on, I knew I wanted to start each chapter out with a lyric. In fact, I wrote the first words (longhand, in a notebook) of this manuscript in 2003, and I think even then, I knew each chapter would somehow feature a lyric, a song. It’s not the first time I thought that way about a long-form piece of writing.

So, yes, each chapter starts off with a lyric from a song. I did up a little CD label thing (which proves why I’m a writer and NOT a graphic designer) that lists the songs that are quoted at the beginning of each chapter. Here it is:

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Writing, Music and the Places Where they Overlap

Apr13

So many things have me revisiting my musical past as of late. It’s really kind of odd how so many things converged at once. Sometimes I feel like, for whatever reason, I just really let music slip away for awhile, and over the last month, a switch has flipped and all of a sudden, I’m back.

I think I’m a little too embarrassed to admit one of the things that started all this. I’ll just say this: it was a TV show. And it wasn’t that I loved the music on the show so much as one of the characters reminded me of how I used to feel about music, and that got me listening to CDs again, and trying to rebuild my old music collection by buying a bunch of used CDs, and looking into concerts and shows again. Okay, I’ll give a hint, since it sort of relates to the remainder of the post, this TV show I don’t quite want to name is named after a song.

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A Sad Day in Music History

Apr5

It is just impossible to imagine that Kurt Cobain has been dead twenty years today. And Layne Staley twelve. A day heavy with sadness to be sure.

I wasn’t sure if I would feel much of anything about today–it’s been so long now–and wasn’t thinking about it too much this morning. I got up, went to my computer, and did some heavy editing to the last section of the second chapter of Moonchild. It’s been slow going and the editing process has been more like a complete overhaul. I’m keeping the bones of the story, but reworking so much of it that it hardly seems like the same manuscript sometimes. So, editing the last five or six pages of the chapter took two or three hours.

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Computer Junkie: A Complete Short Story

Oct5

I love my computer. Since I’m what some people would call a “loser,” I don’t have much of a social life. But when I get on the computer, a whole different side of me comes out. I am no longer shy and dorky, but the queen of the chat rooms. I run three mailing lists and manage two newsgroups. My real hobby, though, is creating webpages. I am an expert when it comes to HTML, and many people do not know it, so the business is pretty good.

Life is always shoving it down my throat that I am never going to be a success, or anyone important, however. My older brother, Brian, is a professional webpage designer and a computer programmer. He gets paid a ton of money for doing the same thing I do, and all I get is lunch money out of it. Sometimes I envy him so much; Brian is everyone’s favorite guy. He was always the prize child. Now he is the richest guy in the family. I will never be anything compared to him.

At the same time, though, I can’t dislike him. He’s nicer to me than anyone else is. He makes time to call me at least once a week and listens to my teenage angst even though he’s been out of college for three years already. He is always doing special things for me like buying me little presents or sending me funny e-mails just to make me laugh. Even though I’m jealous of him, he’s really a great guy. And he can always help when the stupid computer won’t listen to me.

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Okay, this has to be the most embarrassing story I could post, but since I allude to it in my introductory post, it seems only fair to put it up. This is the one with characters named after members of Alice in Chains, one of whom speaks in song lyrics. I wrote this in 1997, back when my parents very first got the internet and I had no knowledge whatsoever of how the internet works so there is a bunch of made up stuff, and a lot of it is really dated. Entertainment purposes!

Don’t forget, you can always check out the Samples section, including Older Works and Published.

~Emilia J

My Table of Contents Looks More Like the Song List on a Soundtrack…or Something

Apr16

So, all my chapters (except for the first four that cover childhood), are named after song lyrics. In fact, I’ll just put the list of songs on here, to give an idea, and then I want to talk about the general motivations. Some songs come up more than once, (“Moonchild” by Chris Cornell, for example), different lyrics are used in each chapter. That song is the repeating refrain of the story, for sure. Anyway, for now, I’ll just give song title and artist.

Here’s the current table of contents:

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