Music to write by

Two weeks on from my references to the ways (surprising to me) Brian Eno's ambient music seems to help me concentrate on the task of writing, I'm becoming a bigger fan of meditative music playing in the background while I work. It's not all Brian Eno (although he does seem to have quite a lot of material to choose from. That's not a complaint.)

Laraaji - Essence/Universe

Allowing the links and transitions that exist in YouTube between themes or artists or whatever it may be the algorithm determines, I was led from one of Brian Eno's albums to another by an American musician going by the name of Laraaji. I had not heard of him before that transition. Wiki tells me he was born Edward Larry Gordon in Philadelphia in 1943. 

Today I've had Laraaji's Essence/Universe playing in the background while working on an assignment for my Open University MOOC, Start Writing Fiction. We have been asked to write the beginning of a new short story deriving from one of the earlier exercises on the course (when we were asked to make a character sketch from a video presentation). I hadn't been greatly enamoured by the character I created. I thought it was quite well-written but I disliked him. At this stage of my learning I'm not really in a position to spend time with characters I don't like, even if I am the one who gives birth to them.

Fortunately for me the helpful folk at the Open University had provided us with alternative stimuli for our story. These came as words, phrases, potential ideas on a story prompt PDF they had created as a Wordle picture. When I opened it the first phrase that caught my eye was "railway crossing". So on Thursday and Friday of this week I used my Morning Pages exercises to set down my first rush of words for what I hoped would become a story. Today I started the editing work with those first-flush, 602 words. 

We were asked to submit for peer review between 200 and 350 words of what may be the opening section of a longer and complete story. Mine begins,

Ivanhoe is a tiny town 650 kilometres west of Sydney as the crow flies. But we’re not crows. So we took the train ...

I hope you're working for me Laraaji.