Tag: casey poma

Linnalapsi: Third Album morphs into new form(s)

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Wow, it’s been a while since I stumbled on here! I’ve been super busy with work and lots and lots and lots of projects (seriously, I have like so many). But don’t worry, I have definitely not given up on Linnalapsi. (Like, at all! I love this shit so much).

Anyway, onwards to a sort of big announcement. Over the past year, I’ve been going on about Linnalapsi’s third album, which is almost done being composed and so on and so forth. In one post, I was talking about how some of the songs were darker, more frantic in nature, and some were more Viking-like and epic. I was wondering if I could somehow work this into a concept album, and go from one spectrum of metal (dark, troll-y metal) to the other (my Viking ones). I even had a story about a group of Vikings who get lost in the woods and then eventually find their +ULFBEHR+T-bearing brothers and do Viking stuff. It would work (MAYBE)…but then I noticed that six out of the eight songs were of the dark, troll-y genre. That means only a quarter of the songs would be Viking, which means that would be super dumb. That’s not equal at all. “Oh, here’s six troll-y songs and then two epic ones just tacked on!” Like, what? So…after lots of thinking…

Seriously, LOTS

. . .I eventually reached a decision.

I’ve never really liked EPs, because I thought that those songs were always kind of like “black sheep” songs in the discography. I mean, they’re not on albums, so. . .like, what? Like, what are they? Why not just put them on the album? I’ve always been a fan of albums, and a little meh towards EPs, but after much thinking (as Mr. Cumberbatch has shown above), I’ve decided that instead of a third Linnalapsi album, I’m going to do two EPs: one that’s all dark and trolly, the other that is all Viking.

As much as I wanted to make a third ALBUM, with like 45 minutes of music and like 12 tracks or whatever, I simply could not ignore the two clashing directions of this music project. My second album is, as one reviewer put it, a “mixed bag”. I mean, on the same album, you have a dark, evil song, then a funny song, then an epic one, then a party song, and then like a what was I doing? Sure, my musical influences are from all over, but in terms of packaging things to people, it’s better to make a product consistent with itself. Not that I only see Linnalapsi as a product, HELL NAH, but I mean, it’s a lot easier to lump stuff together more cohesively. Like, here’s a scary picture for a cover with a scary picture of me and it has scary metal songs on it! Here’s a Viking picture with a Viking picture of me and It has Viking metal songs on it! My last album had a forest picture, a bunch of different styles, and no picture of me at all. . .so. . yeah.

The troll-y one will be released sooner, most def, because those songs are all…done, actually. I mean, finished being composed. Whereas the Viking one has a buncha drafts just waiting to be completed!

Don’t worry, Viking songs, I WILL get to you!

I don’t really want to give out release dates (because I’m so busy nowadays, I have no idea when I could even get around to WORKING on them, much less releasing them), but if I had to guess, I’d say late 2014 to early 2015. Stay tuned for some more Linnalapsi goodness (and trust me, it’s GOOD this time! :D Seriously!)

-Casey of Linnalapsi

Featured image credit: Casper Art Designs

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“A Distant Horn” Novel Editing Update – September 26, 2013

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Hey everybody, what’s happening? I’m in that weird stage between not wanting to work on stuff, not wanting to watch anything, not really wanting to chat with anyone, and trying to stay up even though I am yawning like crazy. Seems to be the perfect time to write a NOVEL EDITING UPDATE!

So, where are we? A month and a half ago, I had just finished my first pass at cleaning up the vomit-draft of my debut novel, “A Distant Horn”. I spoke about how I was gonna print that sucker out by the end of July and read it line for line and mark it up with a red pen. Well, I can tell you now that I have indeed done that! So yay, brownie points for that!

Even though I’d JUST read through the whole thing, I still didn’t feel like I was done yet (ahhhh hell nah), so, like, at 4 in the morning one day, I made a self-published proof copy on Createspace (including a terrible, generic cover), and ordered it before I realized it was probably a bad idea. To help me see the story as fresh, I decided to “search and replace” all character and location names with completely new ones. If I was reading about different people, I might be able to see things a little differently. (The only name I couldn’t change was the town of “Led”, which, upon first attempts, changed EVERY “led” to whatever the hell name I had cooked up, leading to words like “stumbled” and “grumbled” to be “stumbGondor” or “grumbGondor.” My 11-pm self might have caught that, but my 4 AM self? Not a chance.)

Do I care enough to fix them?

Anyway, the proof came a couple days later (early!) and I started reading it right away. I felt like I NEEDED to have the story in my hands, in a BOOK form, in the font it’s going to be in (Garamond, please!). You can look at stuff on screens all you want, but you won’t know what it looks like until you have that shit right in front of you. And this time, while reading it, I would not do so much of a “prose” pass, but more of an overall tone/enjoyment pass. How was the flow? Was I having a good time? Was I not having a good time in some parts? Does it ever get boring? Is it polished enough to be presentable?

When studios test television shows, they’ll have people watch them with these little dials. The dials, which people move either up (for happy) or down (for not happy) throughout the episode, represent people’s enjoyment. This way, producers and studios can see exactly in real time where the audience is having a good time and where the show might be lacking. Does the quality dip here? And if it dips, then why? Well, since I seem to be a crazy freaking perfectionist (and have a lot of time), I DID THIS MYSELF by chapter. Let’s take a look!

As you can see, both the “quality of writing” and the “enjoyment” lines (I forgot which ones are which) dip around the middle before going back up to being fun again. Even though none of my friends cared about this when they’d read it, I think I might have the middle a littttttle too dark than is probably acceptable in the current story. The change in tone kind of felt like watching the goofy Batman and Robin, then switching to The Dark Knight for a second, then back to Batman and Robin. Tonally, it kind of messes things up. So I’ll be looking forward to CHANGING THAT TOO, when I go through this thing for a third time. (Note: My book is hopefully better than Batman and Robin.) But seriously, the story got a little nasty in the middle there. Maybe I put out all my editing frustrations into it, I dunno. Either way, I traveled that narrative and tonal path and know it wasn’t right, so yeah, at least I know it’s wrong.

Well this is getting pretty long, so I guess I should totally wrap it up. I could keep going on forever and ever, but you probably have your own novels to get writing (so get typing!). So yeah, I’m sort of avoiding the big cave-troll in the room here, but I think, there were, on a couple occasions, places where I said this book would be released November 1, 2013. Hmm. . .

When I saw Timothy Zahn speak about “Star Wars: Scoundrels” last year, he said the publishing houses take about nine months after a manuscript is delivered to find all the typos and do all the cleaning and get the artwork, etc, and publish the thing. I thought to myself Hey, nine months, that sounds doable! I mean, think about it, it’s a whole NINE months! But then, as I started editing, I realized that writers’ primary jobs is WRITING. And, in addition to that, they have editors and all that junk that do the crappy, typo-hunting stuff for them (at least that’s how it works, right?) So, nine months for me isn’t really enough time to finish everything because, y’know, I have a full-time day job that isn’t writing about fun goofy adventure stuff. (At least not yet :P)

As seen here, Timothy Zahn’s day job is actually “astronaut”

I realized, that over the course of nine months, I will have spent basically 1710 hours either at work or driving to and from. That equals basically TWO MONTHS AND ELEVEN DAYS taken out of my editing schedule. I mean, sure, I didn’t really start editing until May (instead of February. . .) but I’MNOTTALKINGABOUTTHATRIGHTNOW. I guess what I’m trying to say is I won’t finish this thing in whatever 30-some-odd days are left. The way I see it, you guys are all my friends I’ve invited to a dinner party, and my novel represents the homemade burgers (or chicken or noodles) I am cooking. My responsibility, as a cook and friend, is to make sure the chicken and burgers are cooked thoroughly, lest you get all sick and hate me forever and never come over for more dinner parties. As much as a cook can’t serve you semi-pink burgers, nor can I, as an author, deliver to you a semi-cooked novel. Gotta make this sure this book “al dente”, y’know what I’m saying?

Anyway, onto pass number three (million!) Thanks for being interested and patient. The adventure will come, I promise! Let’s shoot for 2014!

-Casey

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“A Distant Horn” Novel Editing Update – July 20, 2013

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**note: The featured image is not the official cover. I Googled some fantasy stuff and made it in like 5 minutes. Looks kinda cool, though. . .***

Hello there, everyone! It has come to my attention that I have, as of this year’s past six and a half months, written only FIVE articles to post on here. I do mean to write more, but a certain DEBUT NOVEL seems to be taking up all my time. (Like, seriously, all my time!) To not disappear completely, I’ll write something here and tell you how the whole editing process is going.

Editing! . . .yay . . .

Over the past couple weeks (or months…or years?), I have made massive headway on my revisions to the original text, which was written for National Novel Writing Month 2010. That’s right, I wrote 50,000 words in twenty-something days, which means that pretty much all the original text is unusable. What’s that quote? “Marry in haste, repent at leisure”? The writing equivalent would not doubt be “Write in haste, re-write the whole fucking thing at leisure”. In addition to writing a like Cheetah on catnip, I really had no idea what the in-world setting was. I was just flying by the seat of my pants. The world mostly wouldn’t be established until the second book which (which I wrote the next year),which meant that I had to go back and FIX everything. You’d never guess, but if you’re backstory changes, so does a lot of your current story. (Like, everything. . .)

As of two nights ago, I finished my first pass of the entire novel. Well, what I mean to say is that I reached the end of the original text. I still have to go back and add in some SEVEN new little scenes which are either new or are complete re-writes. But that shan’t take long. I’ve contractually obligated myself to have a final, printed, double-spaced, and bound copy of the draft by the end of this month. If I fail to do so, I owe my roommate twenty bucks. (8 bottles of Charles Shaw wine…) After that, it’ll be onto the second pass, where I’ll read the whole damn thing AGAIN, but this time off the printed page.

Hopefully with less edits.

After fixing the second pass, then it’s off to a couple pre-determined beta readers, which’ll be very exciting, for instead of just rambling about the book to friends, they’ll actually get to read it and see how it is. It’ll be good to finally have some objective eyes looking at it, too.

If there’s one thing I have learned about editing/revising a previous work, it’s that it’s an IMMENSE amount of work. Sometimes even more work than actually doing the initial writing itself. I feel like I went into this process with the domestic-care-metaphor assumptions of straightening up a room. Just a little messy. Straighten this up, straighten this out, right? Well, as I started cleaning, I soon realized I was gonna have to build a whole fucking addition to the house. And then I realized that my house wasn’t just a simple one, but three separate ones, and I need to plan and build bridges between them that were structurally sound and wouldn’t crumble under their own weight. The amount of work, to be completely honest, kind of blindsided me.

In order to help me with the crazy task of planning the set-ups, pay-offs, and callbacks of an estimated 180,000-word trilogy, I wrote a long, detailed summary of all three books. The super-summary itself turned out to be some 6,000 words. And that’s not including the some 70-year chronology I included, that detailed the backstory of the entire thing and all the characters since birth and. . .hey, what are you doing with that straight jacket?

J.R.R. Tolkien is known for saying that The Lord of Rings, the massive sequel to the shorter The Hobbit, “grew in the telling”. While I’ve always let my stories and music/all creative stuff take a somewhat organic route to forming (because I am a creative hippie), I had no idea that the novel I started writing for fun in November 2010 would EXPLODE to be a full-fledged trilogy with a long backstory. But the most interesting thing about that fact is that the story CAN’T be anything else. If it wanted to be a short, simple story, then it would be. The story’s really calling the shots here, I’m just writing it all down. I feel like the story itself knows what is best for it, and all I can do is obey its commands.

“Write a new introduction for the company’s arrival to Falkenbir, or else!”

This practice of obeying the creative work reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, this one from Rammstein’s lead guitarist Richard Kruspe. Here he’s talking about music, but I think it works for any type of creative work: “You are part of a machinery, and the music lets you know where it wants to go, which direction it wants to take. . .It is the case that when you have a song, it lets you know if the song should be stately, aggressive or rhythmic – whatever. It always tells you, and when you recognize that, when you are sensitized to this and recognize this, you can’t do anything wrong. We [Rammstein] got this wrong in the beginning. We thought we should try to press into a certain direction. You can’t do that. You can only follow.”

And follow, indeed! Even if it means re-routing your entire story and writing thousands of words of new material (which also means throwing away thousands of words of old material), you gotta listen to your story so it can be the best it can be. I probably should have been writing in “A Distant Horn” while writing this, but oh well, this was a nice, and most welcome, break.

Oh yeah, and the book is about a perilous quest to find a great warrior that can defeat a ancient, super-evil Lich. Didn’t think I had mentioned that yet.

Stay tuned for more updates!

-Casey

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“A Distant Horn” Update: May 9, 2013 (o5.09.2013)
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James Bond Countdown: #12: The World is Not Enough (03.14.2013)
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Listen to the first six songs from the new Fadenfreude album! (03.07.2013)

“A Distant Horn” Update: May 9, 2013

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Hello everyone, just checking in here with some news about my upcoming self-published debut novel, “A Distant Horn”. Don’t worry, I am still planning to release it on November 1st, although my progress with the editing is going a lot slower (repeat: A LOT SLOWER) than I earlier anticipated. That’s all right, though. I was pretty good in college about spending entire days in the library or the editing bay to meet fast-approaching deadlines. So far with this project, I haven’t had to do anything like that, but have been showing it a bit more attention lately (instead of giving it to those pesky music projects).

As of now, I am some 29,000 words into my first pass of the edit, which is pretty much half way. If I want to do ANOTHER PASS (which my perfectionist self DOES want to do, ugh), then I am 25 percent done with just doing passes before handing it off to my trusty editor friend, who’ll hopefully point out all the typos and none of the plot holes. 25 percent, yikes.

I bet you probably guessed this already, but let me tell you, editing a book is no easy task. Each of my James Bond Countdown articles averages around 2,500-3,000 words, despite my best efforts to cut them down (just love those movies, I guess). Those roughly take me half a day to edit, clean up, and come up with pictures. While I won’t have to find pictures for “A Distant Horn,” it’s around 57,000 words, which means it’s like TWENTY James Bond articles, which is a HUGE amount of work. For some reason I thought editing a book was going to be easy. Just fix a thing here, fix a sentence there. Oh, but wait, I forgot, I CHANGED THE ENTIRE BACKSTORY. Oops!

The work is fine in itself, but a lot of times when I have free time now, I want to do absolutely nothing at all. After your day job, you don’t really want to come home to that unfinished riff or that unedited chapter, that has been waiting there all day with an expectant look because you didn’t work on it YESTERDAY, either. Sometimes you just wanna cook your sweet potato and watch “Frasier” all night, you know what I’m saying? And despite my temporary disinterest in doing this work, I know that I HAVE TO if I want the end result to be as good as it can. It’s like being your own boss, but the only worker is you, and lazy, and doesn’t wanna do anything.

I’ll start editing after this episo. . .season, I swear.

So the clock is ticking for “A Distant Horn”. I have 175 days until my projected release of the book (thank goodness I didn’t make any more promises this year). Will I be able to make it? All I have to do is finish the first pass, do the second pass, draw up the map nicely, give it off to an editor, go over it again, make sure everything is perfect, then hand it off to my graphic designer friend, get a cover from the artist (is he still in the USA?), make the pdf, order a couple proofs to see if its good and then publish it. TOO EASY!

Thank goodness I at least have the first draft of the map, which I decided to draw up at work over the course of a couple days. Marion, the crazy, fantastic world in which “A Distant Horn” and it’s two sequels (DON’T EVEN WANNA THINK ABOUT THOSE ATM!) was finally being realized. It’ll have to be re-drawn on the computer, of course (hire someone to do that?), but I think it’s a pretty nice first draft. Check it out and stay tuned!

Click me to enlarge!

Oh, and please, wish me luck. I’ll need it!

Sincerely,

Casey Poma

Listen to the first six songs from the new Fadenfreude album!

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Hello, everyone! Casey from Fadenfreude here with some, yes, I can’t believe it, Fadenfreude news. Who would have thought my little industrial metal experiment from last year would turn into something that I, well, care about? And care about enough to give it news? Oh well, things happen, and I’m happy to welcome Fadenfreude as the next entity in my creative catalog (because I LOVE having a billion projects to work on. . .)

As you no doubt know, last month was February Album Writing Month (or FAWM for short), in which thousands of people around the world attempt to write 14 songs during the shortest month of the year. I completed this last year (resulting in the first Fadenfreude album, available for listening here!), and was intent on creating the second Fadenfreude album.

After full time job-ness, project schedulin’, a concert, feeling all around burnt-out, and on the last day severe technical problems, I only managed to write six songs. That’s 42.8%, which, in every education system in the world is a failing grade (except maybe the United States). I could have bumped up my song total to 7 had my computer randomly begun to have a problem with recording (I love cheap stuff so much!). All excuses aside, here are the six tracks which will appear on the next Fadenfreude album, to be released hopefully sometime later this year.

Some are completely done, while some need an extra bit of ornamentation that a couple additional tracks of strings or electronic whatnot could easily do. They’re all at varying degrees of volume, having not yet been through the meticulous polishing process (that comes later). All the lyrics are in German, but I’ll provide a little summary for each one, as well as a link to the full lyrics and English translations. So grab your headphones and turn it up!

1. Meister aller Herren (Master of all Misters)

A song about Mr. Feeny, the teacher and mentor character from the great ’90s show “Boy Meets World.” Explains how he strikes fear and is boring, but is also smart and intelligent. As the songs states, he’s “had many experiences and already found the answers for us.” Some men just want to see the world learn. Click here for a link for the full lyrics and translation.

2. Kostenlose Möbel (Free Furniture)

Chronicles the life of free furniture hunting and all its dangers. “Crooked nails, ripped cushions, doesn’t bug me at all!” Decorating on a budget can lead to, well, “eclectic” interior design principles, but as the song states, the bank account says “Nein!” when trying to buy nice things.  Click here for a link for the full lyrics and translation.

3. Jeden Tag Los (Every Day Go)

My first real serious song, as in meaning the entire lyrics aren’t a joke. I usually don’t like songs about partying, or feeling good, like P!nk’s “Get the Party Started” or “Let’s get it stared” by The Black Eyed Peas. Like, we’re already partying, do we need to say, “yea, let’s party!!”? Despite my aversion to such titles, I wrote one (because the world doesn’t make sense). And what started as a party song turned into a metaphor for life and how we must “go, go, go! (los, los, los!)” every day because we won’t be here forever. Weird! Click here for a link for the full lyrics and translation.

4. Stuttgart

Another type of song that has always perplexed me is the song about a city. Like, how can you write a song about a city? Every week, FAWM would present its FAWMers with a challenge, one of which was to write a song about a city. I had no intention of doing this, since I have only really lived in towns (and didn’t want to write a song about L.A. . .), but eventually decided I should give my study-abroad-second-semester home a shout-out: Stuttgart. At the end, I say all the ‘burbs I frequented or my friends lived in. Mine, Vaihingen, is mentioned last. Click here for a link for the full lyrics and translation.

5. Verschränkte Melodien (Intertwined Melodies)

“Every person is a melody, that has specific properties. A tempo and instrument, the soul about the sheet music. And sometimes when people meet each other, no matter how they arrived there, the melodies mix together and they go together perfectly.” So begins the most serious song Fadenfreude (and just me in general) has ever tried. A melancholy song for those us whose melodies with others might have mixed, but not been happy songs. It is common for people to believe in a soul mate, some mystery person you’re destined to share a life of happiness and togetherness with. But what if we have sad soul mates, too, who we’re destined to have sad stories with? “At first, smiles, at the end, tears, because not every song is happy”. Click here for a link for the full lyrics and translation.

6. Plastik (Plastic)

A companion piece to the furniture-ode above, “Plastik” chronicles the life of the plastic-bottle Vodka drinker, who, despite wanting quality, doesn’t want to spend too much money (because they can’t). Click here for a link for the full lyrics and translation.

So that’s that. I have another song ready for recording, but am currently fixing my technical problems with recording (or trying to fix it and getting frustrated as hell). I’ll get back to that later for sure. Hope you enjoyed this little sample! I’ll get working on those other songs ASAP! Signing off for now.