Short Post and a Song #146: She compared the song I ultimately chose to "early Coldplay" and I have no idea how to take that.

NURSE: Do you tend to get dizzy or faint when you get blood drawn?

ME: Absolutely yes.

NURSE: You should play some music on your phone, it’ll relax you.

ME: [panicking twice as hard now about whether she’ll like the song I choose] Oh ok cool.

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"One Summer's Day" by Joe Hisaishi

I know I may make it sound like I listen to a wide variety of cool and edgy music when I'm writing, but honestly about 50% of the stuff I listen to when working on my books comes from the soundtracks of children's movies and was written by the amazingly wonderful composer in the video above.

Joe Hisaishi has the power to take emotions and bottle them up into melodies that make your heart ache. "One Summer's Day" from Spirited Away is four minutes of bittersweet nostalgia that will have your throat swelling and your eyes tearing in just the first few notes, even if you're not sure why. You'll start thinking of the the hometown you don't visit often enough, or the last great day you spent with a friend you didn't realize until later you weren't going to see again.

Speaking of writing, I'm editing Viable for roughly the 4,239,101st time. I realized I went a bit mad with line breaks in one of my more recent edits so now I'm going back and putting things more or less back the way they were before I cut all my paragraphs to ribbons. 

It's been tedious and a little disheartening to spend so much time making a change, only to realize the change doesn't work and that it was better the way it was before. But I'm not putting everything back the way it was. A few of those new line breaks actually add some much-needed emphasis to a certain line, or amp up the humor of one of my protagonist's wittier asides. 

Sometimes with a book you'll dedicate A LOT of time to making a change that might only improve things by one or two percent. Sadly that's just the name of the game when it comes to creating any sort of art. It's up to you whether you choose to focus on the time lost—or on how even if it was only by the tiniest bit, you made something you were already proud of even better.