A Good Day to Adapt
May 25, 2010 in Blogs
It is Tuesday, which no longer has the crushing workload it once had and so commended itself as an opportunity to do a bit extra. I had drafted the second article in the Adapting series, the first which actually does any adapting, and so after a bit more cleanup and expansion than I had envisioned I posted it, Adapting Bujold’s Shards of Honor, which occasions announcing it here first and elsewhere momentarily. This particular adaptation focuses on the string of events that comprise the plot, and how to connect a verser character to so complex a story without necessarily derailing it completely. That is not what all of the stories will do, but seemed the critical question in this one; hopefully most referees can adapt most of the technological and body skills found in the story, and if not, well, we can talk about them more in the forum (follow the link for Discussion Forums if you don’t know where they are).
The moment I posted it, I went back to the main page and actually looked at it instead of simply clicking through it as I so often do and must have done today and perhaps yesterday, and noticed that yesterday Eric “Tadeusz” Ashley launched a new series himself, a serial novel cleverly named Cereal Novel. I have already opened the article but not yet read it, but I’ve read his work before and his fiction is good and worth reading, so sight unseen I will ask site fans to support him by reading Cereal Novel: You Elsewhen, the first chapter of what I’m sure is a promising new story.
I’ve also been doing a bit of music. Baxter, my primary partner in Collision, came to me Sunday night and asked if we could cover a song. I told him he knows how I feel about covers, but since maybe you don’t I’ll tell you how I feel about them (but don’t get me started on tracks). If you’re going to do a song someone else has made popular, you are going to be compared to the original, and almost certainly at a disadvantage. You should only do them if one of three things is true:
- You can do it so much better than the original that the comparison has to make you look good, or
- You can do it so completely differently from the original that it becomes apples and oranges and no one would try to compare the two, or
- You have an audience who will never have heard the original and so can’t make the comparison.
The first and third are both unlikely when working with a popular song in your own genre, so if I’m going to cover a song I go for the second. In this case, though, it was a very unusual challenge. See, the song is a “worship song”, and although “worship” doesn’t really mean that, “worship song” generally means a quiet gentle song through which deep emotions are expressed (where “praise song” generally means a fast, exciting song, although not as consistently). Collision is a rock band; quiet gentle songs are not really our medium, but it is the worship aspect of this song that particularly caught his ear and I had to arrange it for a rock band without losing the worship aspect entirely, while still making it significantly different from the original. Then, to complicate the challenge, right now our “rock band” is generally represented by us, that is, two acoustic guitars and one voice, and so I have to convert a worship song into a rock rendition and then adapt the rock rendition for an acoustic set. When I realized it, I smiled sardonically.
And yesterday, as I was driving two hours with company and two hours without and had about five minutes in the middle to pick up a guitar amd make certain that what I was hearing in my head matched what my fingers were able to do, I wrote that arrangement. Late last night and earlier today I put a bit of time into putting it “on paper”–actually, using a midi interfacing program to generate the two guitar and one vocal parts, play them back for myself and Baxter, and print sheet music on them. Computers are wonderful; it probably would have taken me all day to do the papers by hand and a week to record it with a reel-to-reel deck by doubletracking. Bax thinks he likes it, although he’s going to want to try actually playing the parts live before he commits.
I really am better at music than all this other stuff. Ah, well, at least I can do the other stuff, too.
–M. J. Young