I can never know what music will strike inspiration for my writing projects…it’s usually different for each piece that I write. I can’t even remember what I was listening to when I wrote my first book, but it’s buried in journals somewhere.

For the first quarter of The Mycelium Network, I relied primarily on The Beastie Boys release ‘The Mix-Up” which, despite its title, is not an album of remixes, but instead some (at the time) pretty experimental music-only tunes, no singing or rapping at all. A couple of the songs figure prominently in the mood of the first part of the book, “The Gala Event” figuring prominently among those tracks. I did also listen to a fair bit of music from the various Twin Peaks iterations, but mainly the soundtracks to both Season One and Season Three, both of which are stellar (to be expected from Lynch).

It’s looking like it’ll be Marilyn Manson’s new release ‘We Are Chaos’ doing the heavy lifting for the middle third (or so) part of the story. I’ve listened to this thing a couple dozen times by now and I think it’s become my favorite release of his. Pretty astonishing that he can make this kind of album thirty years after he started. I watched an interview with him yesterday and he seemed the most lucid I’ve ever seen him. Ever. Good on ya, Marilyn.

And guess what? I’m 100% done organizing. The first time I can say that since I moved back to Arizona two years ago.

Time to create.