The Project 2026 Inspirations Part Two

In my first installment of this series I talked about the shape and scope of the story, in this one I want to talk about its mood. 

Though I toured Scotland some 50 years ago, I have such a poor memory of my own life, that I have little authentic memories of the experience. I know some of the things I did, but far from all. Which is to say, that much of my "idea" of Scotland comes not from personal experience, but from the books set in Scotland that I've read. I have a much better memory for things like that. These books include a number of John Buchan stories, like The 39 Steps, and Huntingtower, and John MacNab, as well as a number of Compton Mackenzie stories, like Monarch of the Glen, and Whisky Galore that are also set in the Highlands of Scotland. I've tried to give my Loc Lore Rey district a sense of place like that, though it is also very different, far more forested, recalling my vacations spent in Ontario Canada's Lake of the Woods area. As I said, this is going to be another "What I did on my Summer Vacation" story, and I want to get something of that timelessness that would be spending a whole summer in a cabin in the north woods.

The emotional component, at least of the narrator, are actually drawn from a tune with lyrics by Holt Marvell (Eric Maschwitz) music by Jack Strachey called These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You), It is a melancholy song the lyrics written on a Sunday afternoon between coffee and vodka in 1936. And specifically, Ella Fitzgerald's complete 7:31 minute version on Ella and Louis Again. You can hear it HERE on YouTube, so I won't include all the lyrics here. Now, I'm not much of a poetry fellow, and no doubt the lyrics are pretty basic poetry, but the images they conjure up and the mood they create is, for some reason, so very vivid for me - in a very much 1936 way. "The Ile de France with all the gulls around it" or "The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations" or "The waiters whistling as the last bar closes" reminds me of the Paris I never knew, at least in this life. I want to bring that mood into the outlook of my narrator. That and a bit of Chet Baker's  live version of I Get Along Without You Very Well from the album Straight from the Heart, The Last Great Concert Vol ll. that you can hear HERE. Heck, that whole album. By this time in his life Chet knew heartbreak well.

I also envision a singer in the story who looks something like Julie Collins as she looks on the album cover of Strangers Again or with Joan Baez Diamonds and Rust video HERE. In short, lots of musical inspirations for Project 2026.

Otherwise, well, there is going to be a little fishing in the story, fly fishing to be exact. Never much of a fisherman, I took up fly fishing when my son got into fishing. I decided that if I wasn't going to catch fish, I might as well have fun trying, and fly fishing seemed to be an interesting way to try to catch fish in and of itself. I think I'll put a little of that into the story as well.

There are also some old favorite tropes of mine in the story, too many, in fact, but alas, as an old dog, new tricks are hard to learn.

Well these are all the ingredients that I can think of that I'm tossing into the mix for my next novel. We'll have to see what it ends up tasting like. I am hopeful it will all come together to entertain you.