#101 Connecting with Music to Find New Rhythms in Your Writing

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Show notes: The list of categories for the second round of brainstorms is: 1) A book or magazine 2) A job or role, taken on reluctantly, 3) A pub or café, 4) A portal or means of travel, 5) A piece of treasure or magical, sought-after object, 6) A monster or creature, 7) An invention and 8) A weapon.
Link to Spotlight Indie podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@Spotlight-Indie

Hello imaginative people. I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 101 of Brainstoryum. Well, that’s going to take some getting used to, saying “one hundred and…” for each episode.
 
Well, it’s pretty soggy over here in the UK and I’m thankful for things like reading, and writing and podcasting to keep me upbeat while I wait to find out whether the sky really is still blue, somewhere behind all this cloud. But like most people, I haven’t quite dodged all of the viruses: I had a horrible cold about a week ago which made me feel bruised all over, and my brain did a weird thing while I was trying to read. (Actually, at times I was trying to read with my eyes shut… Heads up people, this doesn’t work.) But I was reading an article and came across a paragraph that just listed types of artists: “visual artists, authors, musicians…” And in my weird brain-fog I felt more of a spark when I read the word “musician” more than I did “author”. I mean, yes, I was ill, so you have to make allowances for your befuddled brain. But this moment stuck with me, because sometimes the unconscious mind can tell you things that are in some sense true, while not being true in the ordinary, logical sense: the way that stories that really linger in your mind do so because they contain something that’s true, psychologically true, even if they are based on pure fantasy.
 
Am I musician? Well, a little bit. I play mandolin, I made up the jingle for this show and that’s me playing it on ‘Mandy Lynn’, but I’m kind of rusty, and I haven’t played with the band at my work for a long time. It’s not a goal of mine to become a performer, in fact, one of the things that really soothes me about playing the mandolin is that it’s an art form where I’m not particularly attached to results. I don’t have to produce anything. I do it for pure fun. Sometimes it’s really worth having something like that if there’s another art form that you take seriously. Writing is enormous fun, but when you start setting goals, with serious intentions to publish, a level of professionalism kicks in because it’s no longer just for you. So it involves more of an interplay between sheer joy and hard work; conscientiousness and craft. The outcome of my writing really matters to me.
 
So why did my brain hook on the word “musician” more than “author”, and why am I telling you this?
 
Well, that week, I was working on a part of Weird Creatures, my work in progress, where a herbalist (by trade) visits a country village which is troubled by a deadly creature that roves under the pavement. There are folktales around this monster, and the herbalist sits down in a local pub to listen to live storytelling and music about the legends. There’s a type of music, a rhythm, that triggers the emergence of the monster, so there’s an anxiety mixed in with the whimsical, curious atmosphere as a storyteller begins his tale. And yes, as Weird Creatures is now a collection of short stories that are connected by an overarching story, this bit of storytelling is in fact a story within a story within a story! Call me crazy, but I am having a lot of fun with writing this book.
 
Maybe the reason I came up with the idea is that I’ve often felt that there is a music to language. When you write a good sentence, there’s a rhythm to it that’s pleasing. This is why poetry is so wonderful to read out, or to listen to. I’m always trying to reach that kind of rhythmic beauty, when I write. I love the sounds of words, and I hear them in my head when I read.
 
You might say there’s a kind of subtle rhythm to everything we do, that involves skill or concentration, or art. There’s a series I read as a child, The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, which I still return to, as it’s so beautifully written, and in the first chapter of the first book, called The Book of Three, a character refers to sword making as “having a music to it”, prompted by the protagonist who’s bashing away at a piece of metal, artlessly. Well, maybe this stuck with me. This idea of music being ‘in’ things.
 
And maybe it is an accurate way of describing the essence of what I love about language, which made me, in my virus-addled state of mind, feel that pinch of recognition, when I happened across the word “musician”, even when it was next to the word “author”.
 
Going back to the story I’ve been writing for Weird Creatures, I decided to draw on my affinity with music a bit more, especially as it was so relevant to that story. I looked up a Youtube video of an accordionists playing a drone and improvising over the top of that. It reminded me that improvisation is a thing for me—not just with story brainstorming and writing—but it’s something I’ve explored quite a lot through mandolin, and the violin before that, when I was in a band. Improvisation is a part of the vital magic of art, in music and in writing. It’s these moments of discovery and surprise where the real joy of it just opens up.
 
So whether you play an instrument or not, whether you consider yourself to be musical or not, enjoying listening to music proves that you have a musicality to your mind; that you can connect with those rhythms, melodies and cadences. And there is a music to language as well. You’ll notice it especially, if you read something you’ve written out loud—and a lot of authors recommend doing that, to check the flow and the pace of your sentences.
 
But how about this as an experiment? Take a scene or a story you’ve written that you’d like to develop. Could it be enhanced if there’s background music? A busker, being nosy about the characters’ conversation? Or just music playing in the background that might distract your protagonist, make them whimsical, or feel like dancing; or even angry, or bitter, if the tune is evocative of a memory. Try looking up a piece of music that you think would fit your scene. Have a listen, and see what else it suggests. Can you describe the way the atmosphere interweaves with the character’s thoughts and emotions? And does this add something to your story?
 
Another thing to try would be to just to listen to a piece of music, anything that doesn’t have lyrics; something instrumental, and see where it takes your imagination. It could be classical, a movie soundtrack, but maybe go for something you’re not too familiar with. If I listen to the Jurassic Park theme tune, I know I’m going to be mentally running away from some really large, toothy creatures! But hey, that might be a way to imagine something like that, if you want to enter a story.
 
I love Celtic session music, like Irish, Scottish or English traditional music, without lyrics: jigs and reels. Growing up, I used to ‘hear’ this sort of music in my head in happy moments in Narnian books, as centaurs and other talking animals would dance through the forest. But there are slower pieces too like airs, and these can feel like you’re being told a story. Many of them have stories behind them.
 
By the way, I found a publishing opportunity for short stories that explore music, so if this interests you, stay tuned for that.
 
If you’d like to hear the inception of my herbalist-village story, check out episode 44 of Brainstoryum. There were actually two Exquisite Corpses in that show, which came together to produce that idea, one of them being “The hidden pavement ate the bamboozled accordionist”. So that’s in episode 44. It’s been a long time coming. Not just for the accordionist.
 
**
So before we get into the new story brainstorms, I have some wonderful stories to share from talented listeners who responded to a curious word combination from the last show: the mirrored ifrit. An ifrit being a malevolent or cunning demon or jinn, often depicted as a winged creature of smoke.
 
Elena Dennison wrote a poem:
Villanelle for Akrah, the Mirrored Ifrit
 
The mirrored ifrit wakes, undone by gentle flame,
His obsidian chest now dulled beneath love’s spell;
He wanders misty moors, whispering her name.
 
Once forged for wrath, he burns with softer aim,
A pinkish hue where crimson terror fell;
The mirrored ifrit wakes, undone by gentle flame.
 
His horns, once proud, now tilt in weary shame,
He limps through dawns he never meant to dwell;
He wanders misty moors, whispering her name.
 
What siren’s song or lamia’s gaze became
The curse that cracked his fire’s hardened shell?
The mirrored ifrit wakes, undone by gentle flame.
 
He tends the broken lands once ravaged by his blaze,
A creature born of ruin now compelled to quell;
He wanders misty moors, whispering her name.
 
So stands Akrah—remade, reversed, the same--
A softened echo where his darkness fell.
The mirrored ifrit wakes, undone by gentle flame;
He wanders misty moors, whispering her name.
 
Oh, this is haunting, and beautiful. A kind of emotional or psychological interpretation of mirrored: being in love, but being trapped like that.
 
Thank you, Elena.
 
Paul Monteith wrote:
 
Ifrit Through The Looking Glass

“An ifrit was overwhelmed by sadness. The Wizard of Ash and Ember was using his fiery dragon scales as a cape. Trapped inside the looking glass, there was not much that he could do to retrieve his flame.

Looking in the mirror, the wizard smiled as he turned side-to-side to admire the fiery cape's fit. "No longer the Wizard of Ash and Ember, now my coven must rename me the Wizard of Fire and Ash."

The ifrit turned from the mirror surface and shuffled through the soda-lime world of liquid silk toward the silver reflective surface at the rear.

The wizard had promised that the mirror was a portal, and if the ifrit passed through its glass face, he would find himself home in the Underworld of seven Earths. The price of entering the portal, the wizard had said, was that he must leave something behind--such as one of his flaming scales.

Desperate to get home, the ifrit thought the price of one scale was worth the shortcut home. As he pressed through the glass plane, the mirror took not one fire scale, but all of them. The lime-soda glass had not only shorn him of his scales but had clipped his magic and power, too.

He looked at his reflection in the silver layer. Gone was the grandeur of crimson-orange flame, his mane of fire extinguished, and his wings sparked no more. He was only smoke, a soot smudge, and he shed a tear.”


Wow, there’s a lot packed into this. Very atmospheric. And I love the idea of a portal costing you something; a magic for a magic. Thank you, Paul.
 
You can find Paul Monteith on Bluesky as Quantum Fairy.
 
Paul McMillan wrote:
 
“You find it in the attic, tucked behind a truly offensive fondue set from Auntie Mildred. It is a hand mirror, the kind with a silver back now sporting more personality than shine. You wipe it with your sleeve, and your own face stares back, a bit bewildered by the cobweb in your hair. The reflection rolls its eyes. You did not.

“Oh, brilliant,” it says, in your voice but with the weary tone of someone who’s just been handed the short straw. “Another one who can’t resist polishing things. Do you have any idea how many centuries I’ve been stuck up here because of people like you?”

You drop it. It clatters onto a box of Christmas decorations. “Ow. Rude.”

The Ifrit, for that is what sulks within the glass, is less a creature of nightmare and more of an inconvenience. It follows you now, appearing in every reflective surface, not to haunt you, but to offer unsolicited commentary on your life choices.

“That shirt again?”
“Is that your third donut?”
“Your posture’s atrocious.”

It doesn’t want your soul. It wants better company, and frankly, it’s starting to think the fondue set had more going for it.”
 
This is brilliant, so funny, and nicely tied off at the end there, with a bow, when you return to the fondue set. Thanks so much, Paul.
 
Paul McMillan writes fantasy fiction and you can find him on X as Book Marks Love and Lore.
 
**
SOCKS OF DESTINY ORGAN JINGLE
 
This part of the show is un-transpose-able! There's much giggling and rustling of paper as I pull words at random from the Socks of Destiny to create three unique sentences according to the rules of Exquisite Corpse, going: “Describing word—noun—action—describing word—noun.” Today’s resulting sentences are:
 
1. The velvety sleuth dropped, from the trees, the antsy theoretical physicist
2. The wobbling ibis fell head over heels for the smart Memegwesi  
3. The snow-covered desert cat aimed for the head of the nonchalant driver.
 
**
Now, this is a tricky one, because there isn’t one word combination that’s really jumping out at me, like “Pick me! Pick me!” If anything, in today’s Exquisite Corpses it’s been more about the entire sentences coming together and producing situations, images, like the rambler whose watch gets stolen by a hairy little man, and the velvety sleuth who captures, and then drops, from a tree, a theoretical physicist. I think, in a way, that one calls to me a bit more because there are gaps in it. Sometimes stories get me like that. The sensation of inspiration is often coupled with this feeling that you haven’t quite worked it out yet. Your curiosity is turning it over and your mind won’t quite let go of it because it doesn’t quite make sense yet.
 
It’s like what my hubby Duncan is always saying, that our “monkey brains” want to solve problems, and (for better or worse) that can be a big reason why we can’t let go of a certain train of thought.
 
But thinking of these gaps, and how the velvety sleuth doesn’t quite bring a strong enough image to mind: before I roll the dice to choose a couple of “categories of interpretation”, I think I need a bit more on this phrase.
 
There’s nothing quite like looking up a word you already know the meaning of, to see if there’s anything you’ve overlooked. A doorway into a new sense of the word.
 
A Google search on “sleuth” versus “detective” tells us that a detective is typically a professional investigator (either police or private) hired to solve crimes or find information, whereas a sleuth is a broader term, but often more informal or light-hearted, to refer to anyone skilled in solving mysteries. It says that “sleuth” comes from “sleuth-hound”, but doesn’t go into that, so I thought I’d pull out my slightly ancient, but ever useful, hardback Oxford Concise dictionary.
 
This “sleuth-hound” origin from Middle English is in the sense of “to track”, but going back further, this comes from sloth (with an accent over the o) in Old Norse meaning “trail” and with a reference to a particular use of the word “slot”. Well, looking up this use of “slot”, and rapidly turning into a sleuth myself as I do so, it means “the track of a deer, visible as slotted footprints in soft ground.”
 
Who knew that sleuthing, as a concept, is originally about footsteps marked in ground? It makes me think of snow. I once sat in a forest, on my own, and a strange feeling made me turn around. I assumed I was being watched by a squirrel, but I saw the retreating back of a deer, and was astonished. For largish animals that don’t actually have the power of invisibility, they are weirdlystrangely good at disappearing. They’re not even stripy, to blend into the trees, so no ideaI’m not sure how that worksthey do it.
 
Anyway. So now I’m associating “sleuth” with quietness, an inherent, almost animal skill; so quiet, that all you might find are the footprints left in the mud or snow.
 
And what about “velvety”? This can apply to a velvety voice, texture of skin, clothing…
 
Well, in my dictionary, velvet is just velvet, although it gave me slight tingles to note that there’s a second definition of velvet which is the “soft, downy skin that covers a deer’s antler while it’s growing”. So we are back to deer again.
 
How did that happen? This random junction of words that seemed unconnected, but now, not so much.
 
Okay. This by no means gives us an obvious or complete doorway into “the velvety sleuth”, but it’s still a beginning, which of course is what a writing prompt really is.
 
So now I’m going to roll my 8-sided dice twice and see if these thoughts can come together in a new way. (As usual, you can see the full list of 8 categories in the show notes.)
 
Here goes. 1. A book, magazine or newsletter.
 
The Velvety Sleuth? Actually, I’d buy that out of curiosity. It would be a hardback with a velvet cover, and would contain all sorts of stories of a sleuth who is too soft for her own good. A sleuth who can seduce with just the sound of her oh-so-soothing voice, and get people to open up, spill their secrets. A sleuth who disappears, swift as a deer among the trees. Who unnerves people by appearing suddenly, in places where they felt assured they were alone.
 
Does she have any magical powers that make her this way? Maybe the stories would be more intriguing if you never quite found out, until the end. They keep you guessing.
 
Let me try another category and see what else comes up.
 
2. A job or role taken on reluctantly. Oh! Okay, so this makes total sense. Although, it would be quite unusual for someone to be asked to… do some sleuthing when they don’t want to, or don’t enjoy it. But still: in a way, this gives us a chance to consider the “velvety sleuth” from a different perspective, as someone who has resisted sleuthing for some time. Or maybe she is just new to the role and she’s never noticed before that she has these skills, of being able to slip away easily, disappear, or reappear so quickly that she unnerves people. Maybe these skills or talents only emerge when she starts, reluctantly, hesitantly, to investigate a mystery. It unlocks something in her she’s never known before. It’s like she starts to become a different person. Maybe she’s always been the most ordinary person she knows; she considers herself to be a bit bland, a bit boring; she might have had some ambitions at one point, maybe she wanted to be an actress, but things didn’t work out, and she more or less accepted failure and decided that there’s nothing really interesting about her. Kind of self-deprecating.
 
But then, there’s a murder in her neighbourhood. People start gossiping. The police come round to question her, and ask her some very odd questions about what she did the day before the murder. Things she saw, details she finds she can remember clearly, despite them being really banal. And while she tries to put the whole thing out of her mind, she can’t help it. Something makes her get up in the middle of the night and creep over to the empty house where her neighbour was killed. Her senses sharpen in the dark. She can smell the blood before she sees the stains in the carpet. But then, as she’s crouching in the lounge, wondering at a bloody footprint, the front door clicks open, and she darts behind the sofa. Someone dressed in black starts nosing around, looking for something. Is it the murderer? Or someone working for them? But this is how she discovers her talent for hiding, and staying so quiet that she remains undiscovered—until the early hours, when the police turn up and find her crouched behind the sofa.
 
Ooh, I like this. Could this work as a short story rather than something longer? I especially like the potential element of magic. I mean, if someone’s going to read a mystery, why not throw in an additional mystery, about that protagonist?
 
*
Right, now for some additional motivational power! Some submission call-outs for you. Bear in mind, I have come across these opportunities in the wilds of the world wide web, and I don’t know these publishers personally. Whoever you choose to publish with, always run a check on Google to see what people have said about them, and check their terms and conditions to see if they will suit you.
 
The Writers’ Co-op are looking for stories that encapsulate “weirdness itself” for the 9th edition of their annual anthology, The Rabbit Hole. Submissions are open until 30th April, and the book is scheduled to be released in October. (Speedy turnaround!) They’re looking for unusual, uncanny or whimsical stories between 200 and 5K words, so quite a wide range. Find out more at writerscoop.wordpress.com (and co-op doesn’t have a dash, so it reads like writers coop or writer scoop). Click under the Rabbit Hole tab to find the submissions page.
 
Rooted Lit Mag is now accepting submissions for their spring anthology exploring the theme of “Music,” in case you were inspired by my ramblings in the introduction. They invite creatives of all genres to explore how music weaves through the fabric of our lives. Flash fiction up to 1K words, short stories up to 5K, or up to 3 poems. You can also submit visual art, audio or video. This call is open until 2nd April.
 
Go to rootedlitmag.com and click on the submission guidelines tab.
 
Raconteur Press have numerous submission call-outs for various anthologies on different themes, for longer stories between 5 and 8K. They have specific open dates as well as close dates for submissions and ask that you don’t submit early.
 
Of the different themes, The Muse Within Us opens from 6th March and closes 17th April. Stories where the act of creation itself becomes unearthly, or touched by supernatural forces.
 
Pet Monsters, another theme, opens from 3rd April and closes on 15th May. I think that theme is pretty self-explanatory. Also, there’s a later one on Wyrd Warfare if you like writing fight scenes. So a lot going on there.
 
Go to raconteurpress.substack.com, and click the Open Calls 2026 tab on the right hand side. The page lists many calls, the topmost ones being closed, so just keep scrolling until you find something open, like the ones I’ve mentioned.
 
And, I know I’ve talked about this before, but this time I think it IS time: I want to start a new page at annatizard.com where I can showcase your Exquisite Corpse-inspired stories and poems wherever they are published, when they are published, providing links so that people can look them up. So drop me a line when you’ve published an Brainstoryum-inspired piece of writing, and I will happily feature it on… the Brainstoryum Emporium. I already have 2 writers whose works qualify, but I’d like to get it started with 3, ‘cos that’s a good, solid number. Could it be you? Well, you’d better get scribbling then!
 
But in the meantime, if you have a short story up to 250 words, or poem, that you’d like me to read out in the next show, you know what to do: go to my ‘submit’ page under the Brainstoryum tab at annatizard.com. What would you make of the velvety sleuth? Or any other word combination that’s come up on the show. Go on, surprise me.
 
And lastly, don’t forget to look up the Spotlight Indie Big Weekend, which is all up on Youtube now as it was last weekend. On Friday there’s the panel discussion I was a part of, on Writing Better Beginnings, but there are also loads more events, discussions, interviews and so on, all about writing and indie publishing, so check them out. I’ve put a link in the show notes but if you just do a search on Youtube for Spotlight Indie, you will find their channel.
 
Until next time, go forth and be inspired!