I wrote my ultra short story, “Greatest of Them All,” at a conference about women in fantasy called Sirens. It seemed like the perfect intro to COMMANDER ANNIE AND OTHER ADVENTURES to tie the whole book together.
And now it makes a pretty little song.
My novella, “Commander Annie,” is very strongly inspired by a friendship breakup I went through in middle school. It was fully my first heartbreak. And there’s something just so healing about the catchy 80s-style song I’ve made to go with the story.
I always loved the picture book “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble” as a kid. My story “Geese and Gingerbread” is kind of my homage to it, and it turned into a very nice fairy tale song.
In my first draft, the song for “Huckle’s Puddle” was sung entirely by Huckle… but then I got a version with his fae mother singing part, and with some tricky reworking, I was able to get a final version with a haunting duet that gets me every time.
It really has been remarkable getting to experience my own stories in an entirely new way. As a short story, I see “Summer Strawberries” as being about the plot and ideas… but as a song, I get to just mostly focus on the feelings it evokes… and wow.
For the song version of “Katelynn and the Hummingbird,” I needed to get a lead vocal that believably sounded like it could be a cat character singing… and I don’t know, but the kinda cool, jaunty vibe I ended up with really works for me.
“The Ugly Sapling” called for creating a song sung by… a tree. I think it works. Quirky and sweet, and the conclusion hits hard for me… but then, I wrote it to say what I needed to hear, so that tracks.
My story “Speed Questing” was inspired by a real experience I had in World of Warcraft when a quest triggered a countdown… but since I hadn’t read the quest, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
Never thought that moment would make such a fun song!
My story, “Rumple’s Gift,” was inspired by a long, hard night helping my mom prepare half a dozen ball gowns for a children’s production of “The Little Mermaid” the next day. I was way out of my depth and so tired…
But the song turned out awesome.
It’s such a surreal experience to hear something like “When the Universe Listens” turned into a song… it makes the outside world sound like my inside world, and that’s just not something that happens for me very often.
Some stories, you set out to write, because you have something that you know you want to say…
And some stories — like “The Soul of the Forest” — just kind of happen through you.
And then the song interpretation happened…
And it sounds like magic.
My story “Heart of an Orca, Grace of a Cat” was written for Furvana when I was their guest of honor, and I love how playful the song turned out. I’ve had the chorus line, “I’m half made of moonlight, did you know that?” stuck in my head so much.
I wrote the first lines of “Nawry the Noodlebeast” and outlined it my senior year of college… it took another 17 years to finish actually writing it. This one goes deep in my psyche. So the bar was really high for capturing how it feels to me as a song.