Friday, December 07, 2012

Music and writing a book?

Those who know me well know I have a very very long memory. I don't forget a lot of things. One thing that is strange to me that I totally love is I can sit down listen to random shuffle from my music library and it is like a time machine. I see people, locations, I remember the feelings sometimes even smells.

Most of the people in my life has some sort of theme song to me, a song I hear that I can't help but think of them. Certain songs bring memories up so fast, it can be shocking. I love having a long memory, I get to keep so many wonderful things so close to the surface of my mind whenever I want to.

Then I started thinking, I know I take that for granted, how incredibly long my memory is, and let's face it I am not getting any younger, right? I won't always be able to pull something from 25-30 years ago in a seconds time.

I have also been incredibly lucky in life, At least I think so. I have been on some grand adventures, and come through relatively unscathed. I have tried things and gone through things and been through some stuff. Like I am sure most of you don't know another person who has had an average of  1.17 jobs and moves an average of every 8.5 months for every year they have been alive.

I love my memories and a lot of them are actually really good stories to share... so that got me thinking. i should finally start writing that book I have been told I should write a million times. I guess I never saw a really good reason, but age has created one for me.

I started my outline yesterday and was working on some title ideas. I am planning on writing it in a collection of short stories kind of way. Each chapter will be stories grouped together by a common theme, like cast or characters, major events, schools jobs, etc. Still working that out in my mind.

But I could use a little help, what events did you experience with me that you think are book worthy?

One pitfall of a super long memory is the filtering process, the sorting. I have a pretty good system of context. If I am trying to remember a particular time, I figure out what school I went to, where I lived, where I worked by dates and it helps create my then current cast and then events with them fall in after that, songs and pictures from that time after. I can go step further by looking up pop culture from that time, it adds more details and stories. So how do you pick and choose or combine to get all the best of everything, what do you leave out?