Hey guys, it's been a while, but here's your friendly lyric-writer guy coming in with an update or two on this side of the project.
With my contributions to #1 and #2 (Flamespitters and I am a bind man, respectively) mostly complete, I've been working along trying to get the lyrics set up for our third Combustion. So, I'm getting on here to try and work out some ideas and get a bigger picture for this one.
The idea for this combustion is based on tarot cards. If you aren't familiar with them, they're those cards with the pictures on them that you always see the fortune tellers use in the movies. Each image on the cards represents something (an emotion, life choice, a situation, etc.) Without going into too much detail, a deck of tarot cards usually consists of Major and Minor Arcana. The Minor Arcana is almost exactly the same as a normal deck of playing cards, with four different suits divided from one to ten and then the royal cards. The Major Arcana is where things get really interesting, in my opinion. This part consists of usually 22 cards, each one with its own particular title rather than a suit. Each of these cards represents a stage in a journey. The scale of this journey could be large or small (the size of life or maybe an afternoon in the park), but the formula is more or less always the same. These cards represent the self-discovery, hardships, and emotional transformations that occur in life, from beginning to end.
(As a quick side-note, anybody who finds this interesting may also wish to check out the Monomyth, also known as the Hero's Journey. Not quite the same as the tarot cards, but it still has the same idea of an overarching formula defining life choices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth)
Anyway, people like to use the cards to try and figure out what they should do in the future. There's a certain ritual that one does for this endeavor: you shuffle the tarot deck and place 10 cards on the table in a certain formation. Each card in each position is supposed to tell you something about the one getting his or her fortune told. The first 9 cards are entirely based in the present. They tell you who the person is and what his/her problems are. Only the very last card, the 10th card, is used to infer any kind of advice for the future. This struck me as an interesting concept. All these cards, all these images and concepts, all this work to try and help a confused and worried individual understand who they are and what situation they're in; all this is only for the sake of one final card that is supposed to alleviate all the worries by telling you what you should do. It struck me as a huge waste.
I have never wanted to know my future. I think life would be incredibly dull and unsatisfying if I did know what was going to happen to me. However, I have worked all my life to try and better understand who I am and where I stand in this world. I think that is the true value in the concept of tarot cards, and I wanted to illustrate that idea for this Combustion.
It all sounds a little self-serving now, but so far the plan for these lyrics is to be a narrative from the point of view of a fortune teller in the circus, one who has decided not to rely on this 10th card, but rather trust in what he knows about himself to guide his way. All in all, I'd like it to be a more uplifting and casual theme this time around (the last two have been fairly serious, and I think variety is important). And considering the subject matter, I'd like to have something of an occult motif. That sounds a little contradictory, but I think it could work.
In addition to all this, I've decided I should be a little more open with the beginning stages of my work, so I'm including the very early thoughts and doodles that I've written down so far for this Combustion. For most of these, I just kind of write down the first thought that comes to my head, but I thought it might be nice to show a little of the actual writing process.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E9zEFd4j5Kw228btYB6I6BA6nW5Wxuf2TRyKDEGO6_8/edit?usp=sharing
Lastly, I've decided it would probably be a good idea to start working on the overarching stories in Kindlyn and planning ahead a little, provided that's what we want to do. It's nice to have a direction to work towards, but at the same time I find these random vignettes to be quite charming.
Sincerely,
Your Dear Writer, Luke Jeffrey.
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