Vinyl Fantasy

The Auxilliary Writing Cave has lots of nice features, such as a fireplace and big, comfy furniture. A thing there that we haven’t brought up is our vinyl collection and — hold onto your butts — functional turntable. Lately we’ve made it a project to listen to all our albums (and EPs and rare 12-inch singles and everything else that the turntable can handle).

Music during writing sessions is something that brings out strong opinions. For us, the formula is that music is always good, but if what we’re doing is editing rather than composing or discussing then it has to be instrumental. For some weird reason, the lyrics don’t interfere with our ability to make up new sentences, yet they very much impede us when we’re trying to make adjustments to existing ones.

Our library of vinyl won’t be setting any records (ha!) but it is pretty big. Takes up about four feet of shelf space. It’s also a blend of Jen’s and Kent’s collections, reflecting their sometimes diverging musical interests. That divergence is actually highlighted when we consider what we have on vinyl specifically, because that format aligns with our teenage phases.

So, in an effort to devise a fair method of going through the whole stack without either or both of us going bonkers, we chose to select from alternating ends of the shelf. Currently we’re in the middle of the Star Wars soundtrack, which was preceded by the rather distracting Looney Tunes collection. We do own actual albums by actual bands, honest. Apparently our filing system has a sense of humor.

A writing partner is someone who’ll flip the record for you once in a while.