Diwa & Kaffi: Songs from the Apartment Complex

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Hi there! If you’ve come by because you’ve just picked up my new ebook Diwa & Kaffi, then you will no doubt be unsurprised that I in fact made a mixtape/playlist for the book! I’d posted this a short while ago, but I’d like to reshare this with the added commentary on each song and how they fit in with the novel itself. There’s a lot of love and hope in this mix, and I hope that it lifts you up as well.

1. The Sound of Arrows, “(Opening Titles)”
2. The Sound of Arrows, “Stay Free”
These songs open the band’s Stay Free album, but in Diwa & Kaffi they would actually appear at the very end of the story — literally the very last scene — and would be used during the ‘ending credits’ montage of my imagined film version. I had the entire sequence played out in my head even before I’d gotten about halfway through writing the novel, so when I say I knew exactly how the story ended early on, I wasn’t kidding!

3. U2, “Get Out of Your Own Way”
This is a universal theme of Diwa & Kaffi for every character: sometimes the core of your problems are within, and it’s up to you to find a way to solve them, or at least work past them. This was also a personal theme of mine while I was writing the novel.

4. Ra Ra Riot, “Water”
This is a song that I think lends itself to the closeness of many characters in the book. Whether it’s familial, romantic or just simple adoration, there’s always the worry that others will take love the wrong way. I wanted this novel to be about love as something approachable and shapeable, and how freeing and wonderful it is to be allowed to do that.

5. Beck, “Dreams”
I heard this track a lot during my Day Job hours and it became one of my favorites of his. I love the vibe of ‘nothing’s gonna tear me down’ and it fit perfectly with the themes of this novel. I can picture this being on the personal playlist of a few characters as well.

6. Elbow, “Firebrand & Angel”
Elbow is one of my top favorite bands of the last twenty years and they never cease to amaze and inspire me. This song’s about a special relationship, and while I can see it being about Diwa and Kaffi, I actually see it more about Anna-Nassi and Cole; two oddballs that don’t fit the mold but have found each other.

7. Gang of Youths, “What Can I Do If the Fire Goes Out?”
There are a few noisy tracks on here, and this is the kind of stuff Anna-Nassi would definitely listen to when on her own, late at night in her nestroom with headphones on and stereo loud. She’s an extremely emotionally driven character and this kind of track would definitely lift her spirits.

8. The Naked and Famous, “A Still Heart”
On the other hand, I can see Kaffi listening to this kind of delicate music. He might be high-spirited especially when flying, but he’d also exude a Zen-like balance when he feels purely at peace with himself and his surroundings. Deep down, this is the kind of character he really is. I can see him thinking of Diwa when this song is on.

9. U2, “13 (There Is a Light)”
This is another theme of Diwa & Kaffi: the deep and personal connections between people that go well past friendship and acquaintance. The ability to trust another person not just with their deepest emotions but with their life is certainly rare and worth protecting. You’ll see it between many of the characters in the novel.

10. Embrace, “Love Is a Basic Need”
On the other hand, this is another view of that deep and personal connection: keeping and protecting that link with the person you love even though they might be so completely different from you in so many ways. Love isn’t always about finding the perfect match; it can also be about finding the needed match.

11. The Sound of Arrows, “Don’t Worry”
In the movie version of this story in my head, this is the song that would play when Diwa and Kaffi are about embark on their first trip to Panooria alone. ‘Out of the nest and into the wild,’ as the mandossi saying goes. They might be nervous about doing something new and exciting for the first time, but they’re comforted by the fact that they’re doing it together.

12. Shame, “Friction”
This is totally Anna-Nassi’s song. Noisy and irritable, just like the spirit within her. She can be her own worst enemy sometimes, especially when Cole’s not around.

13. Elbow, “One Day Like This”
One of my all-time favorite songs, and one of the most uplifting and inspiring songs I’ve ever heard. I can be in the shittiest of moods (which I was at the time of writing the novel, nearing the end of my time with the Former Day Job) and yet I was able to find at least one thing that could lift my spirits immeasurably. This would be Diwa’s song as he learns just how important his three friends are to him.

14. GoGo Penguin, “Strid”
This jazz band’s album A Humdrum Star had been getting heavy play on my PC during my writing sessions, and this one’s one of my favorite tracks from it. I’d consider it a sort of instrumental score for a tense and pivotal scene in the book when Diwa and Kaffi are faced with an unsettling situation, and all that they have to go on is instinct.

15. Eels, “There I Said It”
Equally the goofiest and the most tender love song I’ve ever heard, this is totally Diwa and Kaffi’s theme. Their connection runs deep, and yet they’re still characters with embarrassing faults and mistakes and everything else. They’re not perfect, but they love each other anyway.

16. U2, “You’re the Best Thing About Me”
And this would be Anna-Nassi and Cole’s theme. Their relationship is about completing and complementing each other, even though they couldn’t be more different from each other. Their connection runs deep as well, but in a very different way than our titular characters; they wouldn’t want to be with anyone else to make them happier because they’ve already found that happiness.

17. The Sound of Arrows, “Beautiful Life”
This song is near the end of this mix, but this would actually be the opening theme; this sets the tone with the characters as well as with the setting. It also sets the mood of the novel: it’s not about going on a life-altering journey or a quest for honor or victory, but simply about knowing what you want and having the strength and conviction to reach for it with everything that you have. ‘Go and do what makes your heart sing,’ as the tintrite saying goes.

18. Love Tractor, “We All Loved Each Other So Much”
An oldie but a goodie from 1987, it’s a wonderful indie rock instrumental jam that I love. I can hear this being played during the more uplifting moments of the novel. Even the title resonates with our four central characters: they do indeed love each other.

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Thanks again for reading and listening! I really hope you like Diwa & Kaffi!

What’s next?

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

So Diwa & Kaffi drops at the end of this week…and I’m already thinking of what I want to do next! I’m definitely feeling the positive rush that I felt when I released my previous ebooks, how having one new title out each year inspired me to keep doing what I love. Sure, taking a few years off for personal reasons was worth it (and much needed) but now that I’m back I really want to return to this schedule.

So what would I work on, you say? Would it be Theadia? Or maybe Queen Ophelia? A sequel to In My Blue World? Or something else kicking around? Or something completely new? [I mean, I do have that romcom idea as well…] Who knows? Either way, releasing this book has reminded me how much I loved self-publishing — even the hard parts like the revision and the cover layout and the formatting — I want to keep going!!

Prepping the manuscript

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WHOOF. I spent most of Thursday afternoon prepping Diwa & Kaffi for its July 1 debut, and it took me a little longer than I expected! Formatting the manuscript itself wasn’t all that hard, though I’m clearly out of practice and had to fix a few embarrassing errors.

No, it was the cover that was the biggest pain in the butt! I’ll spare you the details other than that my photo editing apps were refusing to do what I wanted them to do. For now I’ve uploaded a slightly touched-up cover that I can deal with, but will most definitely upload a much better one when I have more time and brainspace for it.

But yeah, at this point the book is ready to go! I’m right chuffed that this book is finally about to be a reality!

Coming Soon: New E-Book!

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In case you haven’t guessed already, I am planning a quick release of Diwa & Kaffi, preferably on 1 July to coincide with Smashwords’ annual summer sale. This gives me a little less than two weeks to a) finish the ‘temporary’ cover I’d started making the other day, and b) format the Word file to e-book form. Thankfully I can do both in that amount of time as I’m a quick worker and the novel has been completely revised, cleaned up and ready to go for a good few months now.

What inspired this surprise release? Sigur Rós, of all things. Last Thursday they’d popped onto their Instagram feed and simply said ‘oh hey we have our first new album in ten years coming out tomorrow, have fun’. On that very same day, I’d gotten an email from Smashwords about their summer sale, and realized this was a perfect time to send it out into the wild. I posted it in serialized form for my readers here a few months ago, but I felt it was far past time to share it with the rest of the world.

To be honest, I really miss the thrill of releasing e-books like this! My last one was In My Blue World in early 2019, so it’s been a four-year gap. [I’ve obviously been busy since then with writing and real life stuff, of course.] I’m looking forward to getting this one out to you in a couple of weeks! Stay tuned for updates and links!

Diwa & Kaffi: A demo cover

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I’ve been sitting on this novel a bit too long and I think it really needs to be released. I consider it one of my best works, and weirdly enough the only reason I’m still sitting on it is because I haven’t gotten around to researching and commissioning an artist to create what I’m seeing in my head for it. [For those curious, I’ve always pictured it in a light manga style, having the same kind of mood as one of Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku tankobon, featuring the two mains on the cover and the other two mains on the back. I’m thinking I may do that for a later edition.]

One thing of note: serendipitously, the curved apartment building in the picture is here in San Francisco and is the exact same building that inspired the Palm building in the novel! Did not expect that to happen when I went looking for pictures yesterday!

Either way, I’m planning on finally sending this one out into the wild VERY soon. Which means I’m back to playing around with Shutterstock’s library and PicMonkey’s platform. This is by no means the final version, of course. I need to tweak a number of things, including the color of the sky and the fonts for the title and byline.

In the meantime, let me know what you think!

Keeping Up

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I’ve actually been pretty good with the 750 Words these days! Once again, it’s mainly because I’m using it for a specific single purpose instead of trying to write something new every day. [In this case, I’m low-key doing a bit of ongoing personal writing tied in with a not-quite-trunked, still-on-the-backburner project, but y’all probably know what it is anyway.] I’m lucking out because the writing I’m doing for it is super easy, and I can hit the numbers I want in about twenty minutes, leaving me with a perfect amount of time for the blogging and work on MU4.

Speaking of MU4, the day after I posted Monday’s entry here, I came to the conclusion that the only way I’d be able to break this low-stakes mindset is to do a complete one-eighty. My first thought was: you want tension? I’ll give you some f***ing tension. I realized I couldn’t just build up to it: I had to make it happen, and make it happen now. An ultimate oh shit moment. And I ran with it.

And it worked! This was exactly the push I needed to get this novel back on track, to give it the boost it so desperately needed. I already know I’m going to need to do some heavy revision of the previous six chapters at some future point to make it work, but that’s par for the course anyway. The important thing here is that I’m right where I need to be again. Now all I have to do is keep it going!

Tension

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I’ll admit I’m having a bit of a problem with MU4 lately. I have some interesting ideas, but my brain seems to be stuck in low-stakes mode for some reason. I don’t blame anything or anyone other than myself for that; I’d put myself in that mode near the start of the pandemic to a) get through it and deal with the Former Day Job and post-FDJ personal stuff, and b) get into the mood that writing Diwa & Kaffi required. Thing is, I’ve been having trouble getting out of that mode ever since.

This is partly why I’m writing MU4, to be honest. If there was any universe that could get me back into the higher-stakes brainspace, it’s the Mendaihu Universe. It’s much easier said than done, however…I like what I have so far, but I REALLY need to start raising the volume, so to speak. I’ve written several scenes that I think are great, but I seem to be stopping short of Big Epic Action almost every single time.

So I think I really need to shake it up a bit. Whatever’s going on with both my new and old characters, I need to do more with them. They need to get in on the action, get stuck in oh shit situations, do things with consequences. Why am I avoiding writing that? Well, it could very well be that Certain Real Life Politics over the last five or so years took a lot out of me and I’m merely avoiding the emotional stress from it and elsewhere, but I can only avoid it for so long.

I need to connect and channel that tension again. Feed it into something creative. I’m good at that. I know I am. I just need to take that step and do it again.

Getting there one way or another

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Every now and again I get to a chapter or a scene that is just not working. No matter what I do to it, no matter what I try, it just…fails. It’s frustrating, sure, but I’ve come to the realization that the true source of frustration lies not in the inability to fix what I have, but in the time wasted going trying to make it work in the first place. Thankfully I don’t let that eat at me too much.

I’m no perfectionist, but I am a writer who trusts their instincts. If this is a scene that just ain’t cutting it, I’ll give it the old college try for a day or so just to see if it’s salvageable. Sometimes it works — I’ll come up with a solution that wasn’t coming to me the day before, or I’ll allow myself some time to work through it in my head first. But more often than not, if it isn’t going to work after a few days, it’s not going to work, period. Cut the offending piece and pasted it in my Outtakes document. [And yes, all of my novels have at least one of those.]

I say this after about three days of trying to write the latest chapter of MU4 and not quite getting anywhere with it. There’s a mood I think works, but there’s no plot, just a few connecting scenes, and that makes for pretty boring prose. My mistake was that I went into the scene unsure where I wanted to go and hoping it would tell me. Sometimes that works, but often times it doesn’t. So what I need to do is cut the whole thing and start from scratch.

It’s frustrating, yes, but sometimes it’s got to be done to move forward.