#I'm having way more fun writing 'verlorene'

[peterlorres21stcentury]

creative writing woes of the past

As I continued writing today, fitting together all the little random scraps into something that kinda resembles a story, I accidentally had an intrusive memory of my undergraduate creative writing class (wow, that was like 16 years ago, me olde). It was the first and last creative writing class I ever had, and I'm sorry to say that it wasn't all that valuable for me. The professor seemed intent on teaching us to only write things that would sell, rather than the fundamentals of storytelling, character development, voice, and so on. She was forever trying to squash everyone's creativity into the most boring "marketable" mold possible. I'm still mad at what the prof did to a fellow classmate, who wrote a touchingly personal, semi-fictional story inspired by her deceased brother. Prof was not satisfied by that, and after three increasingly worse drafts, made her re-work it into some bland clone of the prof's own published memoir, with weird psychological drama/sci-fi elements added (???) It was so far removed from the original concept that my eyeballs practically fell out after reading it.

Prof and I never saw eye-to-eye either. She was always getting on my case about writing stories set in the early 20th century ("you need to be more contemporary") and my style ("archaic" was the exact word she used). I bridled at this until eventually she mostly gave up on me. Of course, I like to think my writing has improved by leaps and bounds since those days, but it was only due to frequent practice. I honestly wanted to enjoy that class. I desperately wanted to learn something from it! Unfortunately, there wasn't anything there that didn't prop up the prof's massive ego. I'm amazed I passed that class with high marks, somehow. And no, I never wrote Peter Lorre stories for her. The closest I ever got was writing a short horror story deliberately styled after Edgar Allan Poe (surprise, prof hated that, too).

However, this is a serious question for anyone who likes reading my weird crap for some reason: is there anything about it that could be improved? Anything that bugs you? I'm constantly going back to old works and thinking "hmmm, I might have done that better, but what's done is done" and move on to the next story with that in mind. I'm so humbled by everyone's super kind comments on my work (thank u! I love u), but know that I'm open to criticism too.

[mcrmadness]

Hey friend! This isn't part of any ask game but I was thinking about it so I'm asking anyways :D out of Bela and Farin whose solo music do you like better? And which is your favourite solo song of each?

Hi!!!

I like Farin’s solo stuff more, definitely. And I actually like FU stuff much more than even FURT, Am Ende der Sonne being my favorite solo album of his (and it’s also the go-to album for me whenever I feel angry). I am also extremely fond of Berliner Schule.

Fun fact: It took very long for Fasztination Weltraum to open for me, I really liked “Herz? Verloren!” and its B-sides so when I finally got the full album to my hands, it was a bit of a turn-off and I was almost disappointed with it. Had to listen to it so many times in order to warm up and I still think it’s probably the worst FU/FURT album so far. There’s some gems ("iDisco", for example) in there but everything else is so... basic? Like, they just don’t make me feel almost anything at all. Not positive nor negative. Just nothing. (And pretty much the same happened with Farin’s songs on HELL apart from maybe like 1-2 songs...)

From Bela’s solo stuff I own the 1st and 2nd albums on cd and they’re okay. I liked Code B more than Bingo as there’s lots of skipping to do (for me), too. I think when his third album (and also the rest) came out, I was in the middle of my “not on the mood for any new music” so I did not check out any bands or artists I like no matter how many new albums would have come out so I never did that with bela's albums either. I did watch some music videos but I just didn’t like them at all (and the album name, I think it’s “Bye”? It gave me again even more anxiety than what I had of my own that year.) because honestly, country music is just not my thing. There’s a few music styles I just absolutely cannot stand and they are: schlager, rap/hip hop and country. Even if I'm a horse groom myself, I still cannot stand country music! :DDD

And about his later solo projects I don’t even have a clue what are those or how many albums he has even done. I probably should give them a try one day but I still haven’t had the motivation nor mood for that. I’m sometimes really bad at doing this. I mean, I meant to check out King Køng for YEARS and I did that only this year. And talking of King Køng, that’s not really my cup of tea. There were some okay songs but I have to say that “No More” sounds much better when it’s in the middle of those die ärzte interviews, and it’s actually a very anticlimatic song when you hear it as a whole between all those other songs on the album. I guess I have to listen to these albums a couple of times more still, but let’s just say that I was listening to these while I was drawing and the 3rd album got eventually so boring for me that I had to quit listening to it before it even ended because I was getting way too restless and needed something faster to go with my drawing in order to keep myself focused and from becoming (mentally) hyperactive.

^Here's that part of my collection so far. (Btw I have never listened to FURT's Livealbum of Death despite owning it, idk why. I also don't have FURT's live dvd because I just would not be able to focus on that. I sometimes have trouble even focusing on dä live dvds and other concert videos but those I at least have watched all, and most of them at least once as a whole without skipping.)

***

And then the other part of your question - my favorite song from both.

Pudelsong from FU!!!

I also love songs like Dusche, or Karten. Both also have awesome lyrics (Farin's one of the rare people who writes lyrics even I can sometimes understand), I think Dusche was the first I saw with English translation and holy shit that is just genius and I still can't get over it :DDD I love surrealistic humour and stuff like that, idek how to call that really! But I like it. And Karten is quite relatable sometimes and the instrumental solo is just amazing. I also like the story in Die Leiche, I've just always been drawn to "creepy tragic stories that won't really explain themselves" like that, same with the song Schatten from Berliner Schule. It's just weird that I'm drawn to such lyrics/stories when I absolutely hate any kind of poetic "oh try and interpret me" lyrics because I don't want to fucking guess anything, I want to KNOW. But then I do love a good mystery if it has something to do with death or murder ::D

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And from Bela I think Wiehr Thind Ssuper is my favorite? At some point I used to think that Zappingsong was my fave but I just listened to it and not anymore? Anyway - that beeping in the beginning has also been somewhere else, maybe in a video game or so and it always makes me think of this song. From Code B my fave song is Schwarz/Weiss. I've no clue about the lyrics in any of his songs so we're going soundwise here now.

And then I have to mention Tag mit Schutzumschlag (thanks I can never write that name down without looking it up from somewhere first) because when I saw the video for the first time ever, the little Tim Burton fangirl in me got loose:

Mainly because my FAVORITE SONG (or scene) from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie/soundtrack is the Mike Teavee song and one part of Bela's video is made to happen in the same room/scene :D They've also recreated some scenes and character designs so well from the Burton movie.

Lol my answer got a bit long again but did you really expect anything else from me? XD