Composing the Music of Heaven's Wait

I think I've been creating music my whole life. I remember, as a child, sitting on the floor of my brother's bedroom making up tunes and pretending to play the piano on the strings of a blue plastic tennis racket. I remember writing little songs for the neighborhood "shows" we held in our garage, and being inspired to compose all the time I was growing up.

I had always longed for a piano, and I felt a great sense of accomplishment when I bought my six-foot Yamaha with money I had earned myself. I was in my early 30s at the time. I took lessons for several years, but was less inspired to play the practice pieces than to struggle through the process of creating my own tunes, simple though they were.

New inspiration arose with the birth of Heaven's Wait. I felt the need to attach melodies to the sentiments that were developing for this new world, R.J., the oddball characters and their stories. After all, Heaven's Wait is a very musical place. Its inhabitants have always had music in their lives. The characters' themes needed to be as wacky as they were, but most of the other songs needed to tell a story or reflect relevant emotions.

I believe the first piece I composed for Heaven's Wait was A Journey Above, the theme for R.J. as he traveled from the world we know to a new one somewhere beyond. I sat at my piano and cried as the melody came together. R.J.'s journey was very real to me, and the tune blossomed from the initial feeling of a lone, subdued journey to one of inner peace and splendor.

I had been away from my piano for quite a long time, so none of this work was easy for me. I knew how to write the melodies on manuscript paper from the notes I played on the piano, but writing any kind of accompaniment was purely a trial-and-error process. I just kept diligently playing around until chords and harmonies sounded right.

Then I succumbed to the big cheat. I brought the rough manuscript to my Cakewalk Music Creator program on my computer. I transcribed the music, note by note, into its system and let the program play the song for me. In fact, I've done that with all the pieces I have accumulated in my Heaven's Wait portfolio. There are so many complex facets to this project of mine that I plan to continue to deal with the music in this manner for the time being.

Oh, and one of my ultimate goals is to learn to play on the piano the pieces I have written. A little backwards, don't you think?

What have you done that's a little backwards?

Illustrating—Heaven's Wait Becomes Visual

It wasn’t long before my mind started pestering me to produce some concrete images for all the character and landscape ideas floating around. After all, part of my master plan was to weave simple illustrations into my project. In their previous lives, when they lived in my remedial reading workbook, my main characters had faces and styles, but the illustrations that had been drawn by an artistic high school student didn't quite match my vision of the creatures. So I dug into the illustrating program, Freehand, and also into Photoshop to see what I could come up with.

I was obviously taking on a lot by trying to write and illustrate at the same time, but the processes actually worked well for me. I was on this freewheeling creative journey, with no time constraints and no rules. When I found myself stuck or uninspired with my writing, I put it aside and worked on what the characters and their unusual town looked like. I settled into Photoshop to build the characters because I liked the way I could easily create layers for the different body parts. However, I soon found the program limiting for that type of illustrating. I realized I needed to learn Adobe Illustrator if I was going to pursue graphic illustration.

My primary character took about two weeks to create, because I had to convert him over from Photoshop, and I was such a rookie at Illustrator at the time. Each of the four other characters who play the biggest roles took about a week to design. The five were distinctly different from one another, so once I got their designs down, it was pretty easy to design their family members by modifying facial features, hair, heights and costumes. The work was tedious, but it was so much fun to see the characters and their families come to life, one by one. I was eventually able to add portrait shots to my database, which made the characters seem more and more lifelike.

Illustrating their environment was another story. I didn't have an illustrating background from which to draw. In my youth, I had taught myself to draw tulips, desert landscapes and the girls in the Breck hair product ads that were on the backs of most magazines (I'm showing my age). But that was about it. So I played around in my Broderbund 3D Home Design Suite, which included home and landscape design, to see what I could develop. It was a godsend. Though the process was painstakingly slow, I was able to build not just one home but the entire community. I furnished and decorated the characters' homes (though only with earthly items), and eventually built their gardens, paths and various landscape elements to create the unusual town that lay hidden in the world of Heaven's Wait. With the program's 3D features, I was able to walk through the neighborhood and home interiors and make them fit the personalities of the inhabitants.

Of course, the program came with proprietary restrictions, so I couldn't publish the scenes I created. The graphic elements, pre-designed furniture, plants and textures belonged to Broderbund. For the time being, I was happy simply to see my world coming to life. I took snapshots of the environments and placed my characters in front of them, making my world feel so real, it was almost scary.

I quickly learned, however, that it wasn't easy to place the characters in their settings. They needed to be proportional to the environment, as well as to each other. Back to Access! It was time for some math. I went back to my primary character and calculated the ratios of the other main characters to him. Then I calculated the ratios of their relatives to each of the other characters, and added the statistics to their Access profiles. That way, I would always know how big a character was in relation to others who shared the same scenes. Also, once I set the ratio of the primary character to his home environment, the rest of the placements were calculable. Whew!

An Emotional Tribute

I knew that basing R.J. on my dad was going to be an emotional journey. As I began to write, however, I was not quite prepared for the flood of memories that accompanied the reenactment of my dad's death. I was there again with him in his final days, and the feelings hit me hard. I do think, though, that the exercise was therapeutic for me in many ways. Since Daddy had been robbed of so many more years he should have spent with my family, this fantasy story was a way for me to keep his spirit alive in a unique way. It was also a way for my sons to learn endearing yet true tidbits about my dad, since they were very young when he passed on.

I tried to crawl into my dad's skin and react as he would have, as a spirit trying to work his way through the new otherworldly realm in which he found himself. This experience was draining, and the challenges were many. Everything was much more complex than I had originally intended.

I sobbed through many a writing session as I created R.J.'s story. The first draft included much of my extended family's history as well as my dad's history. I thought it was clever of me to weave such trivia into the piece, especially if my relatives were going to read it.

I later learned that was a very amateur idea. I really had to decide whether I was writing just for my family, or for a more public audience. And as my original little preface began to morph into an actual story, which of those details were relevant to the story and which were simply sentimental memories that needed to be laid aside?

With the preliminary preface finally in hand, I was ready to get back to the life-lesson tales and my original vision.

It's Coloring Day in Heaven's Wait

Have kids, grandkids, or a little bit of a kid hiding within yourself? Spend a few soothing Saturday moments coloring a couple of Heaven's Wait's newest and tiniest creatures, Hopley Drippil and his sister Floplee.

Here's Hopley's page: http://www.heavenswait.com/PDFPages/DrippilsColorbook/CDColorBookHopley.pdf

Here's Floplee's page: http://www.heavenswait.com/PDFPages/DrippilsColorbook/CDColorBookFloplee.pdf

All you need is Acrobat Reader to open the PDF files, and your local printer. Have Fun!

Reflections and Dear R.J.

In the early 1980s, not long after I self-published the remedial reading workbook I had developed to help me tutor grade-school students, my sweet father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My family and I traveled the rocky road with him for 18 months, until he passed away in 1984. For me, the creativity that had been blossoming seemed to fade away. I lost interest in tutoring and stopped taking piano lessons. My creative outlets seemed irrelevant. Instead, I dove into helping my husband build his coffee roasting company. I put my energies and organizational skills into developing and maintaining the behind-the-scenes infrastructures, while my husband built the clientele and sold the products.

Almost twenty years later, I decided to resurrect the characters from my workbook. I looked back again at when I had put them to rest. The timing all had to do with my dad. My sadness over his passing had sucked the inspiration right out of me. But that wasn't fair to my characters, with whom I definitely had unfinished business. It occurred to me that perhaps I could revive these creatures and honor my dad's spirit in the process. Perhaps he could be the person who discovered them, living in their unique world. How would that work? Why, he could find them as he traveled up to Heaven, of course! He was a wonderful, everyday family man who had served bravely in Guadalcanal, Luzon and elsewhere during WWII. What if he became an adventurous soul who decided he'd like to detour over the South Pacific on his way to Heaven, to see the area one more time under peaceful conditions? What if he discovered this unique world in the process?

I thought it could work, but I now realized I needed to write a preface to this grand project of mine. I needed a story that introduced this unexpected new world to the readers, gave my dad a place in it, established his knowledge of the characters' tales and delivered the tales to those of us here on Earth. Never in a million years did I suspect that this creative journey would take me in such a direction.

Pause #2! Write the preface. My dad's name was Robert Joseph. His character became R.J. The title became R.J.'s Story. The in-between world became Heaven's Wait.

Writing--What Did I Know?

I had never written anything that hadn't needed major revision. My teachers in school always told me that I was good at formulating interesting ideas, but not very good at expressing them. I needed help in both verbal and written arenas. But I had to give writing a shot anyway, since it was a major part of my grand vision. The ideas that floated around in my mind nagged at me to be released and often kept me awake at night. There had to be a reason I was heading down this path. All I could do was follow the inspiration. So I began writing the original tales.

I decided to resurrect some animated characters I had created as part of a remedial reading workbook I developed while I was raising my boys. At the time, I used the program to tutor remedial readers from my home. When I started writing the tales, however, I was no longer interested in the mechanics of the reading program. I wanted to give my quirky, otherworldly characters a new life within the realm of this new project.

With no more than a list of life-lesson concepts in hand, I wrote the first couple of tales. I purposely kept the language simple so that anyone, young or old alike, could read my work. There was no outline, and no plan as to how my ideas would all come together. I quickly realized there was much more to this than simply sitting down and writing fictional tales. I wasn't going to get very far in writing about my characters until I knew more about them. They needed distinctive personalities, looks, families, and reasons for behaving as they did.

Pause the process (Pause #1) and enter MS Access. I began building background character data: names, ages, heights, relations, attributes, jobs, generations and more. The database gave me a place to record all the little tidbits of character information I needed to remember as time progressed. My main character, for example, became a fourth-generation teenage male with a father, a grandfather and a great-grandfather, all of whom played parts in the developing stories. I built a form that gave me a handy page for each character as he or she entered the picture.

I also needed to know the backdrop for my tales. These characters were oddball beings that were certainly not human, although human-like, and so didn't fit into a typical earthly setting. It was great fun trying to solve this problem, because I let my imagination run free to see where it might take me. It became obvious that I needed to create another world somewhere out there for the creatures to inhabit. That was fine; I could do that. But then what? How would those of us on Earth know that this other world existed? Things were getting more complicated by the minute!

The answer came to me after some sentimental reflections.

Before Heaven's Wait

And so my blog officially begins. Welcome to my journey!

Almost from the time I first learned about computers, database design and the Internet, my creative wheels started turning. My kids were still young, but I was getting old enough to think that, for their sake, I might want to preserve some of the little bits of wisdom I was accumulating as I worked my way through life's many processes. Seeing that such preservation was destined to be technology-based, I wondered if I could design some kind of application that would express these tidbits in a fun, entertaining way. My vision was that of creating something in a multimedia format that could be enjoyed by future generations of my family (for starters) as a kind of personal legacy, so they could learn some things about me they may not otherwise have known.

My overall plan was wishy-washy, to say the least, and much grander than my knowledge of the programs that would bring my ideas to life. Actually, I'm not sure if the programs back then would have been able to accommodate me anyway. I envisioned a collection of tales that not only imparted a little wisdom but that also entertained with illustrations, sounds and fun things to do. Little did I know how ambitious my ideas were!

I knew I had to start by delving into the rapidly growing world of technology. I had already become fairly proficient at database design with MS Access (after fumbling through a handful of lengthy seminars, where I was probably the only participant who wasn't a computer programmer). While other family members brought relaxing reading materials on vacations, I lugged my 1,200-page Access, Photoshop, Freehand, Illustrator, FrontPage and Dreamweaver manuals around with me. I kept telling myself that somewhere down the line, tools such as these would reveal their value beyond that of tracking brewing equipment or taking product photos for our family's coffee roasting company. My inner geek, engineer, artist and who-knows-what-else were beginning to make their presence known.

The greater picture lingered in my mind, and I moved along, one amateur step at a time.