Soundtrack Monday: Disease

It’s another Soundtrack Monday! This week we’re going old-school, all the way back to the Society series.

Delgado (for all his sins and mine) really liked Matchbox Twenty. I could reliably get into his head playing a couple of their tracks–not to mention a few bits of the soundtrack for the La Femme Nikita TV series, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post. One of the most reliable songs was Disease, which still makes him start talking inside my head.

Of course, Del considered himself not just irretrievably broken but also contagious, a feeling helped along by the awe and fear everyone except Henderson (and Yoshi, and later Rowan) held him in. He absolutely considered himself beyond redemption, especially in the first half of Hunter, Healer. I borrowed a lot of Roy Dupuis’s stonefaced suffering from the Nikita series (and Rowan’s hair does come from Peta Wilson’s amazing platinum mane in a lot of that show), but to this day I don’t know where his particular psychic talent came from. In face, I didn’t even know what he actually did until the second draft of the first book.

Naturally I knew he had some psionic ability, but the details were fuzzy. Once he finally opened up and told me about it, things started to make much more sense and his fear of connection was placed in proper proportion.

A lot of that series also came from X-Men fanfic I wrote in my high school days. None of it survives (thank goodness), being safely hidden in landfills, but its ghost is still on the compost pile inside my head. Nothing is ever truly lost, especially in a writer’s head. Stories germinate in a mound of fertile, rotting material left over from other half-told (or fully told, or even just imagined) tales.

I know there must be people whose heads aren’t full of this stuff, but I’ll be damned if I can imagine how that must be.

Anyway, the Society series could go on–there’s Cath’s story, naturally, and later events. Plus the whole shebang is set in the same universe as the Watchers and Danny Valentine; speaking of which, if you look really closely, there are a few Watchers still around in Danny’s time, though Circle Lightfall’s goals have changed out of all recognition by then. But if I went on with Cath’s story a few dreadful things would have to happen to other characters I like quite a bit and I don’t want to write that. So it’s best to just…let things rest, even though I know what happens next.

There’s no shortage of other stories to tell, after all.