Episode 9- late nights

Hiya! If you're new here, I post short fiction, typically inspired by random prompts I find online, as a method of writing practice. Let's check out today's prompt:

...oh. Yeah, okay, that's fair.

So, writing isn't the only creative thing I do, and very recently, a different creative project has been taking all of my time. I could tell you about it, but this is a writing blog, so I wrote my experience from last night. I also took the opportunity to try writing in present tense, which is SUPER WEIRD to me but apparently there's a ton of people who like it, and it's something I should practice anyway. So, here ya go, enjoy:

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In the rear lobby of an office building next to the highway, a woman rolls a large green cart laden with musical gear to a stop. The lobby is large, full of cheap-looking couches and uncomfortable chairs. A wall of glass, five stories high, separates the building from the smoker’s area, the line of rear parking spots, and the beltway beyond. The freeway is slow at this time of night, and the noise of the passing cars can be individually heard, barely audible over the quiet hiss of the air conditioner regulating the temperature in the lobby of a building that nobody is occupying.

Hours from now, the first of the building’s regulars will arrive. The Korean woman who runs the deli in the front lobby will unlock the door of her restaurant and take in the racks of bread that were delivered in the night. Enterprising corporate types will arrive with the sunrise, to take advantage of the small gym down the first floor hallway. Receptionists and support staff will populate the various medical practices renting space among the building’s five floors, and workers dressed in Business Casual will show up to begin their days.

But for now, the entire building has a single occupant; a woman in her mid-thirties, rolling a green metal cart laden with a large amplifier, a laptop, a bag of effects pedals and cables, expensive borrowed microphone and stands to mount them, and three guitar cases.

Near the glass window that looks out onto the highway, there is a cheap-looking white couch with an even cheaper-looking blue privacy screen built into its back and sides. The screen is felted, and stretches up to shoulder height. It may be ridiculous as furniture, but it makes for a perfect isolation booth. The woman sets two chairs in front of the cough, and lifts the heavy amplifier with a grunt, placing it across the chairs and pointing toward the privacy screen.

The microphones are set next; one set two inches from the cloth that covers the amplifier’s speakers, the other on a stand that raises high and over the couch’s privacy screen, to capture the sound of the amp from further away. On the wide, barstool-high white table behind the couch she places the laptop and device with plugs and knobs that will allow the computer to receive input from the microphones. Cables are unwound, guitars are tuned. She warms up by playing Crazy Train, the rhythm parts. She likes playing lead, but she’ll never be Randy Rhoads, and she’s okay with that. She works her way through a few riffs by Metallica and Extreme, then sets the guitar down and heads outside for a cigarette.

The woman works in the office building by day, as well. She and her dad have a small business that has existed for almost two decades, but has never made a ton of money. She’s worked in that business all her life, but only in the past few years has she taken a role in directing the company. In that time, she’s run it into the ground.

It isn’t an entirely fair thought, of course. The company wasn’t really profitable enough to afford the office space in the first place. The $800 per month for a windowless room and two desks on the third floor was a challenging ask, but when she started working more on the business end of the company, she and her dad needed a place to work. It was good for them for a few years, until the credit card debt got too high.

Now they’ll be cleaning out their office and returning their building keys in two week’s time.

She scratches out her butt on the brick wall, depositing the remains in the smoker’s stand and heading toward the door. The temperature is below freezing, and the cold bites at her hands as she buzzes herself back into the building.

Guitar in hand, she listens once more to the song she’ll be recording over, making sure her ideas are organized in her head. She’s not entirely sure what she’s going to play, but she’s been working out a few ideas. A melodic part that feels ripe for expansion and improvisation. Some chords, to go low in the mix and widen the aural experience of the piece. A guitar solo, which she figures she’ll write on the spot. She’s a talented improvisor, and it shouldn’t take her too long.

She starts by recording a distorted buildup to the end of the song, heavily muting the strings with the side of her picking hand as she chunks power chords. The part is meant to build up to full-armed punk strumming, and she records ten or fifteen takes before she’s happy with the controlled release of the palm mute over the course of the buildup. She experiments with her tone a little bit, then lays down the melodic parts of the song, working them up from concepts to solid, repeatable parts as she records. She alternates between using a pick and plucking out the melody with her thumb and forefinger, controlling the sharpness of each attack.

Once she’s happy with most of the parts, she begins improvising over the section where she’ll play the guitar solo. She records a few of these and listens back, dismayed. There’s a few good ideas, but it mostly just sounds like herself noodling aimlessly. Which is exactly what it is. Her aimless noodling is good, but it doesn’t fit. “Stop overplaying,” she tells herself.

It’s a good note to follow, and one she’s reminded herself of all throughout the making of this record. Years ago, when she first met the songwriter, they’d spent a weekend at a recording studio one state over, working out the skeleton of an eleven-song album. It was a whirlwind of a weekend, two days spent in four small rooms with a group of artists who were all trans, just like her, making wonderful noise. At the end of the weekend, each song had most of its parts laid out, and the band promised to reconvene there a few weeks later.

That was early march, 2020. They did not reconvene. In the following years, the studio closed down and the band members grew apart, but always in the back of their minds they knew they’d made something special, and wanted to finish it.

Now five years later, the electric guitar player from that project is struggling to write the guitar solo for the one song she had found it difficult to come up with a part for, all those years ago.

“Hey!”, comes a voice from across the lobby. The couple who comes late at night to empty all the little office wastebaskets in the building has arrived. The guitarist grins. She doesn’t know their names, but she’s become friendly with them during the time she’s spent in the building, over late nights playing loud guitar for fun and exercise. They are black, a little older than the guitarist, and always happy to hear her play. She waves them over.

“I’m writing the solo,” she says, handing them the headphones. “This is an honest-to-god recording session”.

“This is awesome,” they say. “This feels like something I’ve heard on the radio.” They are excited and supportive and kind, and she appreciates their encouragement.

As they leave to go about their trash-collecting duties, she takes the note to stop overplaying and starts focusing on a more melodic style, riding the rhythm of the song in quarter notes rather than sixteenths, experimenting with dissonance and flow. The solo starts to take shape, until eventually she feels she’s nailed it. She grabs another guitar, writes it out to learn the parts she improvised, then plays it again, changing a single note to create a moment of discord as tension builds near the end. She listens back, and nods.

The solo is written. It’s recorded. Chop it, print it, put it in the can, we’re moving on.

Packing up her things, she realizes that it’s four in the morning. There’s still plenty of recording sessions left to do. The singer will be joining her in the lobby, to re-record some of the guitar and vocal parts that were only done as structural scratch takes back in 2020. That will take time, and she only has access to the big lobby with its beautiful natural reverb for another fifteen days.

She’ll get it done, she thinks. Even if it means sacrificing time spent on other creative works for a little while. She’ll get it done.

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So, yeah! The owner of the studio I mentioned recently shipped me a bunch of her mics, which is why this has come up now— I finally have the equipment I need to get this done, and we have very little time to do it. And, obviously, staying up until four in the morning doesn't really lead to a good schedule for doing daily short fiction over breakfast.

I'll keep updating when I can!

If you want to check out the band, it's called Kimber And The No-Bodies. We have a facebook and a bluesky, and a single song on Spotify from that recording session almost five years ago. The whole album should be out sometime this summer, probably. Hopefully. We'll see!