@melliotwrites / melliotwrites.tumblr.com
Pinned
Lana Gaige (vocals) and Caleb Conaway (guitar) perform "Montana" from Ghost Story: a new musical by Melliot (Mel Hornyak and Elliot Valentine.)
Ghost Story is a musical about an interracial gay couple rewriting the past in search of queer joy in their present. Lyrics by Mel Hornyak, music by Elliot Valentine. Arrangement and guitar by Caleb Conaway.
what has the process of revising adamandi been like? like what are you changing what are you cutting what are you looking out for
Giving it space and then re-perceiving it has helped us isolate the real meat of the show! It's a pretty long show, so to cut it down we had to distill what it was actually About. This is a long answer so there's more below the cut!
Adamandi revision demos (3/?) - a new song for Portia, "Bones of the Dead"! Vocals by Lara Priya Sachdeva. Lyrics by Mel Hornyak, music by Elliot Valentine. Lyrics below the cut:
i have been curious about this for ! a very long time ! so were jason’s autistic traits intentionally written to be that or is it just another case of Incredibly Neurodivergent Fanbase
Yeah — read more about this here! - Elliot
The new Adamandi demos are SO FUN!! The revise of Where Can I Run and Dear Ms Reporter are so so cool cause it feels like Vincent's character motivations being defined a Lot More Overtly then originally and that's So Fun!! Autism Sleep Agent Moment ftw
Thank you!! We wanted to build up stuff more clearly to the pyre scene/ambrose skask moment haha (also because in the original, these were two songs that were written like. kinda before most of the show existed. so they were less incorporated into it/explored a bunch of ideas that didn’t end up making it into the script) - Elliot
we've been revising Adamandi in preparation for licensing, so we'll be sharing some new demos!) this is "Where Can I Run" (2/?)
lyrics:
we've been revising Adamandi in preparation for licensing, so we'll be sharing some new demos!) this is "Oh, Ms. Reporter" (1/?)
lyrics:
A demo of a song for one of the new projects we're working on, Thy Sinful House! It's an adaptation of Seneca's Thyestes using suburban horror to explore ecological destruction as a kind of ancestral sin. As two estranged sisters fight over a grand McMansion, suburbs burn, the world darkens, and children are served up for Sunday roast.
Lyrics under the cut!
Typically when you guys are writing, will you work on mostly/entirely the book first and then work out lyrics, vice versa, or is it more like just writing everything in order (as in, if a scene calls for a song you will stop book writing to then do lyrics)? Asking because I have trouble writing lyrics and am struggling not to just offshore all that work to the very end(ish) of a project.
Typically we do it as it comes (writing book, then pausing and doing lyrics when I hit a song!) If we do end up writing one first, I'll typically write the lyrics first (because it takes time for Elliot to turn those lyrics into a song, which is time I can take to write the book; and because generally book is easier to rewrite than lyrics because of the less strict stipulations on timing, rhyme, etc) but that's not really best practices, haha.
The rationale behind this is that, ideally, your songs should be moving the story forward, not repeating anything from the scene, and giving us a greater understanding of the characters. It's never worked in my brain to skip over songs because I find it difficult to imagine the new state of the characters (what they've said, what they've thought, how they've changed) before I've written the song in which that happens.
If you do write one before the other, I recommend writing monologues for each song that contain granules of information you can mine for lyrics when you do go back and write them, and changing the book around those monologues once the songs are written to remove redundancies and make the songs feel like they launch you out of/into the book effectively. Not saying my writing always does this -- especially really old writing -- but that's why I write in the order I do!
~Mel
hey ! was adamandi taken down or something ? i can't find it on yt for some reason </3
Check this post for insight!
~Mel
I've been watching TAOPP (hence my username!) and I was wondering: At the end of When You're Small, Maya, Jason, and Maddox's actor seem to conspre to mess with Louis through returning a dish. Was anything about that scripted?
Huh! Nobody's ever asked that question before, and it made me go look back at that version of the script.
I suppose it was scripted that someone is messing with Louis here by reinforcing his place in the palace pecking order, but the decision of which actors did it was left up to our director.
~Mel
