At least once a year I write a playlist to write to during NaNoWroMo, and there’s a whole logic around my choices which amounts to a few key rules:

• Music that matches my story, (Starfuckers, Inc just doesn’t put you in the right place for a tender love scene)
• Has reasonable pacing, (I will write in time to the music, that can have interesting effects on my writing),
• Is not distracting, (if you have to stop and pay attention to the music in the background that’s bad, it’s a loss of momentum)

Now this year I had this whole plan around have three playlists, so I could better match the music that I’m listening to to the parts of the story I’m writing. One of the playlists would be entirely general music, the other softer more sad or romance inclined, and the last one would be frenetic and angry and gory to inspire a bit of carnage in my writing.

It’s a really good plan, however, I’ve also chosen to change my cloud music provider. Previously I’d been using Amazon music, (£22 a year), and have had no real regrets, especially since their desktop player really took off – but there’s no streaming to ChromeCast, and while the tracks themselves can be picked up by other apps, the playlists can’t.

So I’ve settled on Google Play Music, which confused the hell out of me because I thought it was £10 a month, (£120 a year!), but that’s just if you want a more Spotify like service. I don’t, I have lots of music, of which I add to occasionally, Google will let me upload up to 25,000 tracks gratis. And I can do all the fun stuff like stream through ChromeCast, and stuff.

I did consider going back to Spotify, but I prefer the limited ownership that mp3 has, compared with no ownership offered by streaming only services.

Unfortunately, as Amazon Music playlists aren’t sharable, I’ve had to spend time recreating my major playlists, and rather than spending ages recreating three more, I’ve just done one playlist for NaNoWriMo 2014. I’ll have to wait until my next project to play around with the multiple playlists idea, and single playlists have always worked well enough in the past.

Beneath the cut is this year’s playlist, it’s not in any particular order as I’ll keep skipping the music as I write.

NaNoWriMo 2014 Playlist

Any suggestions are always welcomed