Author Archives: Satis

Music I Love: Dead Letters, by The Rasmus

Album: Dead Letters
Artist: The Rasmus
Year: 2003

Track Listing:

  1. In the Shadows
  2. Guilty
  3. First Day of My Life
  4. Still Standing
  5. In My Life
  6. Time to Burn
  7. Not Like the Other Girls
  8. The One I Love
  9. Back in the Picture
  10. Funeral Song

I discovered The Rasmus relatively late in life, having already lived through the angst of my teens and matured from adolescent depression into the full-blown mental illness of bipolar disorder, and I remember thinking to myself, damn – I wish I’d known about them when I was fifteen.

Despite getting their start in the mid-nineties, the Finnish rock group came to worldwide attention in 2003 with the release of their fifth album, Dead Letters. From a pop-rock beginning, Dead Letters takes a turn firmly into goth-rock territory, with dark and miserable lyrics reminiscent of their home-grown contemporaries, HIM.

Yet unlike HIM, whose music tends to drip melancholy and sadness, The Rasmus maintain a dark yet upbeat bounce throughout their work, whether on the syncopated beats of In the Shadows, the epic chorus of Guilty, or the metal-tinged riffs of First Day of My Life.

Above their previous – and some of their later – albums, though, the overall flow of Dead Letters is impeccable, with mid- to fast-paced songs taking over the first side, while the more mellow back half – with ballads like Not Like the Other Girls – leads into the raucous Back in the Picture, before petering out dramatically with Funeral Song.

This is an album that would have made a huge difference to me in my teen years, and even since then I’ve played it over a hundred times with relish, because its anthemic goth-pop tracks are everything I wanted to hear but didn’t know existed.

The Rasmus have continued to release excellent albums, from their excellent follow-up, Hide From the Sun to their U2-inspired eponymous release in 2012, but Dead Letters remains their defining album to this day, and will live on for me as an epitome of fun goth rock.

New Year, New Resolutions (New Promises to Break)

I’m not sure why the start of the year (or, I suppose, the end of the year, depending on how you look at it) is a time for resolutions, other than it’s an easy marker to know when you last make promises you (probably) knew you weren’t going to keep. I mean, I could make a resolution to write more in July, but something about January just makes it easier to remember something you’re going to forget.

I wrote forty-nine posts in 2018 (including this one), which is up from the twenty-nine in 2017, although in fairness I wasn’t working on fantasy at all during that year (instead focusing on completing my YA novel, 22 Scars). Still off from the goal of at least one a week, but better than I’ve been for a while.

The thing is, this blog isn’t just about fantasy. I mean, yes – it’s under my fantasy pen name, Satis, but it’s also where I built my first following, got two articles posted on the WordPress front page, and set up the idea of Thoughts of the Week, Movie Nights, and many other short-lived topics. This blog was meant to be a place to express myself, a safe place to talk about mental illness, and all the things I think about.

But I think it’s time to focus and tighten up, and that means separating what I write, where I write it, and why I write it. I now have three blogs I write for regularly: satiswrites.com, cmnorthauthor.com, and thebipolarwriter.blog (the first two are mine; the third I guest write for). My plans for the next year include writing a second YA novel, probably before focusing on the fourth book in The Redemption of Erâth series, and so I imagine that I’ll have a lot to say over at cmnorthauthor.com. I also want to contribute to thebipolarwriter.blog more frequently (at least once or twice a month).

That doesn’t mean I want to leave satiswrites.com to languish, however. Even if I don’t have many fantasy contributions for the next twelve months, I still intend to post here for my Thought of the Week, Movie Night, Music I Love, and other random bits and pieces. So here’s the plan:

There might even be room for crossposting, but we’ll see how things go. I want to write more this year, but I don’t want to promise things I realistically know I can’t deliver on.

So consider this the first post of 2019 – and let there be many more to come!

Working on My Signature

My son came to me the other day (he’s fourteen), and asked for a signed copy of The Redemption of Erâth. The interesting part is that it isn’t for him, or even for a friend – it’s for a friend’s friend.

One of his best friends is a huge fan of fantasy, including Harry Potter and others, and for her birthday one year we gave her a copy of the first Redemption of Erâth book, Consolation. Apparently she liked it, because she wants to give a signed copy to one of her friends for Christmas.

It’s kind of neat.

I know perfectly well I’m not famous, well-known, or even known at all; fewer than a hundred people have bought my book, and probably fewer still have actually read it (so many people buy things they don’t read). But when someone recognizes you for your efforts, however small the recognition, it feels good.

I was in my local coffee shop the other day as I often am, and as I’m waiting in line the owner offhandedly comments that I’m on the ‘wall of fame’. I wasn’t sure what he meant until he pointed to the door, where, lo and behold, my picture is on the wall, amongst half a dozen others! I’ve done exactly one book signing there with about three people in attendance, but they still felt it was enough to recognize me on the wall of the shop.

That felt great.

I was in the local paper the other month for that book signing; a reporter happened to be picking up his own coffee the day I was there, and sat down to ask me a few questions. The book signing and article are about my young adult book, 22 Scars, but in some ways that’s even better, because that’s my ‘serious’ work.

The point is, it’s interesting to consider who might know you, and what they might think. Once your work is out there, you can’t take it back – people know you and your writing, even if it’s only a very few people. And to think that those people enjoyed my work enough to want to share it with others – whether via a gift, or by recognizing me on a wall – is a feeling that hits deep. It really feels meaningful, because of course that’s why I started writing in the first place – to touch people’s lives.

So who knows – maybe one day I’ll be signing books all over the place! More likely not, but still – time to work on my signature!