Today is a repost from a long ago post. Most of you, almost all in fact, will never have seen it so it’s not so bad to repost.
Before i sat down to make the first New Albion song i wrote out a bunch of vignettes as a creative writing exercise about this city of New Albion i was trying to make come alive. It gave the fodder for what were all the little scenes mentioned in the song(s). In the next few days i will be sitting down once again to do the exact same thing for my Dieselpunk New Albion so i thought it would be a hoot to revisit this old post made at the beginning of my writing the Steampunk Opera before posting new snapshots from the city many generations later.
Snapshots From New Albion:
I am now consumed with getting my fictional city of New Albion living and breathing in my head.
The first song in each Act is the Narrator describing and discussing the city and the next generation of the McAlastair family. However, i am not concerned with the look of the city at all. To be honest, that is a task for others. I know it’s fun, but the show is best served letting others decide how to envision and represent it. Plus, it being theater, you cannot go for a realistic look, you’re going for something stylized and suggestive.
We’re going to go into city visuals anyway later this week, simply because it’s helpful to me to creatively visualize being in an actual place , but for now, in order to fill the Narrator numbers with interesting snapshots of residents and aspects, i simply write tiny little blurbs. I could write these all day long. Of course the amount of time in the first Narrator song i have to mention this stuff is insanely short, especially since i use the first 3rd to tell the fanciful beginnings of the place, but it’s great none the less.
Snapshots of New Albion:
– The New Albion Mafia is run by a one eyed dwarf who makes all his major decisions by rolling a pair of silver dice.
– The head of the Zeppelin Pilots’ Union is a middle aged castrati whose songs can be heard by pedestrians in the street below as he flies overhead.
– The Major is a thin, bookish woman whose political rivals nevertheless fear her, and who ridiculous rumors purport to be some type of lunar shapeshifter. Running against her does indeed have a high fatality rate.
– There are 12 districts, and each one has a representative in City Council. Although each member must take a vow of celibacy during their term and wear a specially fitted chastity belt (in an effort to achieve a Platonian standard which actually doesn’t happen) the positions are none the less highly sought after and there is much nefarious activity surrounding their procurement.
– On Ashland St. is the Alchemists Lodge, where initiation is rumored to be having to transform a dream from an adolescent girl into a liquid glass bauble.
– 4 thieves once broke into the Lodge to steal the baubles. One was indeed stolen but three of the thieves were found the next morning still sitting in the Lodge’s subterranean showroom staring at the collection.
– The weapons of choice of city residents are knives for the poorer class and electrical tipped canes for the richer
– There is a cult that worships an obsidian god of coal. They are apparently quite obsessed with fire magic and often seek menial service jobs stoking the many, many coal furnaces that power various aspects of New Albion.
– The Great Steam Organ in the Cathedral is a city treasure and the musician who plays it is a half mad eccentric who lives in a small apartment beneath the church. His living quarters is a very cave like dwelling which is now covered completely in a rare, slightly phosphorescent fungus which he peels a small piece of off and ingests before each daily performance.
– The twilight fog is rumored to contain an airborne aphrodisiac. This is untrue, but nevertheless in some quarters of New Albion at twilight there is a significant amount of copulation in doorways.
