Joel Selvin interview with Brian Eno on how he created the startup music for Windows:
Q: How did you come to compose “The Microsoft Sound”?
A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.”
The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.”
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
Genres for Erotic Fiction (NSFW!!! but it’s only text):
bradley:
1. A stroke story that is no more than eighteen lines long, including the title and blank lines, and no more than seventy columns wide. 2. A story short enough to fit onto the screen of Mat Twassel’s computer. Offers to just buy him a larger monitor have been ignored.
double-bradley:
A stroke story with a one-line title and a 34-line body. A strict double-bradley consists of two seventeen-line segments, each with a beginning, middle, and end.
flash fiction:
A short-short story. Different venues will have different definitions, usually–but not always–in terms of word count. Ideally, flash should have strong characters, setting, and plot despite its brevity.
stroke fiction:
Writing with the primary purpose of causing arousal. In the most compelling and honest stroke fiction, the person the author is trying to arouse is herself.
variants:
Like the sonnet, the detective novel, and the delta blues song, the bradley and double-bradley are literary forms with strict structural and thematic rules. And, as with the sonnet, the detective novel, and the delta blues song, different artists will adhere to these rules with varying degrees of faithfulness.