#188 (of 365) "Burn Girl Prom Queen" Mogwai

I once wrote the start of a short story/novel based on this song, based on driving home after work one day in the 2000s and having a not-very-close-call where a kid's ball flew out onto Route 35 and he ran out after it, dangerously in my mind, because I had to slam on my brakes to prevent the collision and I came up with an idea for a story that would result if I had not been paying attention and not seen him. That story got abandoned but I kept the germ of the idea through to a later novel about a similar incident, told from alternating POVs - one of them the driver, in this case a young man in college, and the second POV the high school brother of the kid who gets hit by the car and ends up in a coma. The two main POVs intersect and meet and--well, I never finished more than the first few chapters and a detailed outline. It was too depressing. But I loved the high school brother character and the first couple scenes I used him in and his two best friends (based loosely on two of my best friends). So I swapped out the whole "driver POV" that sparked the entire story with a completely separate plot I was developing based on a monster tormenting a snowbound town in Vermont. I put both stories together in one novel, with the connection being the brother of the main POV character gets special powers after his coma where he can see the future--the monster they encounter when the entire crew goes up to Vermont over Christmas break for a school play trip. I thought it was great. It never sold. Years later, I re-read it and realized it wasn't so great--too much plot and confusion between the two stories, so I scrapped the whole "driver in NJ" story and the boy in the coma and just put the "crew" of friends in high school in the horror story from the start--this one taking place in these largely abandoned cabins in the snowbound Catskills (literal cabins in the woods) and I turned the monster into a witch, or the ghost of a witch. That one is much better and will maybe sell someday, although my focus has turned to a different horror story (SWIM) which I'm trying to sell right now. 

Anyway, the song that was playing in my car at the time of the inciting incident driving home from work over two decades ago was "Burn Girl Prom Queen" by Mogwai, and so the folder containing all of these story ideas and two complete unsold novels is named "Burn Girl Prom Queen." There are no lyrics to the song, so I'm not real sure what it's "about" but it's beautiful and languorous and sparked two decades of writing, which--even if none of these stories ever get published--is a magical thing.

"Burn Girl Prom Queen" - Mogwai // EP (1999)