A Note on Chemistry, part 2

For those of you who are new to the Fuzzy Experience...at least as off a year or so...you could be forgiven for having never given my fic, Chemistry, a look. A cursory glance at the description will tell you that it's...different...than the vast majority of my other stories.

Doesn't help that I find it hard to talk about the topic it swirls around.

For those of you that have been around long enough to have read it, or read it as part of the TwiDance Collab before I switched to My Little Dynamite, I'm sorry that I've dragged my feet on picking it back up. I will try to get the next chapter out faster.

But I one thing I do want to talk about, and I don't think I have before, is the chapter titles. The latest chapter gets its title from the Fine Young Cannibals, 1989 song: She Drives Me Crazy. The whole song titles thing was sort of an experiment on my part. Since the story is about my personal experiences filtered via pony, I wanted to tie it back to those experiences. I wanted a solid link for me rather than beat all of you over the head with it time and time again. The best way I could think of tying these things together was via something that ties me to a time and place and the feelings that go with it like nothing else short of scent: music.

Also, trying to use scent adjectives for chapter titles felt like super try hard-y...

So I went with music. Each song connects me to a place and time frame and all the myriad experiences I processed there. I try to find songs that represent the chapter's contents, but I know that the context to make that apparent is sometimes completely obscure to anyone other than myself. It can be a play off the literal words in the title, or even the lyrics of the song (which aren't even in the chapter). It can be my emotional attachment to the events of the chapter and a song I recall listening to, or it might be something that's even another step removed where the song makes me think of a time when I was thinking about another time...and that's not even mentioning that my choice sometimes comes from Cadance's POV, sometimes Twilight's, sometimes Shining's, or sometimes just mine.

There are no hard and fast rules for what song works and what doesn't. Plus, since the period of my life I'm drawing on for Chemistry spans a couple of decades, there is a shitton of cross referencing going on behind the scenes too. So if a song doesn't seem to fit, I don't blame you for thinking that. But to me, they all fit like a glove, even if I'm the only person in the world that it makes sense to.

Also, I want to point out that these song titles are both surprisingly easy and deceptively hard to pick! Chemistry focuses a lot on Cadance, and love as a concept AND as a word in song titles was all over the place in the 80's, giving me loads of choices. But it also means I have to narrow the field down from a bunch of songs that all feel right.

I mean really, how do I pick which is better? Love Is a Battlefield, or What's Love Got to Do With It?

Stay tubular.
-Fuzz