Inspiration Through Music: Dear Esther Soundtrack

Inner conflict is one of the sole drives in stories. Characters battling with inner demons about what they should do or coming to terms with what they already have done. To me, there’s nothing more emotive and heart-wrenching, as a simple instrumental song to illustrate this inner turmoil. And it was with extreme excitement a few months back, that I discovered Jessica Curry’s soundtrack to the indie game, “Dear Esther.”

“Dear Esther” is a short paranormal/mystery game created originally as a mod from the Half Life series. I’ve already referenced mods before in my “Cry of Fear Soundtrack” post. My favorite game commentator, HarshlyCritical, did a let’s play of this game which can be found here. The game follows a male protagonist who wanders about an island reminiscing about his lost love and alluding to several scientific formulas and Biblical passages. The game’s pacing is slow but the atmosphere it provides is stunning. And Curry’s score for it ultimately swept me away. Haunting, delicate, and sorrowful in some places but also inspiring and uplifting in others, the 17 track album was probably one of my best buys this year. Today, I’d like to share 8 of those tracks with you.

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Spring Promo Stats!

Good morning, readers,

So the spring promo has officially come to a close. In the course of 48 hours, “Vox” was downloaded 279 times and climbed all the way up to #28 on the Kindle free Action & Adventure bestseller’s list! That’s quite an accomplishment, seeing as how it was in 700,000th place before the promo began.

Of course since the promo ended, the book has back slid a little bit into 55th place and is now in 1,600th place overall. Seeing as how there are over one million books in the Kindle store, I’m going to take that as a pretty good sign that things went well! A thanks to everyone who purchased a copy of the book this weekend, anyone who helped promote it, and anyone who encouraged me while I marketed it!