I've written this song before

I began drafting Act II of MELISANDE this morning. I'll put the roughest draft of the first song behind the paywall so you can see what it is before you see what it will eventually become.

The lyrics don't even rhyme yet, it's just a sense of what she might need to think through while she's standing outside the castle. At a certain point it's obvious that I start writing a chorus, which makes me wonder if this will be a song with verse and chorus and if it will turn out to be a power ballad (barf barf barf), although I've already committed to it not being a power ballad because first of all it's not that kind of show and second of all the pianists are offstage.

This is a cappella, just Melisande and her mind.

But when I started writing the chorus I suddenly remembered the tune of the chorus and that was because I suddenly remembered that I had written this song before.

In college.

When I was trying to write a musical that had exactly the same plot (and exactly the same ending) as the film Ruby Sparks, except I was writing this musical in 2002 and Ruby Sparks didn't release until 2012.

I never finished this project – I did finish (and stage) some of my college musical theater projects, but not this one – but I finished writing this song, in which the author's fictitious character Allegra announces that she wants to learn more than what he's written for her.

Like Ruby Sparks (spoiler alert), she ends the song by leaving him. But before that it's this glorious explosion of excitement that only comes when you discover there's an entire world out there that's full of interesting things to learn and try and do and become, etc. etc. etc.

And that's what Melisande is discovering, in this song.

So I'm tempted to use the same chorus, or a variation on the chorus, now that it's popped back into my head.

But the truth is that it doesn't fit, MELISANDE takes place in the immediate past and the piece where the author brings a fictional character to life takes place in the immediate future, to the point at which I – in 2002 – predicted the popularity of "Eden" as a baby name.

(Other baby names I predicted, in my various writings set in near-future times, include "Halcyon" and "Meridian." I also anticipated the resurgence of fin-de-siècle names like "Charlotte" and "Grace," but so did everyone else. Now I'm just waiting for a generation of Dorotheas and Timothys to be born.)

At any rate, here comes the paywall and after that you'll get the roughest of drafts of the song: