I’ve been a fan of Tom Waits and his music since 1990 or so, when my friend Mike introduced me to Waits’s 1985 album Rain Dogs. I admire his range and I find his subject matter enthralling. While Jennifer says my Tom Waits CDs can “live in your car” (apparently she’s not a fan), I listen to them pretty frequently.

Here’s one of my favorite Waits songs, “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”, from 1992’s Bone Machine:

For contrast, here’s “Drunk on the Moon”, another of my favorites, dating back to 1974’s The Heart of Saturday Night:

This song, in fact, inspired a character in my novella, “The Winds of Patwin County”, which is, I think, one of my more successful pieces of fiction.

For some reason, I associate Tom Waits with writing. And for that reason, I’m pondering a project: editing an anthology of original short stories inspired by the music of Tom Waits. I have no idea at the moment how I’d go about doing it (I imagine I’d need to get some sort of rights from Tom Waits’s label to do this). I would probably set up a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project; the money would go to production costs (it’d be self-published) and to paying the contributing authors.

I don’t know for sure, though. Any thoughts, anyone?