TRR - Fall Into Romance Blog Hop & Giveaway!

Thanks for visiting me on TRR Blog Hop!   Be sure to visit others since there are lots of prizes to win! (Just click on the button at the end of this blog)

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MUSIC MAGIC

Music is able to create magic through emotion.  It can pump us up, it can make us laugh, or it can make us cry and make us mad.  It’s no wonder that authors often use music to set a mood or invoke a scene.  Cara Lynn Shultz creates a playlist with her novels and mentions that playlist throughout her books, even going as far as explaining in the back of the book why she used particular songs. 

For me, I usually focus on one or two songs for each of my books.  The most obvious one is “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme” by ABBA for my novella A Man After Midnight.  When I started listening to the lyrics I immediately thought it would make a wonderful story to tell.  The same happened when I heard the lyrics to Kate Voegele’s song “Sweet Silver Lining”:

But so many people are looking to me
To be strong and to fight
But I'm just surviving
And I may be weak but I'm never defeated
And I'll keep believing
In clouds with that sweet silver lining

I envisioned this bitter woman who’s completely misunderstood and I came up with Heather Hart in A Silver Lining.  I’ve had people complain that she’s too abrasive and they hated her, but she needed to be unloved to be able to be redeemed by love.  I love making readers squirm in their seats.

Not every song is as distinctive as those two, however.  In my novel In a Chord I actually mention the inspiration song by name.  When I first heard Skillet’s “Awake & Alive” I loved the female (Jen Ledger) voice interspersed with the male lead singer (John Cooper), plus the violins in the beginning.  I immediately envisioned Momo and wrote her story around her punk/goth look.

I had the song “Undisclosed Desires” by Muse in my head as I developed my character Delilah Ward for the book Once Upon a Love Story.  Caleb is this clean cut good boy but she’s had an embittered life that she’s trying to crawl out of, to be a better person.  I loved writing their love story.

Star Mates is another Muse song inspiration.  “Uprising” is all about resistance and fighting back.  I combined that with Leona Lewis’s version of “Run” for its haunting melody and those two songs drove the plot of my alien abduction story.

I listen to many different genres of music, all except rap.  I’m not much into rap.  When I heard Colton Dixon’s song “Scars” I knew it was special and I created a special man.  Dicen Burke, a man who has such an evil demon on his shoulder that he can’t get past it and ends up ODing on stage.  He wakes up in 1927 and finds a love that transforms him.  His story, “Dreamland”, will be out October 2^nd.  This one actually has a second signature song, “If I Could be Where You Are” by Enya.  It’s his love them to Juliet.

One band that is my absolute favorite is Linkin Park.  Yes, I know they have some rap, but their rap I can handle. (LOL!)  I absolutely love their lyrics, from the harsh heavy metal to the melodic ballads.  (I even like Chester’s other band Dead By Sunrise)  If you’ve never listened to Linkin Park, just take a few of their songs like “Crawling”, “Somewhere I Belong”, “Given Up”, “Castle of Glass”, or “The Catalyst”…there are some very powerful lyrics here that stay with you.  In fact, I use “Somewhere I Belong” quite a bit for an inspirational song…and I’m using it right now for my current WIP.

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To win a PDF copy of any of my titles (one that has already been released) all you have to do is leave a comment or let me know what song(s) inspires you!  The winner will be chosen at random the day after the blog hop (the 22^nd) so please leave a way to contact you (no contact, no win).  Thank you so much for visiting with me!

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@BethDCarter 
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