Tag: Music

Happy Valentine’s Day

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I don’t really like Valentine’s Day. Yes, I know, I read and write romance novels. Isn’t it required to like Valentine’s? Flowers and hearts and candy and poetical language and jewelry and love? What’s not to like?

The commercialism, I guess. The sense that it’s required, that it’s some sort of test for lovers to see if they get a good enough gift or a meaningful enough gift. Real romance is so much more quotidian and transformational than that.

But that’s not to say that I don’t like love songs and poems. So for Valentine’s, here are a few of my favorites.

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Mood Music, Part 2

This is for the Washington contemporary which is at 25,000 words and now has a complete outline. A victory plan if you will.

I have realized that I have a tendency to write complex heroines and too perfect heroes. I’m annoyed that my heroines always have these “issues” that need to be fixed and that the conflict in the hero’s trajectory is always external. I need to fix that.

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Mood Music, Part 1

After a few weeks away from it, I’m back to the historical novella. I don’t like the first three chapters, but then I think it finds itself. I’m not sure what to do about that problem. Cut those chapters and work the vital material in elsewhere? Switch POVs? It’s fairly obvious that I need to find a critique group if this is going to be a project I continue to pursue.

In the meantime, here’s my mood music.

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Soundtrack for Writing

I was working on revisions last night and it wasn’t going well. In part, I’m not used to organizing my utterly unstructured scenes into something like the W plot. But eventually, I determined that it was also that I had A Capitol Fourth on the background. It was the wrong music. It was not the manuscript’s soundtrack. I couldn’t think my story to John Philip Sousa.

Do you use music for writing? Do you have a certain genre that inspires you? Do you have songs for certain characters or types of scenes?

For your listening pleasure, I’ve embedded the key songs that I associate with Together Is Enough after the break.

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