It's All About The Writing - And The Music

I write to music. I always have. My novel has a soundtrack. Since the first day I sat down and stared at the blank page, remembering all of the writing advice I'd heard and read, "Start with action," "Start at a life changing moment," "Skip the throat clearing," Alice has been with me. Alice in Chains, that is. Yes, for those who know me, they know, I'm a diehard Alice fan.

Seventy percent of the novel was composed while listening to "Black Gives Way to Blue" and "Facelift" exclusively. I couldn't write to anything else. I have "Dirt," "Jar of Flies," "Sap," "Alice in Chains," "Unplugged," "Live," but the moment my iTunes switched to one of them, I was immediately distracted. I'm an equal opportunity Alice player, so to find myself favoring one CD over another for this particular task was intriguing.

But, who am I to question process? IT WORKED!

Then, I saw "Super 8." One of my favorite songs growing up was ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down," which, if you've seen "Super 8," you know it was featured in the movie. Yes, that was me dancing in my seat. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it was where I was in my novel, perhaps it was that every time I clicked on "We Die Young," the first song on "Facelift," iTunes would send a message that said, "SERIOUSLY! AGAIN?" No, "Again" is on the eponymous CD...

I guess you have to be an Alice fan to get the joke.

Sensing I was close to thinking I was done with the novel, I decided to make up my own playlist of influential and inspirational songs to get me through the Warsaw Uprising. Songs like, "Bad Boys Running Wild" by The Scorpions, "Wherever I May Roam" by Metallica, "Burn It To The Ground" by Nickelback, and more Alice. A lot of the songs meant something to me, some were just a play on words, like "Dynamite" by The Scorpions. I listened to that while I wrote about blowing up a train depot, along with "Rock You Like a Hurricane," "Blackout," and "Energy" by Shinedown.

Hey, I have FUN while I write, and then I break my own heart and cry. Anyway...

Of course, there was this eclectic mix of music that had nothing to do with anything. It was just a groove I liked. The playlist was almost four hours long, and I tried to write all the way through the playlist. Sometimes I replayed a song or set of songs if I felt the need.

One of my first readers commented that my novel is "dark." Maybe that's why Alice's music resonated as the "soundtrack." Today, as I drove home from work, I played "Your Decision," "Black Gives Way to Blue," and "Down in a Hole." Listening to the lyrics, I could picture different scenes from my novel, all of them painful.

When people ask if the novel is autobiographical, first novels are supposedly autobiographical, I say, "It's a WWII drama about the Polish Resistance," and they think it isn't autobiographical. They think because of the time period, the setting, that it doesn't have any of me in it. It is all me. I wrote it from a place of pain. I dipped from the same well that Alice pulled their songs from, The Universal Shithole of Darkness. It is the obscene and unwilling experiences of darkness that caused my characters to say, "You understand. You will write our story, but it will also be your story. Your story is what lies beneath."

That isn't to say that every single scene in the novel represents a literal real life experience. It's not the literal... and that's the cool thing about being a writer. When you surrender to it, when you stop telling your characters what to do, and start listening to them, you find yourself in places you have not yet begun to imagine. (Tip: Your characters tell you what to do in the first draft. You tell them what to do in the second, and third, etc. "No, no! Get over here! There's a giant hole you need to fill!") I love this process. I love revising and editing more than I ever thought I would. I love seeing things in my writing I wasn't even aware of as I wrote it.

I LOVE WRITING! And, I love making my own soundtracks. The one today reminds me of the fan fiction I used to write... I'm Hungry Like the Wolf! Haha!

Why I Talk About Writing, Now

I used to be one of those writers who never talked about writing. Writing, as any writer knows, is a solitary pursuit. There isn't anyone there but you and your characters, and it's your responsibility to channel their thoughts and actions onto the page, to give them depth, to create conflict, to decide their fate. Okay, maybe you have a dog or a cat or both who join in this endeavor with you. But really, how useful are they when you're trying to figure out a character's motivation? The truth is, no one can help you with that.

I started writing poetry when I was 12. The poems were horrible and weak, what you might expect from a 12 year old. I'm still not a great poet. I honed my writing skills by writing what they now call "fan fiction." I had a couple of friends who, along with myself, were Duran Duran fans. I would write us into stories with them, complete with romantic entanglements and children. *Blush* I always had an audience. But, I also always had someone saying, "Why does she get Nick? I want Nick." Rewrite. I suppose that was good practice for revising later, but for the wrong reason.

I wrote my first short story in 7th grade. It was named after a little known B-side Duran Duran song called "Secret Oktober." It was a fantasy piece wherein a photographer accidentally crosses over to another world via a wormhole near Stonehenge. He meets a beautiful woman who helps him to the magical waterfall that will transport him back to his world, all the while pursued by an evil sorceress. I always loved that story, probably because it was my first. I decorated the cover with symbols from the "Seven and the Ragged Tiger" album, vinyl album (that thing they used to put music on, went around on a turntable under a needle, Google it).

I loved that story for another reason. My teacher that year had fallen ill and had to have surgery. Our substitute, whose name I can't remember, sadly, told me, "This is really very good." It was the first time anyone told me they liked what I'd written, other than my constantly warring friends over who was hotter, Nick, Simon, or John. (It was John, I mean Simon) Yet, I started becoming a little more protective over my writing.

I wrote for the school newspaper, the yearbook, and I won an award for copywriting from the yearbook publisher that netted me an all expense paid trip to New York City and seminars at Columbia University. I read voraciously ("The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton, 53 times - not kidding), Judy Blume, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Sweet Valley High series, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Danielle Steele, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Alexander Lloyd, and one and on and on, and I listened to music, dissected lyrics, I journaled, I made up two hour videos for songs that were four minutes in length (back story, back story!), and I wrote a lot of letters. Pages and pages and pages of letters.

Writing letters is different than sharing your creative work. For years I wrote in silence. I sent my work out, and it was rejected. I did once receive a nice personal note from a publisher in FL who said that the subject matter was "too serious," for what they were looking for, but please, submit again. I once submitted a novella to the Faulkner Wisdom competition that was so terrible, not the story, just the way it was written, that I waited quite a while before submitting again (about 8 years) just so I was sure they had forgotten my name. It was a fantasy novella called "Higher House" that also included a waterfall and a bad wizard.... hmmmm... anyway, this time I made the semi-finals.

I figured out "Higher House" was written so poorly by reading Stephen King's "On Writing." Once isn't enough to read that book.

So, this is what my writing life was like. No one read my work. I didn't talk about my work with other writers, I talked about it with non-writers. Which is a nice way of saying, my friends put up with me talking about writing. Then I blogged, and I posted a lot of posts, and a few mediocre poems, and on occasion, around NaNoWriMo I'd post a few chapters of an unfinished work, and that was all.

Then through the course of several life changing events that happened to crop up around the same time, and by and by, I decided to get my Masters in Creative Writing at Goddard College. Now, I can't shut up about writing. I post to Facebook, I tweet, I yak to my guests at work, I yak to my friends, writers or not, I yak to my coworkers, and my son. I yak all the time about writing, and I write about writing because I LOVE WRITING! Sometimes I'm specific. Sometimes I'm not. I'll tell you all about my book if you want. I'll tell you about the problems I'm encountering and how I intend on fixing them. I'll tell you about the books I've read - The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, read it! I'll tell you about the stack of books I'm waiting to read and the books I want that I haven't gotten, because I LOVE BOOKS AND I LOVE WRITING!

So, why shouldn't I talk about it? Am I going to tell you about the new book I'm writing? Probably not because it's still percolating. The screenplays I'm working on? Maybe, they're a little more developed. The problems with my short story that I can't seem to figure out? Uhhhh...

Being in the Goddard environment, among my tribe, has unleashed a beast. It's my love and my passion. I may not be specific, but I will talk about writing, until I can't talk anymore.

The Blue Stone

The Blue Stone is set during the tumultuous years of World War II in Niebieski, Poland, a fictional town near Cracow. Volkdeutscherin Elena Kohlmuller and her brother Paul assist Elena's Jewish mentor, Jakob, and his brother Jerzy, in fleeing from the Cracow ghetto, setting the stage for their inevitable forming of a Polish Resistance group.

Jeweler by day, document forger by night, Elena is caught between her allegiance to Poland, faked allegiance to the Reich, Jews, Nazis, and her friends; Anna, a Pole she is sheltering, Janina, a fellow Volkdeutscherin and self-described favor-seeking whore, and Aleksandr, the quiet, blue-eyed Russian POW her brother rescued.

Matters only become more complicated when Elena and Aleksandr discover four children hiding in the Catholic Church. Then Elena runs afoul of the local Nazi leader, Gerhardt Schwarz, who is determined to root out the local resistance organization.

Separation tests them as the men are drawn deeper into the Resistance movement, pulling them into the chaos that is Warsaw only for Jerzy to return, bringing with him the Karmazinov brothers. Clashing in their first moments, Elena learns Vladimir, the eldest, is the quintessential Communist, as determined to bring Poland under Russian rule as Elena is to keep it free.

Following defeat at the Warsaw Uprising, Elena and Janina, stunned and bereaved, come home to shocking revelations. As the Russians advance into Poland, Elena, Janina, and the children attempt to flee into Germany, only to be captured and imprisoned. Allegiances are formed and broken; loyalty and betrayal shift as quickly as the front lines as undercurrents of love and jealousy flow to the daring escape, reunions, and conclusion of The Blue Stone.