I never really considered myself that into music. Sure, I had a lot of CDs and I’m always buying MP3s, but I can’t sing worth a damn and my attempts at playing an instrument went nowhere. Not that I didn’t try. I attempted to learn the viola, the guitar, the piano, the drums, and I think there’s one more, but I can’t remember what it was now. I failed miserably at each. I even know why–I never practiced.
I think this is what separates an interest from a passion–the desire to work at the passion. Writing is my passion. From the age of 14, I wrote and rewrote and revised. If my words didn’t live up to my standards, I didn’t give up. I went back in and worked on it some more, or I chalked it up as a lesson and went to a new story.
With music and art, I gave up when I wasn’t immediately good enough in my own view. Yes, I have an interest in both and I wish I could pick up a pencil and draw. I can’t. But then I’ve never taken the time to try to improve. These are interests for me, not passions.
Oops, digressed. Sorry. Anyway, I never considered myself that into music despite my large collection because I’m a passive consumer and I don’t even really listen to music all that much. Then I started thinking about it some more. I listen to music a lot at the Evil Day Job (EDJ). Not every day, but I call my iPod “life support.” (At home, the laptop is called “life support.” 
I also usually have a song in my head, even if it’s just a stanza or something replaying itself. This week it’s been the Brady Bunch kids singing It’s a Sunshine Day. Why? I have no idea. I haven’t watched the Bradys in a long, long time.
My books have theme songs. This started by accident. When I was revising my first published book, Ravyn’s Flight, I was listening to Devo’s Greatest Hits and when Girl U Want came on, I kept replaying it over and over and over. It finally dawned on me that I was looping the song because it fit my book. Ever since then, I’ve tried to find a theme song for every story.
Sometimes I just pick one because I can’t come up with the perfect choice and I don’t have time to waste looking any more. So while I list theme songs for Through a Crimson Veil and my story in Shards of Crimson (among others), they don’t really bring the book to mind or the characters.
But when a book has picked it’s song, it’s a completely different story. I can’t hear that Devo song I mentioned without thinking of Ravyn, Damon, Alex, and Stacey. And the music can influence me while I’m writing the book. The theme song for book 2 of the paranormal trilogy my agent is shopping right now brings in information on that hero every single time I play it. I know that when I actually grow close to writing his story, I’ll have this song looping to get my head into it.
Another example was when I was writing The Power of Two. Whenever I wasn’t sure what to do next (and back then, I wrote a lot more seat of the pants than I do right now), I would listen to Corey Hart’s Never Surrender. That was Cai’s motto: Never surrender. So the song helped me see what the character would do next.
It’s not always theme songs either. When I wrote Blood Feud for The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2, Isobel and Seere were listening to Tchaikovsky in her car and I’ll be damned if I didn’t have to listen to Tchaikovsky, too. The weird thing is that I had to listen to it while I was writing In the Darkest Night, which has no relationship whatsoever with the vampire story. I don’t know why, but I bought 3 MP3 albums and shuffled them all weekend while I wrote Kel’s book. Kel has zero interest in classical music. He’s more Seether and Korn than violins and horns.
And that’s the other weird thing–my characters influence me. If they have a word they use all the time, I’ll pick it up even if it’s one I rarely used until they came in. Same with music. I’d never listened to Seether until Kel, now I have one of their albums and I listened to it just this week. Actually, I’m blaming my heroes for all the hard, edgy music I have now. I have always had an eclectic taste in music, but metal was not something I liked or played. Until I started writing contemporary paranormal and my guys arrived.
It’s also interesting that music is more important to my heroes than my heroines. Hmm. I need to think about that. Maybe I have a blog topic for another day.
Tags: music