Welcome to this week’s edition of Welcome Wednesdays!

We’ve talked in past editions of Welcome Wednesday about imagining our books as movies or TV shows, and who might play our characters on screen.  What’s something else that every movie and TV show has?

A soundtrack!

So today’s question is, does your book have a soundtrack?  Tell us all about it!

I’ll begin…

 

So I have this story that’s been in my head for YEARS, and I’ve never figured out how to write it.  I have a hundred page 1’s that never made it to page 2.  I have grand ideas about how it could be a TV series, rather than a book, and I have bits of screenplay written.  It’s a huge, epic time travel story, and if I could ever figure out the right way to tell it, it would be really, really cool.

But one thing I DO have for it is a soundtrack, and I came up with this a long time ago when I was envisioning it as a full-length TV series, so this list works best if you can imagine each song as being the main musical theme of an episode.  You can probably tell when I first came up with this story based on when the majority of the songs I chose date from…

 

This Must Be The Place (Talking Heads)

Steppin’ Out (Joe Jackson)

Moments of Pleasure (Kate Bush)

Like a Hurricane (Roxy Music live cover)

Humans From Earth (T-Bone Burnett)

King of the Mountain (Kate Bush)

Don’t Cry (Asia)

Heads We’re Dancing (Kate Bush)

Down to London (Joe Jackson)

Somewhere In Between (Kate bush)

Gunning For the Buddha (Shriekback)

To Turn You On (Roxy Music)

Love and Anger (Kate Bush)

Tomorrow’s World (Joe Jackson)

Me and You Against the World (Joe Jackson)

Trism (B-52s)

Amnesia (Chumbawumba)

Too Dizzy (David Bowie)

Losing My Religion (REM)

Ain’t It A Shame (B-52s)

Stupid Girl (Garbage)

New York’s In Love (David Bowie)

Lined Up (Shriekback)

Saving the Best For Last (Marc Cohn)

December (Collective Soul)

That Voice Again (Peter Gabriel)

 

Now it’s your turn!  Tell us all about your fictional world and be sure to leave a link so we can learn more about you!

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Welcome Wednesdays!

Today let’s talk about the real world vs. your fictional world.  Exactly how “real” is the world your characters inhabit?  Talk a little about how you build the city or town or village they live in.  Do you use real-world locations and happenings?  If they stop for a coffee on the way to work, do they go to Starbucks, or to a coffee shop of your own invention?  If they have a little celebrity crush on an actor, is it Chris Hemsworth, or is it someone you invented for your own world?

rite and let the characters take you wherever they want to go, and hope it all makes sense in the end?

I’ll begin…

My books are set pretty firmly in the actual world.  My new series, the Jane Barnaby Adventures, is set in the early 1990’s, and when my heroine thinks of an actress, she thinks of Julia Roberts.  When she visits her friend who works at a fancy department store, she goes to Bergdorf Goodman.  And so forth.

Now it’s your turn!  Tell us all about your fictional world and be sure to leave a link so we can learn more about you!

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Welcome Wednesdays!

Today I’m asking you authors to talk about someone else.  Tell us who your favorite writer (besides yourself!) is, and why?

 

I’ll begin…

It’s a tough question.  I think I have to answer, even though I only really love one of his books, Mark Helprin.  Even with his books that I really couldn’t get into, his writing is just beautiful, and I’d kill to be able to wrote 1/10 as well on any kind of consistent basis.  And the one book I really do love of his, Winter’s Tale, is maybe the best novel of the last century.  And, yes, I’ll stand by that opinion.

Now it’s your turn!  Remember to be sure to leave a link so we can find out more about you and your books!

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Welcome Wednesdays!

Today I’m asking all you authors to tell us a little bit about the way you write.

Are you a plotter?  Do you meticulously outline every scene of your books?  Are your walls covered with index cards?  Do you have a three-hundred page notebook with every detail of every character, from your hero down to the homeless guy at the bus stop who was mentioned once, twelve books ago, and never seen again?

Or are you a pantser?  Do you just write and let the characters take you wherever they want to go, and hope it all makes sense in the end?

I’ll begin…

I’m far more of a pantser.  I have a general idea of what the story is, and where it will end (and sometimes a clear idea of the climax), but the road to that ending is not defined at all to begin with.  I just start writing and see what roadblocks and detours crop up, what subplots appear, which minor characters demand more attention.

Now it’s your turn!  Tell us your process, and be sure to leave a link so we can find out more about you and your books!

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Welcome to this week’s edition of Welcome Wednesdays!

Today I’m asking all you authors to take a step back from your books and try to see what unconscious influences might have made their way into your stories.  I think we all end up putting things into our books based on things we aren’t conscious of at the time, but that become clear when we look at them afterwards.  Tell us about one of your books, and something that you put in there without knowing why at the time, but now you can see exactly where it came from.  It might be a character trait, a location, some dialogue, anything, really.

I’ll begin…

One of the supporting characters in the Dream Series books was drawn from a TV character – but I didn’t realize where she’d come from until I was partway through the third book of the series.  Sara’s mother-in-law, Helen Alderson, took a dislike to Sara right from their first meeting in DREAM STUDENT.  She didn’t show up, except for being mentioned in passing a couple of times in the second book, DREAM DOCTOR.  But she had a much larger role in book three, DREAM CHILD, and it was in the course of giving her a little bit of the spotlight that I realized where she came from.  I was totally channeling Lorelei’s mother, Emily Gilmore, from “Gilmore Girls.”

 

 

Now it’s your turn!

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