#WIPlash Wednesdays~ There'll Be #LoveSongs...#MusicalMusings

♫Have love songs ever inspired an idea for a book?♫

I honestly can't think of any songs that have directly inspired any ideas for my books, though music is part of my writing. Generally it plays more of a secondary role, almost a persona of its own—it is part of the flow and undercurrent that plays in the background like a soundtrack to the movie playing in my head.

If there were any song that has been inspiration, in general, it would have to be Sara Bareilles' One Sweet Love.

I have actually used that song during the writing of several of my books because it depicts the main theme of all my stories and that is the eternal desire we all have to either find true love or our soul-mate and it expresses the hope that it hasn't already been found and lost without realizing it.

Music is a good medium for drawing forth strong emotions. sometimes all it takes is a song's handling of a topic or lyrics that speak straight to the heart of you to move you to tears of joy or heartache. Music is a vessel through which we experience new and old emotions. We are reminded of our youth, that first crush, the first kiss, the first heartache. It can provoke memories of the first kiss we had or our wedding day, the moment we realized we were truly in love.

Music opens up those parts of us—those portals—that can take us back in time or remind us of what we've lived through. That's probably why I enjoy having playlists of music while I write that, for me, defines the characters and the emotions that are embedded in my storytelling. Music is an audible way of storytelling and when meshed with my written word, it embraces the living flow of feelings that emerge.

There might not be a song which has inspired a certain story, but there are plenty of songs that are woven into the fabric of what I write.

I can't hear certain songs without thinking of certain characters or scenes because even when I read back what I've written, I can still hear the melody—the soundtrack—even when I'm not listening to the music.

Have a great Wednesday! Write On!
I can see the weekend from here.

WIPlash Wednesdays- #Research for #CastawayHearts

In 2007 when I started writing Castaway Hearts, I didn't know a lot about Virginia. Originally I'd intended to set the story in Boston, but something drew me to the Norfolk area and the need to write "near" there, rather than further north along the coast. My story also was originally going to be set more in the mid-to-late 1800's rather than the 1790s, but again, situations and circumstances changed as I began to write the story.

One of the most important pieces of research material I used for Castaway Hearts was the book-

I used Wikipedia to figure out the timeline for corsets and stays, when they were and weren't in "fashion."

To understand the proper name for quilt designs I went here- Quilt Patterns Names

Links for other places I used for research follow-

An Outline of American Literature
The Food Timeline
18th Century History- The City of Norfolk, Va
American History Timeline 1780-2010
Great Inventions
Fire and Light
1780s Decade Timeline
Norfolk Highlights 1584-1881
Virginia Historical Society
Tobacco Timeline: The Seventeen Century
Tobacco Timeline: The Eighteenth Century
Virginia History
Virginia, Timeline of State History

I'm not sure I can honestly pinpoint every detail I learned doing this research or what I've used within the story because a lot of it now seems just common knowledge to me. One of the things that always sticks out most is that I learned matches didn't exist yet and therefore my characters, in the 1790s would have used tinderboxes and spills (tightly wound paper) to light their pipe tobacco. And though most of the information I found in these research resources did not appear, by direct means, in my novel, all the knowledge I gathered helped build the scenery and behaviors of my characters and the time in which they lived.

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Currently I'm still working on the same WIP, I'm up to 63,156 words of approximately 80K. I left off at a very pivotal moment in the hero's life that deals with his mother, brothers and their deadbeat father. The stormy weekend and my husband's oral surgery has bumped my writing time to the back burner while I take care of family matters, but I'm hoping to get back to work on it today.

WIPlash Wednesdays-Descriptive Writing

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

~E.L. Doctorow~

What Do YOU see?

As a reader, I enjoy epic novels with great attention to detail. I don't just want to see the waterfall—I want to hear the roar of it as it rushes over the cliffs above. I want to feel the cool spray as if I'm close enough to reach out and let it sprinkle and splash on me, close enough to dive right into the swirling, rolling waters (nevermind that I can't actually swim).

Then I would relax next to a large rock, smoothed over time, where the water laps lazily against the gray stone slab. I could feel the soft swishing of the waves against my body as the noonday sun beats down, warming my skin through the lush leaves of the branches above. Hear the twittering tropical birds swooping and calling to each other in the distances while the sweet aromatic flora scents waft in on the breeze and envelope my senses. High in the sky, white wispy clouds drift by on a cerulean canvas.

As a writer, I also enjoy incorporating details to bring the scenery to life—to bring all the reader's senses into play, to see, feel, smell, hear and maybe even taste, what's there. I want them to join me in the moment, to live it as they read it.

What good is writing if it doesn't conjure up a reality? those adventures we love so much might seem like random words strung together, but the beauty comes when those words segue from a blank screen of nothingness—opening onto a scene, the characters, a room or setting- and a movie begins to play out, to take shape in the mind of a reader.

The Kelly green grass on the hillside glistened in shimmering dewdrop diamonds in the cool early summer morning light. Golden sunshine warmed the white wooly sheep grazing the valley near the babbling brook that divided the countryside. Yellow dandelions dotted the banks on either side as little Tommy chased his Labrador retriever down a dusty lane nearby.

Tommy stopped to pick a dandelion that had gone to seed. He lifted it gently, squeezed his eyes shut so tight his eyelids ached, then blew the white tuffs with all the air in his lungs. Squinting one eye open, Tommy watched, his jaw slack, as the tiny puffs rose into the heavens and drifted away like so many miniature umbrellas floating to mysterious destinations and far-off places his five-year-old mind could only daydream about. A row of lilacs in bloom perfumed the air with their sweet aroma.

Smoky, the jet black Lab, dashed back to his young master whose sandy brown hair, tousled by the breeze, had fallen into his eyes. Tommy took a deep breath, threw back the strands of hair and tossed the spent dandelion stem over his shoulder, then snatched a twig from the roadside.

"Get it, Smoky!" Tommy reared back and flung the stick toward the creek. Darting through the tall damp grass, the dog leaped through the air and splashed down in the shallow water. Racing back to Tommy, Smoky appeared to grin with the twig in his slobbery jowls. The dog dropped the stick at his boy's feet, then shook the water from his shiny black fur, dousing Tommy in cold creek water.

"You silly dog!" Tommy squealed, falling to his knees and wrapping his arms around Smoky's damp neck, paying no mind to the cloying wet-dog smell emanating off his pooch. "I love you."

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Can you see it? Feel it? Smell it?

All that on the fly, a little word play in a free writing exercise, but it came to me, rolling out in a mini-burst of detailed inspiration.

What about you?
Anything by a writer that ever stuck with you~ long after you were finished reading it?