Researching the Industry, Music, Vulnerability

I have always been a night owl. Many of my Friday nights after my children are in bed and my husband and his friends are in the basement jamming away at their music, I settle myself on my couch and work.  I work late into the night, usually just beyond 1:00 in the morning.  For the most part this is great, but it becomes difficult when I’m trying to make big decisions that late at night.  And let me tell you, the decisions and thoughts around what is the right next step when the writing is ready to start going out into the world is not easy.  There are SO many ways to go, and so many things to keep in mind when making a decision about moving forward.  I’m currently in this place where I’m working on query letters, and collecting information on who I’d like to query, while also trying to wrap my head around what the inner-workings of the publishing world are.  As a total outsider whose background is not the publishing world, this is daunting and immensely intimidating.  There are so many things to learn about how to query, what questions to ask if a writer gets to that point that an agent reaches out who wants to represent them, what publishing contracts look like, all the different kinds of rights that a published work has, and so, SO much more. 

I’ve made some great progress on my query letters. I am also continuing on this round of revising SB one chapter at a time, while pieces of SoS hit me out of the blue. A song lyric or something my oldest daughter will ask me or something I’ll see on Instagram will hit me with an idea of something that needs to be added into SoS. This week this happened as I was listening to music specifically. As I was making my YouTube line-up for Friday night, I found the Hanson channel. 😮 Oh my heart, I tell you. I was SO happy. I stared watching their videos and listening to some of their new music I hadn’t heard yet. As I was listening to them talk about their music and their fans who’ve been with them since their first days, it hit me that my main character in SoS has a strong connection to Hanson and their lyrics, because of course she does. She does because I did and that makes this part of that story the closest connection my main character and I have. Hanson’s lyrics are part of the soundtrack that buoyed me so much at that time in life. While this story is not a non-fiction piece, it is a story inspired by events that occurred during my adolescence. Because of what this story is, this will be one of the most personal connections I share with a character I’ve written. While that is wonderful, it’s also vulnerable in a way that I didn’t think I would put myself personally in a fiction piece. So there’s that.

Have you ever had a character that you connect with more than others? How do you handle that in your writing? Does music fuel or interact with your writing experience? If so, how?

Happy Writing!