August Falling: Music and Its Role
When I was younger, I was able to write through anything. It wasn’t uncommon to have the radio blaring in the background. As I got older, the ads started to irritate me – well, those annoying ones (“Hello! Hello!”) where somebody was talking right at you. They always broke my concentration. Listening to CDs helped solve that problem. Originally, I’d just play anything. But as I grew more experienced and idiosyncratic (as a writer) I’d chose music that tonally suited whatever I was writing. It helped get me in the right mood and created a mindset that contributed to the story. When I was thirty, I went through terrible clusters…
August Falling: The Inception
While I was doing the Hachette Manuscript Development Program, then-Hachette publisher Bernadette Foley asked me to think about where my book fit in the market. As research to that question, I asked some of the other participants if they’d read similar books to my own. The wonderful Kim Lock made a number of suggestions, including one popular novel. I bought a swath of books with the intent of seeing how they related to Just Another Week in Suburbia. That was the summer I house-sat my friend’s house to dog-sit their dog, Jet, so I could work on the revision of Just Another Week in Suburbia. While I was off from…