Read Around the Rainbow | How does music/noise affect your writing?

ReadAroundTheRainbow

It’s Read Around the Rainbow time! Every month, we’re a bunch of authors who blog on the same topic. This month’s topic is:

How does music/noise affect your writing?

I’m sensitive to noise. If there is too much noise around, I get panicky and sooo exhausted. Being in rooms filled with people is a nightmare, that buzz of voices. I can’t hear what the person next to me says when I’m in a situation like that, and it completely drains me. I avoid parties and gatherings like the plague LOL

When I first started writing, I only had one child. I was on parental leave, and I wrote smutty M/F for my own amusement, not with any plan of ever publishing anything. I wrote when my son was sleeping, and hubby was away working. In silence. Blessed silence.

Then I had more children, and silence became a scarce commodity. I started listening to music while writing – not because I wanted to listen to music but to drown out the noise of four children playing and a husband plucking on the guitar or whatever he’d be doing.

Nowadays, I write early in the mornings before the kids get up, so I could write in silence, but I put on music right away without thinking. It’s become part of the routine.

I don’t really hear what I’m listening to when I write. I disappear into the story, and the music is just there, in the background, blocking out the real world, but I have a list on Spotify called Play it Again, Sam. On that list, I save songs that spark ideas.

I often put on random Spotify lists when loading the dishwasher or cooking or other fun stuff, and sometimes there is a line in a song that sparks an idea. I wrote The Drunken Dog after having heard Longer Than You’ve Been Alive by Old 97. I was baking, and it came on one of those random Spotify lists. I don’t think I’d ever heard anything by Old 97 before, but while kneading bread, a vampire rockstar came alive before my eyes LOL

Check out what the others have to say!

The Drunken Dog

thedrunkendog

Zev Nightfall has a secret. For two years, he’s been the beta in a loosely knitted werewolf pack, but he’s not a werewolf. He’s a crossbreed, part wolf, part fae, which is a death sentence in most packs. That’s not his only problem. One night he meets Otis, a vampire. Shifters and vampires aren’t friends, yet fighting is the last thing on Zev’s mind.

Otis Miller is in the middle of rebuilding his rockstar persona. Again. A hundred years ago, all he had to do was to move when people started noticing him not ageing. With cameras and social media, it doesn’t work anymore, and he isn’t sure he has the energy to start over. Then there is the shifter coming to the bar where he’s singing. He makes Otis want to jump off the stage and never look back.

Zev knows he shouldn’t get involved with a vampire; he has enough problems as it is. But Otis is alone and vulnerable, and it tugs at Zev’s heartstrings. Normally, Otis stays away from other supernatural beings, but something about Zev makes him want to curl up on his lap and forget about the world around them. But how would two people from enemy species make things work, and will Zev’s pack ever accept not only a crossbreed but a vampire as well?