Romance Writer’s Weekly: What’s in Your Spotify?

Hello to everyone in the audio radiance! Welcome to my spot on the web. Now, if you’ve never been here before and are jumping in from Brenda Margriet’s blog,  just go on and make yourself comfortable while I introduce myself.

Hi, I’m Liz. I write Erotic Romance science fiction and fantasy, and I write New Adult fantasy romance. I’m probably best known for my Steampunk BDSM novel House of Sable Locks. 

Here on my blog, I tend talk a lot about writing and my works-in-progress. Accountability helps keep me on target. I’m currently working on two pieces. The first is book three of my ongoing Patreon serial Heir to the Firstborn (a new adult fantasy romance. Forged in Fire, book two of Heir to the Firstborn was published just two weeks ago). The other work in progress is the first in an Erotic Paranormal Romance series that I’m tentatively calling Flesh and Blood. Book one is Blood Bound,  and you can find excerpts in my previous blog posts. It’s what I fondly call my BDSM Vampire series.

Now, I tend to listen to a lot of music when I’m writing, because it distracts the toddler part of my brain that wants to go play with new pens and coloring books and eat all the chocolate. If I turn on Spotify, I can focus more easily on words. I used to do this in grade school, and it drove my mother wild — she couldn’t understand how I could work with background noise. To me, though, it’s essential.

Now, what I listen to depends on what I’m writing. Ninety-five percent of the time, I’m listening to instrumentals. Words can be a distraction, because I like to sing along. Singing = not writing, at least for me. So instrumentals.  My current playlist of choice for instrumentals isn’t one that I made. It’s the house music from Eat Your Science, one of Alton Brown’s live shows. It’s all theme songs from classic science fiction TV and movies. My only complaint? There are only nineteen songs on the playlist, so it is over too soon!

Another playlist that I enjoy, and that is also too short, is courtesy of Lin-Manuel Miranda. His Write Your Way Out playlist is fun, and includes some artists that I hadn’t been familiar with before. I don’t listen to it as often as Eat Your Science, because lyrics. (Also, here’s a warning — this playlist has some explicit lyrics.)

Now, I do have my own playlists, and I’m playing with them a bit. When I wrote my BDSM Paranormal Romance Heart’s Master, I included a playlist in the endmatter of the book, made up of songs that were referred to during the course of the story. Music was fairly important in Heart’s Master — Stephen, the main character, was a triple threat (singer, dancer and actor) who lost his career  and his sight in a car accident. That accident also woke his magical abilities, and he discovers that he is a bard. And that there’s a mage in the Elvenlands who wants him dead.

I’m doing something similar in Blood Bound. There’s a playlist, but not because either main character is a performer. Well, one of them is a pole dancer, but that’s not his main job — Daniel is a bartender at night and a yoga teacher during the day.

In this book, each chapter title is the title of a song that matches the mood or the theme of the chapter. I set up a playlist in Spotify for the book, and the list and the link to this playlist will be included in the endmatter of the book.

Now, this is not the final version of the playlist, simply because I haven’t finished writing the book yet.  There are a couple of choices for chapters near the end that might change, if I find something that suits the mood better.  (Specifically? Chapter 19. I love Van Canto, but I’m not sure that particular song is what I want. However, I haven’t written chapter 19 yet. I know what’s going to happen in there, but until I have the words on the page, I won’t know for sure if that song is a good fit, or if the other song I’m thinking of will be better.)

And, because I am a masochist, I’ll be doing similar playlists for every book in this series (right now, I think there will be five books, with a possibility of seven. We’ll see.) So I have a master playlist where I’m collecting songs that I might use or that just put me in the right mood for writing this particular series.  There are several songs on the list that I’ve already earmarked for book three. (Yeah, I haven’t finished book one yet and am already planning book three. No, I won’t be jumping right to book three. Books happen in specific order — besides, if I write book three first, then I’ll just have to change it when I write book two and things happen that impact book three.)

Hopefully, your stop here has given you some new music to listen to, and some new books to enjoy while listening to that music. Your next stop on the merry webring is Jenna Da Sie’s blog. Let’s go see what she’s listening to today…