Posts Tagged ‘music’
Guest post by musician and author Maggie Allen
Posted by janinekspendlove in News and Updates on April 2nd, 2013
Maggie & I playing Beatles tunes on our guitars.
Many years ago when I was WAY into costumes (I still love costuming, but in 2005 I was obsessed) I stumbled across the website Padawansguide.com while researching a Star Wars costume I was working on. The owner/manager/creator/content EVERYTHING person was Maggie Allen and I sent her an email which she promptly answered. We went back and forth a few times and found we had a lot of common interests outside of Star Wars & costumes (like a love for the Beatles & flying). I was immediately struck with how multi-talented and intelligent Maggie was (and still is), but more importantly how genuine a person she was. She was (and still is) truly one of the kindest, nicest people I’d ever met, and I can honestly say that she has made me a better person just by knowing her. Oh, and I learned how to play guitar because of her.
So it’s with great excitement that introduce all of you to one of my very best friends, Maggie Allen.
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Music and Writing
A big thanks to Janine for letting me take over her blog for a guest post. Janine and I became friends because we both liked Star Wars, but the things that really bonded us after that were music (especially The Beatles) and writing.
We’ve both come a long way since we started writing silly stories and playing guitar together. It’s been really awesome for me to hear Janine say she was going to write a novel, and then watch her actually do it. And now, not only has she written a novel, she’s written several of them. And lots of short stories.
I’ve only just started taking my first forays into professional publishing. I’ve got a short story coming out in an anthology this summer and a few others coming out through Silence in the Library Publishing, LLC’s future anthologies that I’m really excited about.
My biggest and most recent accomplishment has been the album of original songs that my band, Naked 
Singularity, just finished.
Writing songs is not dissimilar to writing stories. Actually, it might be more similar to writing a specific type of poetry, like a sonnet. Though not as strict in form, a song has a specific form of verses and choruses that ultimately tell a story or evoke an emotion. And stories and songs also often start with a scary blank page that needs to be filled with words. Like stories, songs have meaning, sometimes more than one. They’re open for interpretation. And they’re transformed by the listener’s own unique point of view. Of course, unlike stories, sometimes the lyrics of a song are put together the way they are simply because they rhyme. That’s part of the challenge in a way, getting the words put together to have the rhythm you want, while still containing a meaning, even if it’s not the one you originally intended.
Songs are often taken literally, and I’ve had people actually ask me why I write the lyrics I do. The truth is I’m happily married, so any so-called “unhappy relationship” songs aren’t drawn from my present – they’re either inspired by past experiences, or friend’s experiences, or even have hidden meanings. I went through a period where I was unhappy at my job, and I wrote a number of songs that I disguised as being about relationships. And frankly, I think it’s easier to write songs about being insecure than it is about being happy. But ultimately even the most confessional song can be a work of fiction. Which really doesn’t make writing one terribly different than telling a made-up story! It’s just a different form of story-telling!
If you’d like to check out our music, here’s our website: http://naked-singularity.com
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Bio: About the author: Maggie Allen is new to the publishing world, but not new to writing. By day, Maggie writes about non-fictional topics in astronomy and astrophysics – and at night, she spends time in other creative pursuits. These include running her popular costume websites (The Padawan’s Guide to Star Wars Costumes, The Costumer’s Guide to Movie Costumes), writing short stories, sewing 18th century gowns, and playing guitar in a rock band, which just came out with its first album of original music.
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Lastly, need a copy of my books? As it happens you can buy them here.
Playlist for War of the Seasons, The Half-blood
Posted by janinekspendlove in News and Updates on July 30th, 2012
In case you missed it, book two in the War of the Seasons series, The Half-blood is out & available for purchase in just about every form imaginable.
That said, I’ve been asked by several people where the playlist is? You know, like the one I had at the back of The Human. Well, truth be told, I didn’t feel the need to list a playlist this time, because essentially the Table of Contents of The Half-blood was the playlist since I named every chapter after a song title.
Even so, people have asked for the playlist, so you’ll find it at the end of this post.
This topic brings me back to a guest post I had the pleasure of writing for the talented Stuart Jaffe where I discuss what my musical inspirations for writing have been.
He then very graciously returned the favor and wrote a post for my blog.
I won’t completely repost my post from Stuart’s blog – you’ll need to go there if you want to read it in full, but I am going to quote parts of it here, as it fits in nicely with this playlist post.
Music plays a very large part in my writing. I create specific playlists to help me get in the “mood” or channel a theme. In fact, in my most recent novel, War of the Seasons, book two: The Half-blood, I ended up naming all my chapters after song titles. It wasn’t until my second draft that I realize just how much I’d been listening to Adele while writing The Half-blood. A good ¼ of the chapter titles were song titles from her albums! I changed most of them since I didn’t want to use more than one song title from an artist, but I think I still may have ended up two from Adele. *EDIT* And in looking back, several artists got at least 2 songs (The Beatles, The Cranberries, Cat Stevens, etc).
Whether you like Adele’s music or not doesn’t matter, the fact is her two albums 19 and 21 perfectly set the mood I was trying to achieve in The Half-blood. This proves to be very essential when you’re a part time writer like me. After a long day at your day job it’s hard to sit in front of a computer again and tell your mind to be creative. It sometimes needs a jump-start and it definitely needs training. It got to the point where as soon as Adele, The Cranberries, or The Steelwells would come on my brain “turned on” and the words flowed.
I guess I was a bit Pavlovian in my approach, but it worked. My first novel took me one year to write the first draft. The second took just over three months and is a far better novel in terms of both writing and story. Sure, some of that was feeling more comfortable/experienced in what I was doing, but a big part of it was training my mind to write even when it didn’t want to.
Playlist for War of the Seasons, book 2: The Half-blood
1- No Need to Argue, The Cranberries
2- Trouble, Cat Stevens
3- Who Knew, P!nk
4- Here Comes the Sun, The Beatles
5- Dream On, Aerosmith
6- Old Friends, Simon and Garfunkel
7- A Thousand Miles, Vanessa Carlton
8- Empty, The Cranberries
9- Kiss With A Fist, Florence and the Machine
10- Only in Dreams, Weezer
11-Movin’ Right Along, The Muppets
12-Compass, the Steelwells
13-All Things Must Pass, George Harrison
14-Out To Get You, James
15-Hard Headed Woman, Cat Stevens
16-Uninvited, Alanis Morissette
17-Crossroads, Don Mclean
18-Many Shades of Black, The Raconteurs
19-Apologize, One Republic
20-Runnin’ Down a Dream, Tom Petty
21-Ship to Shore, The Soulutions
22-Tug of War, Paul McCartney
23-Wicked Game, Him (cover)
24-Secrets, One Republic
25-Turning Tables, Adele
26-Golden Slumbers, The Beatles
27-Carry that Weight, The Beatles
28-The Remedy, Jason Mraz
29-Cool Blue Reason, Cake
30-Precious, Depeche Mode
Lastly, need a copy of my books? As it happens you can buy them here.
Guest post by Stuart Jaffe & WotS: The Half-blood pre-sale
Posted by janinekspendlove in News and Updates on June 26th, 2012
I had the pleasure of writing a guest post for the talented Stuart Jaffe! You can see it here where I discuss what my musical inspirations for writing have been.
He then very graciously returned the favor and wrote a post for my blog, which I must say I don’t think I deserve, and I hesitated to post at the risk of seeming self-serving. Thank you Stuart! 
I first met Janine this year at Ravencon and then again at ConCarolinas. We hit it off from the start and I suspect she’ll be in my writing life for many years to come. When it came to writing this guest post for her blog (thanks for having me, BTW), I went over several possibilities and finally settled on something that wasn’t in my list at all: People.
Too often we get so involved in writing a story, creating a book, marketing a book, garnering reviews, panicking over sales numbers, cheering over sales numbers, up and down, round and round, that we forget the simple fact that all of this is about people. It’s about writers (who are, generally speaking, people) sharing stories with readers (who are, most certainly, people). It’s about human interaction. Even if you and I never meet, we interact through the story.
It may sound a bit airy, but it’s truly the core of what we are doing. It doesn’t matter the story, either. The Way of the Black Beast is the first in my post-apocalyptic fantasy series with magic from tattoos, blues guitarist/assassins, and a whole host of mutated beasties, but at its core, it is about a woman protecting a boy while dealing with her own twisted family issues. My latest novel, Southern Bound, is a paranormal-mystery about a researcher who discovers his office is haunted by a 1940s detective. There’s a cool mystery surrounding North Carolina history mixed with ghosts, curses, and witches, but the story is really about the love between a man and his wife. It’s always been about people. And by making our stories about people, writers connect with readers.
This may all seem rather obvious, but the obvious things are usually the ones we forget so easily. What brought it all in focus for me was thinking about Janine and politics. In this country, we’ve been living through a particularly volatile time lately with everybody drawing lines in the sand and nobody listening to the other, let alone uttering that dreaded word — compromise. And yet, on a human scale, a one-on-one scale, we can still connect with each other without the vitriol that spews all over the comment section of any news article on the Internet.
Janine exemplifies that warm, gracious, human side we should all strive for. And she didn’t even pay me to write that. Perhaps that’s one reason why she’s met with success publishing her book. Perhaps on a deeper, subconscious level, we can all sense when we are being told a story that touches the human side of us.
Sheesh. I didn’t intend for this post to get so heavy but then again, if we didn’t stop once-in-a-while and write about these things, the Internet would have nothing left except porn, comedy, and cats. So, now that I’ve done that, go ahead and return to your porn, comedy, and cats.
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Stuart Jaffe is the author of Southern Bound, The Malja Chronicles, After The Crash, as well as the short story collection, 10 Bits of My Brain. Numerous other short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He is the co-host of The Eclectic Review — a podcast about science, art, and well, everything. For those who keep count, the latest animal listing is as follows: five cats, one albino corn snake, one Brazilian black tarantula, three aquatic turtles, one tortoise, assorted fish, two lop-eared rabbits, seven chickens, and a horse. Thankfully, the chickens and the horse do not live inside the house.
Lastly, don’t forget, War of the Seasons, Book Two: The Half-blood **PRE-SALE**
For a limited time only, pre-order the book for only $12.99!
Every book will be signed – please state if you want it personalized (and with what name) in the special instructions to the seller when you purchase.
Each book is $12.99, and there is a flat rate shipping fee of $4.95 in the United States only.
Due to printing timelines, the books will be signed and available for shipment during the 2nd week of July. Expect them to arrive shortly thereafter.
Canadian buyers, shipping will be the same price for you, but it will not be priority, so it will take longer to arrive.
All other international buyers, please contact me first before purchasing (leave a comment on my homepage with your email address – they are screened). Your shipping cost/times will be different.
