I am delighted to welcome to the blog the author
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| Photo:Ion Paciu |
Sharing her thoughts about how music inspires her writing process
Inspirational
Playlist: rock and opera
Music
is a key part of my writing process. I prefer to listen to classical music
while writing as I find anything with lyrics interferes with my thought
process. But music is a key inspiration when I’m at the early ideas stage, when
I’m inventing and clarifying a character; assigning music, bands, singers, to
my protagonist helps me to firm up a personality and backstory. I take my time
to get it right, selecting according to the period in which the story is set
and choosing something I think fits my character. For Justine Tree in Connectedness,
this eventually meant a combination of rock and opera.
I
made an early decision that the young Justine would be a fan of Joan Jett and
The Runaways, particularly their 1976 hit single ‘Cherry Bomb’. Inadvertently,
in my head I began to think of Justine as physically resembling Jett too. Once
I recognized this, I stuck two photographs on the wall above my computer: Joan
Jett as she is now, in her fifties, the age Justine is when she starts to
search for her birth daughter; and Kristin Stewart playing Jett in the 2010 film
The Runaways, around the age of Justine when, as a student, she falls in love
and falls pregnant. Jett played rhythm guitar, seen standing left of lead
singer Cherie Currie in the
official
music video. Quiet Justine, like many teenagers, admired the singers’
outgoing vibrant personalities, the opposite of what she was like herself but
what she longed to be.
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Joan Jett and Kristin Stewart
Cuttings on my Wall |
The
sea is particularly important in Justine’s life. She spent her childhood in a clifftop
cottage on the East Yorkshire coast, waking up and falling asleep to the sound
of waves breaking on the shore below. As an adult artist, she lives in London
but is still drawn to her homeland. I show this connection, this innate sense
of belonging, by the music she plays and particularly Benjamin Britten’s opera
Peter Grimes. Britten’s first opera, it
is about a fisherman in Aldeburgh on England’s eastern coast, a misanthropic
loner who is hounded to self-destruction by the townspeople after the
mysterious, but accidental, deaths of two of his apprentices. When Justine is
troubled, she listens to the Four Sea Interludes that both remind her of home
and reflect her emotional turmoil.
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The Royal Opera
Photo Clive Bardo ROH 2011 |
It
was important to me to show joy in Justine’s life, though her story is a
difficult one. Interviewed on the radio programme ‘Desert Island Discs’, one of
the tracks she chooses is
‘Bohemian
Rhapsody’ by Queen. This was a hit in 1976, staying at number one in the
charts for nine weeks. Justine confides to the radio audience how she and her
mother loved this song, dancing around the kitchen table to the bemusement of
her father. This scene was cut from the novel at the final edit stage but you
can read it in
Connectedness/cuttings,
a small collection of three free stories; perhaps they are better-named
‘extracts’, never previously published.
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Queen Bohemian Rhapsody
Original UK sleeve Photo Wikipedia |
Finally,
I couldn’t set the novel in Spain and not include flamenco. When Justine first
arrives in Malaga in 1982, she goes to a flamenco club with her two flatmates.
When I wrote the scene, I was hearing in my head
‘Canta con la Voz del Corazón’ sung by
Carmen Linares, one of the finest flamenco singers in Spain.
Although the song is dated slightly later
than the period I was writing about, it stuck in my head. I have a pile of flamenco
CDs and this is the one I found myself humming. It mans ‘sing with the voice of
your heart’.
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Carmen Linares
Photo Javi Martinez_elmundo |
About
‘Connectedness’
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Beulah Press
May 2018 |
TO
THE OUTSIDE WORLD, ARTIST JUSTINE TREE HAS IT ALL… BUT SHE ALSO HAS A SECRET
THAT THREATENS TO DESTROY EVERYTHING
Justine’s
art sells around the world, but does anyone truly know her? When her mother
dies, she returns to her childhood home in Yorkshire where she decides to
confront her past. She asks journalist Rose Haldane to find the baby she gave
away when she was an art student, but only when Rose starts to ask difficult
questions does Justine truly understand what she must face.
Is
Justine strong enough to admit the secrets and lies of her past? To speak aloud
the deeds she has hidden for 27 years, the real inspiration for her work that
sells for millions of pounds. Could the truth trash her artistic reputation?
Does Justine care more about her daughter, or her art? And what will she do if
her daughter hates her?
This
tale of art, adoption, romance and loss moves between now and the Eighties,
from London’s art world to the bleak isolated cliffs of East Yorkshire and the
hot orange blossom streets of Málaga, Spain.
A
family mystery for fans of Maggie O’Farrell, Lucinda Riley, Tracy Rees and
Rachel Hore.
About
the ‘Identity Detective’ series
Rose
Haldane reunites the people lost through adoption. The stories you don’t see on
television shows. The difficult cases. The people who cannot be found, who are
thought lost forever. Each book in the ‘Identity Detective’ series considers
the viewpoint of one person trapped in this horrible dilemma. In the first book
of the series, Ignoring Gravity, it is Rose’s experience we follow as an adult
discovering she was adopted as a baby. Connectedness is the story of a birth
mother and her longing to see her baby again. Sweet Joy, the third novel, will
tell the story of a baby abandoned during The Blitz.
Sandra
Danby is a proud Yorkshire woman, tennis nut and tea drinker. She believes a
walk on the beach will cure most ills. Unlike Rose Haldane, the identity
detective in her two novels, Ignoring Gravity and Connectedness, Sandra is not
adopted.
Author
Links
Huge thanks to Sandra for sharing her inspirational music with us today
~****~
