I’m thrilled to be able to finally reveal the cover for Emma and the Silk Thieves, the second in my Tales of Widowswood series, a middle grade fantasy. Emma’s adventures continue as she finds herself needing to make good on the promise she made the Spider Queen. Alas, Emma is still dreadfully afraid of spiders (well who wouldn’t be frightened of a green furry spider bigger than a dog) and tries to prepare herself for their inevitable meeting. But the spiders aren’t the most dangerous things in the forest these days… and the thieves have their eyes right on Emma.
To go with the new cover for Silk Thieves, Curiosity Quills has also redesigned the cover for Emma and the Banderwigh (the first in the series) to keep the look consistent. (I love the magical forest feel here.)
Sometimes I’m asked where my inspiration comes from for my writing. Most of the time, it feels like ideas fly out of the blue. I’ll get a one or two-sentence long concept, jot it down, and then build it up into a more elaborate story. Every so often, I’ll be in the midst of writing a plot outline or perhaps even in the draft itself when I’ll get a song stuck in my head. A handful of times, a particular song has resulted in changes to the story, additions to a story, or wound up fitting the mood so well I developed a mental association between the writing and the music.
It’s been awhile since I posted something, and who am I to deny a sudden inspiration to ramble a bit. Here are some cases where a song has had an effect on my writing, inspired it, or developed a close association to it:
One More Run (Book 1 of The Roadhouse Chronicles)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3yvFmi_q1M
Nice Shot, Filter
While I was coming up with the opening scene of this novel, a wasteland-weary driver behind the wheel of an electric Dodge Challenger flying down a desert road, the bass line from this song came out of nowhere and got stuck in my head. Add to that, a car-to-motorcycle gunfight, and the song just fit too perfectly to ignore. I wound up titling the chapter “Nice Shot Man” since the song had been playing on loop in my head while writing it. The tempo of the music and even the lyrics fit the scene so well, if I get struck by lightning and this ever becomes a film, I’m going to lobby for it to be the opening track.
It Ain’t Me – Fortunate Son major-to-minor, Chase Holfelder covering CCR
This is a case where I hadn’t been expecting a particular song to influence the story. Usually, I can’t draft with music on because it distracts me. For some reason while writing One More Run, I happened to have YouTube going in the background and this song came up on random. The baleful, minor key got into my head and changed my early conceptions of the Dallas settlement from a typical outpost to a group of surviving US Military still holding it together as if the world hadn’t stopped. The sentiment of the song fits Kevin’s attitude at this point in the story – Someone’s gotta save the world, but it ain’t me. I wound up titling the chapter ‘It ain’t me,’ and added an old man playing the song on a guitar.
A Good Run of Bad Luck, Clint Black
For the Roadhouse Chronicles, despite it being a post-nuclear apocalypse with zombies, something about it made me want to impart a sense of a western to it as well. A friend had recently suggested I listen to some country music (after I said I didn’t hate it, which surprised her). This song wound up getting stuck in my head for a while. During edits, I wound up adding an additional chapter to the end of the book to (hopefully) create a more satisfying ending of the first in this series. This song fit the mood perfectly, and also lent its title to the chapter.
Nine Candles of Deepest Black
Wither, Dream Theater
In the beginning of the story, Paige is severely depressed and struggling to find the energy to even get out of bed to go to school. I didn’t have this song in mind while writing the chapter, but later, when I heard it, it struck me how apropos it was to the story and her mindset at the time. During the blog tour for Nine Candles, one of the participants asked me to put together a playlist of songs, and this one leapt to mind right away.
Secrets, Bevin Hamilton
At one point in the story, a ghost is attempting to communicate with the girls, and does so by causing a computer to turn itself on and start blaring a song. I stumbled across this one while hunting for a song that might be appropriate for a ghost trying to call someone a liar. After sifting among the search results, I clicked on this one. The combination of title, lyrics, and the eerie harpsichord fit the mood so well I decided this to be the song. Alas, Paige doesn’t quite get the message right away.
A Ghost Among Fireflies
The Touch, Stan Bush
Okay, I’m dating myself with this one, but… While writing the short story A Ghost Among Fireflies, which is in my anthology The Far Side of Promise, this song came out of nowhere and lodged in my head. Early in the story, the main character is flying her spaceship into a gauntlet of defense satellites in an effort to reach a quarantined planet. While she’s dodging laser blasts and flying like crazy to keep from getting blown up, I had this song in my head. In this case, the scene made me think of the song, so it’s the inverse of where inspiration came from the song.
Zero Rogue (Awakened #5)
(This book doesn’t yet have a cover)
Aqualung, Jethro Tull
In the fifth book of the Awakened series (which isn’t released yet), Aaron is wandering along and winds up sitting on a bench in the park. That tripped a synapse in my brain which brought this song up. Despite the story being set in 2418, I couldn’t help but work in a few referenced lines (since both characters involved are from London). This too is a case of the scene calling to mind a song, not so much the song inspiring the scene – though it did cause a bit of banter.
Dead Man’s Number
(Book 3 of the Roadhouse Chronicles does not yet have a cover)
Burn – The Cure
In the third book of the Roadhouse Chronicles series, one of the characters gains a measure of victory over someone they’ve been quite angry at for a long time, and as a message, blasts this song in the room while the target of their anger is bleeding out. My head filled with the mental image of the character slow-walking away with this music playing.
Emma and the Silk Thieves
(Book 2 doesn’t have a cover just yet, but here’s the cover for book 1)
Walpurgisnacht, Faun
During the second book in the Tales of Widowswood series, the Feast of Zaravex (a harvest festival) occurs in Emma’s village. Since the image of satyrs features prominently in that holiday (the deity Zaravex is depicted as a satyr), my brain linked the scene to this song and wound up hearing it on loop while writing the festival scene. In this case it’s a matter of synchronicity – the song fit the scene perfectly, but was not the inspiration for it.
Division Zero
Memoria, Unheilig
Finally, an after-the-fact case. A few months after Division Zero #1 released, I stumbled across a German band, Unheilig. Their instrumental track, Memoria, struck me as the most perfect title music to use if Division Zero ever became a TV series. The haunting tech-influenced song captured the essence of the story – a woman dealing with ghosts and spiritual beings in a world overrun with technology.
Well, there you have the most prominent examples of when music influenced my writing (or synchronized with it). If any other writers happen to read this, drop a comment if you’ve been inspired to write something based on a song.
I’m pleased to announce that Curiosity Quills is putting most of their catalog up for sale in December for .99 (ebooks). Different genres go on sale on different dates, and the sale includes all the books in CQ’s active catalog. Below are the sale dates by title for my novels:
On December 13 and 14, Contemporary Fiction goes on sale. My novels, Caller 107 and The Summer the World Ended (both YA fiction) will be .99 for the ebook.
Science Fiction
December 15th and 16th is the day for Sci Fi books, which includes quite a few of my books:
My middle-grade fantasy novel, Emma and the Banderwigh (Tales of Widowswood series #1) goes on sale for .99 on December 17th and 18th. (The second book in this series, Emma and the Silk Thieves is scheduled to release January 3rd!)
This is a great opportunity to grab up a bunch of ebooks (again CQ is putting almost their whole catalog up on sale). Check them out at www.curiosityquills.com
Today only (11/29), you can find HAVELOCK on sale for just 99 cents. As the sale ends soon, I thought it appropriate to share just how this story came about.
I’d had this idea for a spy novel for a while. I was always disappointed in the lack of female spies and the way the existing ones were portrayed. While they might be able to kick-ass occasionally, most ended up captured and needed to be rescued. Without a doubt, there was room for a strong-willed heroine who possessed the attitude and skills and absolutely no trace of the usual ‘damsel in distress’ element that plagues too many strong female characters.
Having read almost all the original James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, I wanted to create a female character who would be more than a match for a man like Bond. And then I started to wonder what Bond’s daughter would be like had he actually succeeded in impregnating any one of the women he’d encountered over the years. In one of Fleming’s short stories, there was a female character who was out to take revenge on the people that killed her parents. She was fiery and passionate. She ended up as a Bond girl in the movie ‘For Your Eyes Only’ and her name was Melina Havelock (Judy in the original story).
I contacted the Ian Fleming Foundation in the UK, who own the rights to all the Bond novels, including the new ones, to ask if I could reference James Bond in any way in what I originally wanted to be a spinoff novel. They were extremely helpful but couldn’t grant the permissions I needed. The story had to be original. Which I took as a challenge to write a James Bond spin off without any reference to Bond himself, M, Q, 007, a license to kill, etc. The result was HAVELOCK.
Is Eliana Havelock the daughter of James Bond? Does she have her own ulterior motives? Is she as lethal as she is beautiful? One thing’s for certain . . . Eliana Havelock doesn’t need a license to kill.
Ever had one of those days? The kind of days that challenge every skill, threaten every ethical standard, and undo every single concept of what you would ordinarily have considered an impossible situation? Despite near-perfect planning, I’m having one of those days right now.
It all started when I decided to find my father. I’ve never met him. His longtime vocation makes him a hard person to find at the best of times, but I recently discovered he was reported missing three years ago. He hasn’t surfaced since, and maybe it’s the paternal side of me, maybe it’s because my mother passed away and I’m seeking a parental figure, maybe I want to know why he never came back for me, but well… I gotta find out what happened.
And that’s why I, Eliana Havelock, now find myself tied to a chair in a dank basement somewhere near Karachi, Pakistan.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to be tortured.
Andrew Buckley – The Story So Far . . .
Andrew Buckley attended the Vancouver Film School’s Writing for Film and Television program. After pitching and developing several screenplay projects for film and television, he worked in marketing and public relations, before becoming a professional copy and content writer. During this time Andrew began writing his first adult novel, DEATH, THE DEVIL AND THE GOLDFISH, followed closely by his second novel, STILTSKIN both published by Curiosity Quills Press.
Andrew also writes under the pen name ‘Jane D. Everly’ for his HAVELOCK series of novels. His first upper middle grade novel HAIR IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES is now available from Month9Books with the sequel due out in August 2017.
Andrew also co-hosts a geek movie podcast, is working on several new novels, and has a stunning amount of other ideas. He now lives happily in the Okanagan Valley, BC with one beautiful wife, three kids, one cat, one needy dog, and a multitude of characters that live comfortably inside of his mind.
I’ve signed contracts with Curiosity Quills to publish The Harmony Paradox (sequel to Virtual Immortality), and Dead Man’s Number (Book 3 of the Roadhouse Chronicles). Release dates have not been set yet (at least not that I am aware). The first book in the Roadhouse Chronicles series (One More Run) is due to release December 2016.
Also, my next release is nine days away – The Far Side of Promise, is an anthology of my short stories due out on the 14th of November. This collection is the result of a combination of my overactive imagination and a suggestion from CQ. Back in 2014, they put out a call for short story submissions for the Chronology antho. At the time, I hadn’t done much in the way of short story writing, but I decided to give it a go.
I sat down and tried to think of a story idea… and got a pile of them. Being on the indecisive side, I wound up writing all of them and sending them all in. Lisa from CQ remarked that I sent them so many stories they should print an anthology of just mine. (Which we wound up doing).
Initially, Emma and the Banderwigh was a short story included in this batch. One of my beta readers adored it so much they asked me to expand on it and turn it into a full novel. While CQ was processing all the short story submissions for the Chronology antho, I wound up doing that and wrote the novelized form of Banderwigh.
I spent about a week or so hemming and hawing about having both a short story form and novel form of Banderwigh, and I ultimately decided to drop the short story from the Far Side of Promise anthology and replace it with something else. I batted around ideas for other short stories, but one concept kept coming back to the forefront. I wound up writing Innocent Deception to replace the Emma and the Banderwigh short, and sent it to CQ fully expecting it to be too late for Chronology, and as part of my antho.
Turns out, CQ liked Innocent Deception the most, and that’s the story that got in to Chronology alongside quite a few other wonderful writers (including Piers Anthony).
The Far Side of Promise antho has been in production for quite some time. Due to that, more of the stories within it wound up getting made into full novels. One More Run started off as a short story, but a fellow CQ author, Will Stanton read it and suggested that I expand that concept into a novel. (If you like post apocalyptic fiction, check out his book – The Artful),
Initially, I novelized One More Run starting where the short story left off… but beta readers had some confusion issues, and it didn’t seem right to send people hunting for the short story to read before the novel… so I wound up putting the short story into the front end of the novel.
Daughter of Mars (a short story in FSOP) grew into The Hand of Raziel (book one of the Daughter of Mars series.)
(A similar situation arose with Innocent Deception when CQ asked me to write more in that setting.) The novel Heir Ascendant is a continuation of the short story, but the short is embedded at the front of the book so people who haven’t seen Chronology (or Far Side of Promise) get the whole story.
Other things
I’m offering signed paperbacks of The Summer the World Ended for a limited time at $10 each (plus $3 shipping). For more information, please email me at mcox2112 (gmail).
Emma and the Silk Thieves (Book 2 of Tales of Widowswood) is done with proofreading and on its way into the production queue for a January 2017 release date. The third book in the series (Emma and the Silverbell Faeries) is currently with CQ’s beta reader.
That’s about all I can think of as being new for the time being…
Been somewhat busy as of late working on two more manuscripts.
The Harmony Paradox, a sequel to Virtual Immortality came out at 233k words and is currently in beta reading. The events of that story resume eight months after the end of VI, following Nina, Joey, Kenny, Katya, and Masaru.
Struggling still to come to terms with what she has become, Nina adopts an orphan girl after a soul-crushing investigation in hopes of clinging to her humanity. She draws a seemingly-routine case that goes deeper than she initially suspects.
Joey is settling in to his new role as a network analyst for Division 9. He discovers not all is as he believed in regards to the AI he believed he’d destroyed, and a desperate plea from the sister he can’t stand sets his life on an unexpected course.
With his wife clear of drugs and home, Kenny is looking forward to a few years of calm to be with his family. When the Syndicate appears to ask a little too firmly for his assistance recovering an artifact from the Badlands, he decides to bring the entire clan rather than be separated from them. Eldon is skeptical of his stories about The Sentience, but young Hayley seems to feel the demon’s presence.
Katya has emigrated to the UCF and tentatively entertains the hope that she may be free of her former corporate masters. With an unusual roommate to look after, an eight-year-old girl who’s been alive for twenty years, she decides to try for a normal life. Alas, her skill set seems suited for a particular line of work, and a seemingly easy data acquisition job gets complicated.
Masaru has returned to Japan, drawn back into the life of a CEOs middle son. The expected boredom of his first official duty as a representative of Kurotai Electronics takes a dangerous turn, and he finds himself questioning not only what he wants out of life, but his entire nation.
I’ve also completed the first draft of Emma and the Silverbell Faeries, the third book in the Tales of Widowswood series. In this book, Emma answers a plea from a faerie, and unwittingly travels through a fey circle into another world to protect them against mystically enraged animals that seem bent on destroying the Silverbells to the last faerie.
Event! – I will be at the Collingswood Book Festival tomorrow, Saturday 10/1/16. I’m looking forward to meeting readers and signing books.
I’d also like to thank everyone who has recently posted a review of Chiaroscuro – The Mouse and the Candle, The Hand of Raziel, or Nine Candles of Deepest Black. I still have some review copies available (including older titles). If interested, please email me at mcox 2112 @ gmail .com with a request and a link to your blog.
