As I mentioned many times before, music is my greatest inspiration for writing. Often, when I’m feeling stuck in a particular part of a story, I find the answer in songs. In Welcome to New York, I found out what was Alana’s “secret” after listening to She’s Not Mine, by Sara Beirelles. In Once in a Lifetime, one of the relationships is heavily based on Outside, by Catfish and the Bottlemen. I even directly stole a line from the song for one of the scenes. My next novel, Beautifully Unfinished, was born from the first four verses of Breathe Again, by Sara Bareilles. Last year, I started a series on my Twitter and Instagram (hey, follow me there!) where I post a very short story — aka flash — based on one of my favorite songs. Not only it’s a great writing exercise, but it’s fun, too! I thought it would be also fun to try to use it to explain my writing process, so that’s what I’m going to do here. Hopefully, I won’t bore you to death! We’ll see. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.
A little bit late, but I’ve finally rounded up my favorite reads of 2019. It was such a good reading year for me, I’ve found so many new favorites! Let me gush about them! Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.
Remember at the beginning of the year I made a post about my bujo? And in that post, I included a picture of my writing track for 2019? You can read it here, but I’ll also tell you — my goal for this year was to write 150k words. I kind of surpassed it a liiiitle bit. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.
Remember when I used to post my month in songs on the blog? Good times… I kind of abandoned those posts because this year has been a crazy busy one. I’ve been posting less, but I’ve been writing more. Which, ultimately, will be good for everyone. Still, as my obsession with music persists — as does the link between songs and my stories —, I’ve decided to do a recap of what this year in songs has been like for me. Below you’ll find a list of my two favorite songs of each month and how they shaped what I was writing at the time. I even included a sneak peek of one of the scenes in Once in a Lifetime that was born from one of these songs! Shall we begin? Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.