Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
As I mentioned in a recent post I haven’t been listening to music at all recently (by which I mean for the last few of years) because of all the podcasts I subscribed too and now have to try and keep up with.
However, my other half had a play list going at the weekend (amazingly it wasn’t all Bruce Springsteen!) and one track took me right back to the first book I wrote, A Single Step. In those days I listened to music at my desk when I worked and in the car as I was spending a lot of time then ferrying children around. I don’t think I was even aware of what a podcast was back then. How things change!
The song that sparked this wave of nostalgia was this one…
Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones. It is the song that Emma and Trent first dance to, in my head at least. What they dance to is not mentioned in the book. But I remember listening to it over and over to create the mood for me to craft the right words. There were a few songs that accompanied me as I wrote that book and I ended up making up a disc for the car so I could listen to the tracks there too, and continue to think about my growing book as I drove.
It brought back many happy memories to listen to Wild Horses again and it reminded me just how absorbed I was in the writing process then. How consumed by it I was. I loved writing A Single Step. In a way it was a very innocent time for me. It was the first novel I ever finished and I did so before I knew anything about the publishing business. I had no website or blog. In fact, I had no idea what a blog was and I wasn’t on any social media at all (imagine that!). Marketing wasn’t even on my radar. I had no idea what was to come. And I tell you what, it was great fun. No deadlines, no word counts. No worries about reader expectations.
I had initially just set myself the challenge of writing a book and hadn’t thought beyond completing it. So it wasn’t until I finished writing A Single Step and had then gone over it again, and again, and again, that I gave any thought to actually getting it published. I’m not sure now what I thought I was going to do with it, if anything, as I knew nothing about how to get published and I’d never even heard of self-publishing.
It was my daughter who mentioned it to me first. She’d heard you could publish a book via Amazon. So, after getting some editing help and having a fairly terrible cover made up that’s what I did, I launched my book onto Amazon with still no clue as to what I was doing. I vividly remember getting the email to tell me it was live on Amazon and then downloading it. I couldn’t quite believe it was on my Kindle and available for me to read. I was alone when this happened so this was probably my loneliest launch, but also the most exciting.
I sat there on the 3 January 2014 staring at the cover of my book on my Kindle and suddenly realised I was going to have to work out how to tell people it was available. Then everything started to change.
Do you have a piece of music that brings back really vivid memories for you? Do you have songs that remind you of a particular chapter or incident in something you’ve written? Let me know if you do.
Hi Georgia! Yes, I remember those innocent times. I’ll never forget the first time I pressed ‘publish’ on amazon in May 2014, just a few months after you. We were innocent and romantic writers then! I suppose we’re no longer so innocent, which is a good thing, but I’d say we’re both still romantic because we’re in search of our happy ending! In Hal Elrod’s Morning Miracles for Writers, which I share on my blog today, he says something powerful that all writers know, but we sometimes forget: Our aim is not being published, but being a writer, and we are! So congratulations and keep writing! Have a great week.
Thanks for such a lovely positive comment, Luccia. Keep writing and have a great week yourself! I’ll check out your post, I see it’s just landed in my inbox 😀