One of the things that I frequently do is come up with a playlist of songs that I’ll listen to possibly obsessively while I’m writing.
The soundtrack from “Pirates of the Caribbean” was frequently on my list while I wrote Clockwork Kingdom. It was pirates, and fog, and ship battles, and it just set the mood for me.
I didn’t realize until just recently that a lot of the songs on the playlist for Zydeco Queen are from the 60s and 70s. The novel I’m currently writing has some scenes that take place in a high school. The songs that have crept onto this playlist are painful songs from way back then, expressing my teenage angst. Some of the songs I still like — others I kind of roll my eyes at the drama-queen nature of them.
While I wasn’t bullied horribly in high school, my best friend was. (She’d come to the US from Germany when she was 14. She dressed European — very stylish — not American, and got tremendous crap about it, as well as other things.) This book has been difficult to write in places, reliving those ancient hurts.
There was a meme going around, about tweets you’d send to your 13 year old self. So many things I’d tell myself to do differently. As that’s pretty useless, I guess all I can say is that, “It gets better. It does take a long time before it gets better, and you have to hit a couple pretty desperate places first — but it does get better.”