Today at David Gutowski's awesome site, Largehearted Boy, I got to share my music playlist for my new novel, The Summer She Was Under Water (Queens Ferry Press) on Book Notes:
"My second novel, The Summer She Was Under Water, is actually two books: one I started years ago and put away because the themes of family dysfunction (specifically, parents and their adult children spending a weekend at their lake cabin to relax but instead creating a powder keg of built-up grievances) seemed so overdone, and the other a magical realistic novella, called Water Moon, I wrote about a man who discovers he is pregnant. Although completely different in tone and subject matter, they seemed to be speaking to each other, and it was only when I wove them together did I discover the terrible secret hidden in an already broken, blue-collar Baltimore family. (I don't recommend you always plan novels this way, but it seems to work for me.)
I don't remember exactly what I was listening to years ago when I wrote The Summer She Was Under Water or Water Moon, and they were separated by years of other projects, but when I was going over the edits of the final book with Erin McKnight at Queens Ferry Press and seeing the novel fresh again, I viewed it like a movie, and since I love music scores, I wondered how someone would score it, scene by scene."
To read more and listen to the playlist, go here.