‘Music was solace, understanding and escape’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Jake Kerr

My guest this week describes a journey – of looking for a life path, of circling around it many times until he found where he was meant to fit. He says he thought he wanted to be a DJ because he loved music, and indeed became a music industry journalist. Then one day he started writing stories – and realised this was how he wanted to use the experiences that music gave him. It was clearly a good move as he has been nominated for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon and StorySouth Million Writers awards. He studied fiction under Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria and is now contributing to Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams’s Apocalypse Triptych. He is Jake Kerr and he’s on the Red Blog with his Undercover Soundtrack.

‘I look for clever, lyrical music with a twinge of melancholy’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Catherynne M Valente

‘Music and fairyland go hand in hand’ writes my Undercover Soundtrack guest this week. After cueing up her playlist I can assure you this fairyland is not just rich and strange, but funky, cheeky, cheesy, sassy, riotous, ridiculous and whimsical. It’s hardly surprising then that her novels and poetry have been nominated for numerous awards, including the Mythopoeic, the Lambda, the Hugo, Locus, World Fantasy, and Nebula. Deeply fond of writing to music, she’s also closed the musical circle by inspiring three albums by singer/songwriter S.J. Tucker. She is Catherynne M Valente, and she’s over on the Red Blog talking about The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making.