‘Spurred by the song’s rhythm, my typing fingers flew’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Dianne Greenlay

My guest this week has a taste for the adventurous. Her novel is set in the pirate-infested waters of the West Indies in 1717, and her characters are unwittingly pulled into a hazardous sea journey. The music that sustained this imaginative voyage is epic and foreboding, but not without its lighter elements. My guest discovered in her research that sailors used dance to ward off boredom on the interminable days at sea, so she wrote a scene to the soundtrack of a reel. But it became more than dance; when the characters shrugged off their tensions they began to behave in unexpected and delightful ways. In case you’re imagining it’s all lace, beards and cutlasses, though, there’s a distinctly modern note at the end: Moby makes an appearance (no, not the whale). The author is Dianne Greenlay (one of my co-conspirators at the League of Extraordinary Authors) and she’s on the Red Blog with her Undercover Soundtrack.

Writing: a journey in music – guest post at Helen Hollick

You may recognise Helen Hollick as a recent guest on The Red Blog, where she stirred up a storm with raging seas and black-hearted doings, all devised with the music of Mike Oldfield, among others. She’s also a bestselling author who’s hit major charts with her pirate novels, so that’s probably a better reason why you might know her.

After she guested for me, she was curious to find out more about how I use music and how I developed the idea of The Undercover Soundtrack into a blog. Especially as it’s been going for more than two years now – and contributors are now lined up into July!

Some of you NYN old-timers might have heard this tale before, but in case you haven’t, or you want a brief intro to my fiction, or you want to see where Helen lives on line, head over to her blog …

‘Music used to be background until this character’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Helen Hollick

My guest this week used to regard music as a mostly-ignorable atmosphere. Then one inspirational moment changed everything. She was listening to Mike Oldfield when a character leaped, fully formed, into her imagination – an enigmatic pirate of the Caribbean, skilled with a cutlass and a roguish smile. This character also proved a turning point in her career, as her agent advised her that the adult readership did not want stories about pirates. But so strong was her conviction about the character that she wrote him anyway – and thus her indie career was born. She is Helen Hollick, her novels are the Sea Witch series, and she’s on the Red Blog with her Undercover Soundtrack. All say ‘arrr’.