Talking Music and Books with Brian Rowe
Please welcome the very talented, and I think rather cute, Brian Rowe!
He’s here on the blog today to help promote his Birthday Trilogy, of which Happy Birthday to Me is the first book. I’m in the process of reading these and they are fantastic! Brian really knows how to write amazing characters, and he’ll draw you in quickly.
I’ll let him speak for himself though. Below is a post penned by Brian himself. He shares with us his musical inspiration for his books. Enjoy, and make sure to check out his books!
Writing a book is impossible without a little bit of music to help you along the way. I’ve had a love for film scores all my life, and I’ve found them to be very helpful when I’m writing the first drafts of my book. I wrote much of the first Happy Birthday to Me to the score of Little Miss Sunshine, which would put me in the whimsical mood of the earlier chapters. And I listened to the amazing, hypnotic scorefrom A Single Man for the later, emotional scenes.
I listened to the score from The Social Network while writing Happy Birthday to Me Again. The score won the Academy Award, and it’s incredible stuff. It’s also perfect writing music, for pretty much any genre you’re writing in. I listened to The Social Network score for a lot of Happy Birthday to You as well—I wrote the first draft of Book 3 just three months after Book 2. But, and not to give anything away, Book 3 gets really intense and action-packed in the last 100 pages, and for that material, to get me in the right state of mind, I listened to the track “The End” from the 2006 Oscar-nominated film United 93. I just played it over and over and over, and it helped me get in the right state of mind for what happens at the end of Book 3.
Film scores are the best! I really don’t know what I would do without them. I’m about to start writing the first draft of my next YA novel. And I’m excited to find the perfect film score to go along with the writing of it.
Seventeen-year-old Cameron Martin has a huge problem: he’s aging a whole year of his life with each passing day!
High school is hard enough; imagine rapidly aging from seventeen to seventy in a matter of weeks, with no logical explanation, and with prom, graduation, and the state championship basketball game all on the horizon. That’s what happens to Cameron, a popular pretty boy who’s never had to face a day looking anything but perfect.
All Cameron wants to do is go back to normal, but no one, not even the best doctors, can diagnose his condition. When he finds love with a mysterious young woman, however, he realizes his only hope for survival might be with the one person who started his condition in the first place…
