Live and Unleashed – Eternal Dance

Sometimes it takes the shadow of death to bring love to life

You make me want to live,” she murmured before sleep finally took her.

“You taught me how,” he breathed the words to her, bending to kiss her lips as she slept, then lay there, listening to the quiet whisper of her breathing, feeling her head grow heavier and heavier against his shoulder as the room began to darken, as the sun sank slowly into the Pacific Ocean.

It’s been a busy, exciting and nerve wracking weekend here as the final touches, last minute decisions and edits were put into the preparation for uploading Eternal Dance to Amazon. Finally the button got pushed and off went the file, wending its way to the KDP servers for conversion, and finally, FINALLY, into my inbox popped the notification that the novel was live, ready and available.

It’s a very strange feeling, sort of like squirrels dancing around inside your belly with hobnailed boots on, when you get that Email, and suddenly start thinking along the lines of OMG, it’s out there! (Though probably a shade more blue than that, if you catch my drift), and then you have that moment of breathlessness, like the moment where your car is poised at the crest of the big drop on the tallest roller coaster you ever rode in your entire life.

I’m still there, I think… anticipating that drop, or maybe I’ve just started on the wild ride – with so much to do – promotion, marketing, the endless thoughts of ‘what comes next’ – and of course a crazy notion that popped into my head as I sat at the top of the drop, wondering and worried as I’m sure all authors do when they send their work out into the wilds.

I won’t say anything more just yet, about that balmy thought – maybe in a couple of days when I’ve had time to think it through a bit more, I’ll share with you just what that was.  For now, I’ll just say – and never a dull moment – onward to the next project.  Onward and Upward, Right?

Eternal Dance is available for purchase at Amazon’s Kindle stores, worldwide.

Click the book cover to visit Amazon.com

Eternal Dance, Inspiration and Process

In this post, Linden answers some often asked questions about her upcoming novel, Eternal Dance, and the process by which she develops and writes to tell her stories.

What provides the spark of inspiration for novels like Eternal Dance, and what keeps up that inspiration?

For me, it’s those chance meetings and those random moments that happen to us day upon day.  They might seem meaningless at the time, or we can’t possibly imagine that anything could come of them, but when I am getting ready to write a novel, or a scene in a novel, that comes from one of those apparently unimportant moments, I find myself sitting there and asking, ‘what if?’

For example, in Eternal Dance, the big ‘what if’ moment is that first meeting between Marc and Ceinwen.  What if someone like Ceinwen, someone who has learned to live a life of abandoned hope, is suddenly blessed with the kind of things, the kind of love, that comes to her after that chance meeting; what if someone struggling the way Marc was at the outset of the novel embraces the courage to change their life and accept the journey through a struggle into the light?  Those are the kinds of questions that get my mind and emotions working, and help to craft the tales.

Keeping going is sometimes hard, especially when thinking in terms of how the characters might think and react, what they want and what they can have.  We all have moments like that in real life, right?  Where what we want we can’t necessarily have, and it changes the course of our life’s journey? I suppose one of the good things about writing a novel like Eternal Dance is that, as the author, I can grant the characters those moments – I can also withhold them too, and there was a lot of withholding in ED.

What else inspires me when I’m writing?  Music, I find a lot of inspiration in music. When I’m writing a particular scene I will often have one piece of music on repeat, or a short playlist on repeat that might carry the same energy as the scene, or the same sentiment.  I find it helps.  Mostly it’s music without words – music from soundtracks for example – but occasionally I’ll come across a particular song that has a direct inspirational impact.  There are a couple, maybe three or four pieces of music like that in Eternal Dance.

What was different or difficult about Eternal Dance specifically?

What I was saying about the music? That provided one of the difficulties when writing Eternal Dance.  Music and Lyrics are a minefield.  There’s one scene in particular that I’m thinking about where, in the initial writing process I had included the lyrics to inform the pace and direction of the scene. It came to the edit and I had to take that out without losing the momentum or meaning of the scene – that was hard, but I wasn’t about to get into all the legal wranglings that come along with trying to get permission to use lyrics in a work of fiction.

That wasn’t the hardest thing about ED though.  Eternal Dance broke, and still breaks, really, all the rules – the initial draft far more than the final version anyway. In its first incarnation the story was told in the first person from the male point of view – the story was told through Marc’s eyes and with his voice. We still see the story of Eternal Dance through Marc’s point of view, but in a far less direct way, and now in the third person. It was a difficult decision to do that, and one I swung back and forth on for a long time before I finally settled on doing that. There are some few things taken away from Dance because of that, but ultimately, with the ending of the novel being so far away from the expected norm for romance, I feel that it was a sacrifice that I had to make.

Where are you in terms of the publication process for Eternal Dance?

I’m going through the editing process for a second time, trying to catch all those pesky little mistakes that are so easy to miss the first time through. The cover is done, obviously, I think you can see that on the home page for the website, and the tagline and summary too.  So yeah, I just have to get through the second edit.  It’s taking time, because I have to fit it in with everything else – reading… writing… life.

What’s next – anything new on the horizon?

Always. I don’t ever stop, not really, so… yes.  I have a couple of things that I’m working on, at various stages of the process – the initial spark for one, part way along in the development of another, and recently I came across an old, old, manuscript and I have a feeling that with some work, editing and tweaking, that might at some point see the light of day.

I realized and accepted that I have a certain ‘formula’ if you’d like to call it that.  I’m not going to fight that.  It works for me, and the thing about the kind of stories I’m writing is that if if doesn’t work for me as an author, then it’s not going to work for the reader. If I’m not moved, then neither is the reader, so that’s the main guidance I write by, I suppose. I enjoy what I write, that makes a big difference, even when it’s hard – as in difficult to get right, as well as emotionally challenging – I still enjoy what I write, and what I’m crafting.

 

Eternal Dance is coming soon on Amazon Kindle.