In Tune: Writing about Music in Fiction! 🎶

I’m crafting some exciting new projects for 2024, including a delightful 4-week online writing class at WOW! for February.

Introducing: IN TUNE: Writing About Music in Fiction!

If you’re looking to treat yourself to some writing motivation or looking for the perfect holiday or birthday gift for the writer in your life, look no further! This class will rock! 🤩🎸🥁

Course description:

“Fiction is filled with references to music: from high-school dances and music-school students, singers, music teachers and lessons, garage bands and musical instruments to records, rock concerts and folk/indie festivals and coffee-house performances, opera and musical-theatre performances, and so much more. Many of us spend our happiest hours with music in the forefront or background of our lives as soundtrack. There’s a type of music-inspired prose for as many musical genres as you enjoy.

Whether you’re writing a scene or story about a music practice, a novel with a musician or music fan as a protagonist, or just want to know more about how musical fiction works and/or add musical references, vivid characterizations of vocal performance, or music-centered scenes or references to your writing, this course will explore how music culture, sound, setting, POV, and more are portrayed within fiction to enhance and inspire your own rhythmic, compelling prose. Knowing how to read musical notes isn’t required for this class—just the desire and sincere appreciation for both music and literature and to add another tool to your literary toolkit.

Students will choose one novel with a musical plot to read independently, and the instructor will provide excerpts from music novels as well as handouts and a weekly writing assignment to get the muse melodically flowing! Join us for this new course that’s sure to strike a chord.”

To the great joy of writing and music! Sign-ups open now! Clickety-click: IN TUNE: Writing About Music in Fiction!

To 2023! 🎉

I bought this fanciful party horn at a greeting-card store and have lost track of when.

Doodle by yours truly. Mechanical pencil, Paper Mate Flair Medium and Arteza Bold 1.0 mm pens, and sketchbook paper. Digital filter used in larger version seen below.

It doesn’t have a year on it and the store is now out of business. It has golden paper that shimmers and a fluffy frill of ebony feathers that I think gets prettier with time.

It’s a little crooked (in real life and in my drawing) but holds a lot of hope and cheer.

Each time this calendar year we get to start over, to reset, to look ahead in art and in life, and that feels fitting and good. Thanks for all of your camaraderie and support.

Here we go, 2023! To all that we’ll create and experience in the year ahead!

New Year, New Writing: I've Got the Inspiration Station for You

This is your year! Invest in your writing dreams in 2020!

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