Mendocino Music Background--and Giveaway!

Anyone over on Goodreads? You can look for my giveaway if you're interested in one of ten free copies of my ebook. Isn't the cover gorgeous?

Mendocino Music Covers

As we go into the release of this latest book, I wanted to share a bit more background for Mendocino Music.

When I first started this novel many years ago, I wanted to explore the question of what it would take for an artist to come back to her passion after a long absence. I figured that no one would read a novel about the choir singer who quit, so I asked myself how I could make it bigger. And I settled on the world of opera.

But if I imagined a world-class talent in a field like the opera--where passion and hard work live together--I knew I needed a very big tragedy to upend my protagonist's life. Which is how I came to tackle the truly difficult topic of the September 11th attacks. I only hope I have done this subject some justice.

Once I had my tragedy in place, I realized that I wanted to set the comeback story in a life which felt real--meaning that I wanted my protagonist Marina to have a relationship and a family to worry about, not just herself.

And so the seeds of a women's fiction novel were born.

Learning about the opera was a true joy! I dove into research, and tried to understand the nitty gritty details of that world. I loved wrestling with problems like what repertoire Marina would sing, and balancing out the demands a real singer would face in highlighting her vocal abilities and her language skills and the various composers whose works she would sing. So I researched and I wrote and I thought about the road my character would take as she enjoyed her early success, suffered through her period of agony, and then attempted to claw her way back into a career in a field she loved.

Early on, I was truly fortunate to realize that one of my acquaintances had a vast amount of experience with the opera and was willing to spend hours chatting with me and then reading drafts and commenting on them in detail. What a godsend it was, to spend time with Julia! This book is so much stronger for her input.

And finally, I had a truly odd inspiration for one small portion of the story.

A few years before starting work on this novel, I audited two years of college-level Italian. In some of our final lessons, we tackled the verb tense "passato remoto," the remote past, which is used for fairy tales: "Once upon a time...." For a class assignment, I wrote a short fairy tale in Italian, about a princess who couldn't marry until she was first kissed by a butterfly. And I loved writing that story so much that I sought out classes in writing fiction, and eventually translated and expanded the fairy tale into English.

The end of my novel centers on a fictional opera called "The Princess and the Butterfly," based very much on the fairy tale I'd originally imagined in Italian. I'm currently polishing up the English version, and will make it available--free!--to my email subscribers about a month after the release of this novel.