Playlist for War of the Seasons, The Half-blood

In case you missed it, book two in the War of the Seasons series, The Half-blood is out & available for purchase in just about every form imaginable.

That said, I’ve been asked by several people where the playlist is? You know, like the one I had at the back of The Human. Well, truth be told, I didn’t feel the need to list a playlist this time, because essentially the Table of Contents of The Half-blood was the playlist since I named every chapter after a song title.

Even so, people have asked for the playlist, so you’ll find it at the end of this post.

This topic brings me back to a guest post I had the pleasure of writing for the talented Stuart Jaffe where I discuss what my musical inspirations for writing have been.

He then very graciously returned the favor and wrote a post for my blog.

I won’t completely repost my post from Stuart’s blog – you’ll need to go there if you want to read it in full, but I am going to quote parts of it here, as it fits in nicely with this playlist post.

Music plays a very large part in my writing. I create specific playlists to help me get in the “mood” or channel a theme. In fact, in my most recent novel, War of the Seasons, book two: The Half-blood, I ended up naming all my chapters after song titles. It wasn’t until my second draft that I realize just how much I’d been listening to Adele while writing The Half-blood. A good ¼ of the chapter titles were song titles from her albums! I changed most of them since I didn’t want to use more than one song title from an artist, but I think I still may have ended up two from Adele. *EDIT* And in looking back, several artists got at least 2 songs (The Beatles, The Cranberries, Cat Stevens, etc).

Whether you like Adele’s music or not doesn’t matter, the fact is her two albums 19 and 21 perfectly set the mood I was trying to achieve in The Half-blood. This proves to be very essential when you’re a part time writer like me. After a long day at your day job it’s hard to sit in front of a computer again and tell your mind to be creative. It sometimes needs a jump-start and it definitely needs training. It got to the point where as soon as Adele, The Cranberries, or The Steelwells would come on my brain “turned on” and the words flowed.

I guess I was a bit Pavlovian in my approach, but it worked. My first novel took me one year to write the first draft. The second took just over three months and is a far better novel in terms of both writing and story. Sure, some of that was feeling more comfortable/experienced in what I was doing, but a big part of it was training my mind to write even when it didn’t want to.

Playlist for War of the Seasons, book 2: The Half-blood
1- No Need to Argue, The Cranberries
2- Trouble, Cat Stevens
3- Who Knew, P!nk
4- Here Comes the Sun, The Beatles
5- Dream On, Aerosmith
6- Old Friends, Simon and Garfunkel
7- A Thousand Miles, Vanessa Carlton
8- Empty, The Cranberries
9- Kiss With A Fist, Florence and the Machine
10- Only in Dreams, Weezer
11-Movin’ Right Along, The Muppets
12-Compass, the Steelwells
13-All Things Must Pass, George Harrison
14-Out To Get You, James
15-Hard Headed Woman, Cat Stevens
16-Uninvited, Alanis Morissette
17-Crossroads, Don Mclean
18-Many Shades of Black, The Raconteurs
19-Apologize, One Republic
20-Runnin’ Down a Dream, Tom Petty
21-Ship to Shore, The Soulutions
22-Tug of War, Paul McCartney
23-Wicked Game, Him (cover)
24-Secrets, One Republic
25-Turning Tables, Adele
26-Golden Slumbers, The Beatles
27-Carry that Weight, The Beatles
28-The Remedy, Jason Mraz
29-Cool Blue Reason, Cake
30-Precious, Depeche Mode

Lastly, need a copy of my books? As it happens you can buy them here.