Bringing the Heavy (Metal) to Romance!

One of the great things about writing while listening to Heavy Metal is the wide range of lyrics that come across my speakers from the various bands I’m jamming. Being a male romance writer, the supposed joke is that I’m not emotionally expressive enough, so in my writing life I can show the love I have to give.  For the record, I’m not talking about spandex bullshit metal like Stryper or Warrant.  Those guys aren’t metal.

Obviously this is just a bunch of crap but I’m not here to set the record straight on the Male romance writer.  Being a paranormal/Urban Fantasy/Kinky writer, I have to decide with my characters what their issues are and how they’re going to resolve them.  Listening to music helps keep me in that world until my writing is done for the day.  Writing dark stories with themes of trusting the self and our mates, having to get over old issues, learning to love and live again, those are heavy things.

Much of the Metal that I listen to deals with these themes, as well as jolted lovers and that helps me to build stories with worlds that are vast, images that appeal to all a reader’s senses and characters who are REAL.

What?  YOU don’t want real?  Shame on you!  Readers aren’t looking for characters that have their EXACT same problems, but rather I believe that readers want to see how characters deal with similar situations and get out of it to get that coveted HEA.  The fact that no one I personally know can relate to Echo from Echo’s Odyssey is probably a joyous thing since he’s an assassin for Feary.  Slipknot  helped create those feelings of loneliness and self betrayal. So did Sevendust.  Lyrically those two bands are some of the darkest out there because they deal with the scariest thing of all:  Self.

The theme of Echo’s Odyssey is that true love can conquer everything (sounds like any romance novel huh?) if the parties would just let it.

In Echo’s Odyssey, the wars of Faery are over, but for the assassin Echo and his lover Alexandrya, a new war is just beginning. They return to Faery expecting to be reunited with the third member of their triad, the princess Serenissa, only to find she and Faery itself are threatened by even greater peril.

Heavenly Bodies out now in Print!  BUY!

Dream Theater has been a new inspiration despite the fact that I jammed them when I was younger.  I lost touch with a them after the 4th album because it wasn’t heavy or dark enough for me.  But my brother sent me some newer cds of theirs and now I’ve got them in MP3 rotation as I plan out a new novel and work the followup to “I Will Submit to You, Master” while dealing with the typical trust issues in a BDSM novel along with her growth issues at being forced to look at her own reality.  Particularly just the flow of the album  Train of Thought because of ambience created by the band.

That’s what writers, do, we create ambiance using the flow of our words to create worlds readers escape to.  If I’ve done my job well, then I’ve taken you out of this reality and shown you another one.

Sascha Illyvich
Sascha’s Secrets…stories so hot they must be whispered
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