Round Robin for June--emotion and fireworks!

"It was the music. Always the music. It started somewhere deep in his soul and coursed through his body in a mad rush to explode on the surface. He had felt it as a small child, this urgent need to touch the piano keys, to hear the notes, to reach inside the old upright in his grandmother’s parlor, close his eyes and feel the strings and make the vibrations. To release the music from within himself and then take it back inside, remold it and start all over again.

"He felt it now. Eyes closed, hands splayed on a keyboard, his foot pumped, his head moved, his body swayed. He felt the music, was the music and both started and stopped with the music. Smoke, lights, crowd, video screens, revolving stage—all enhanced his music, helped others feel it. But no one knew the music as he did. No one was the music as he was. Not the four other members of Bone Cold—Alive, not even his twin brother, who lolled his head as he sang to the 75,000 fans that screamed and yelled and gyrated with them. The drums modulated the rhythm, increased, called to him. He felt them. The crowd called to him. He felt them. Shifting his weight, he took a deep breath, and began to sing into the mike attached to his headphones. His words, his song, his music.

"His soul."


This is the beginning of the prologue for T's Trial, releasing July 1 and the first of six in the Bone Cold--Alive series about a rock band and their individual redemptions. I wrote this years ago, when the book was entitled Heaven on a Kitestring. It was a 1997 Romance Writers of America Golden Heart finalist in Long Contemporary. I knew it hadn't a prayer of winning (it didn't), but RWA in Orlando was certainly more fun because I was a finalist.

Why did I know it wouldn't win? Rock. Star. Music. Drugs. Eddie T, the man who is music, has flaunted every rule and held nothing sacred but his music. While I have rewritten parts of the book over its course of two e-publishers as Lyla's Song, and now being independently published, these words have always stayed the same. I placed my hands on the computer keys, closed my eyes, and gave life to T.

This round robin focusses on emotion. You've wandered here from Beverley Bateman's blog and I'm sending you on to Anne Stenhouse.

But that's hardly fair. Perhaps you'd like the complete list of participants and here they are:

Margaret Fieland
Heidi M.
Beverley Bateman
Kay Sisk
Anne Stenhouse
Connie Vines
Ginger Simpson
Geeta Kakade
Fiona McGier
Lynn Crain
Rhobin Courtright