Music adds the theme songs to our lives.  Who can not remember a moment in time that does not contain either a smell or a song that ends up triggering a forgotten memory?  There have been times in my life that, either up or down, happy or sad, a particular song has voiced my feelings at that moment better than I could have on my own.  The song starts; I close my eyes and am transported to that place in time.  A lost memory resurfacing, for good or bad.  Politicians theme song their campaigns, advertisers theme song their products, and even television characters, like the fictional characters on Ally McBeal, have theme songs to help them express their emotions to the audience better.  The theme that I believe is the most prominent, in any genre of music, is love.  The finding, chasing, catching, and loosing of love can be found in music from every culture, in almost every society, across the entire globe.  For the purposes of this essay I have chosen to analyze four songs about the end of a relationship, the music genre that I have chosen the songs from is country. 

The messages contained in the songs carried the central theme of moving on.  Although, in all the songs one partner has moved on while the other has stayed in one place pining for the other.  The first three songs I looked at, You Were Mine, Outside the Frame, and Let Me Let Go, all have a dark feel to them.  These songs focus on the one who was left behind and speak from their point of view.  The songs embody a sense of loss, a grieving for what was and what could have been.  Like in most break-ups the partner who was left is only remembering the good times, at this point in the grieving process anyway, and sees their life as an empty place without the other partner.  Another message found in the lyrics find the partner bargaining and pleading with the person who left to come back.  Like in You Were Mine were they write, “Please tell me she’s not real, and you’re really coming home to stay.”  The narrators in these three songs are looking back on happier times that to theme now seem unreal.  All are dealing with the thin line between what was real and what is their new reality.  In Let Me Let Go the narrator places the blame on her inability to let go on the other partner, she feels the hopelessness of her situation.  In this song she is using running away as her way of not dealing with her problems, she is in denial.  Contrariwise, the Terri Clark song Better Things to Do looks at, in a humourous way, the view of the person who has convinced herself that she has moved on and feels that by convincing her partner that she’s shifted her energies towards other things, that are more interesting to her.  By keeping herself too busy to think about him she is enabling herself to move on with her life without him.  She lists things that a reasonable person wouldn’t need to do to prove how over him she really is.  Loosing love is one of the hardest things to do.  It has been said that the grieving process that a person goes through after disengaging themselves from a relationship is similar to the process that people go through following the death of a loved one.  It certainly isn’t the same, but it is similar.

In contrast to popular belief, as evidenced by the chosen songs, a study by “Hill, Rubin, and Peplau (1976) found that the majority of the breakups were initiated by women.”  I found this information extremely interesting.  The radio is peppered with songs of love gone wrong.  A quick perusal of the lyric sheets from my CD’s confirms that the prevailing notion is that of the man being the initiator of breakups, not the woman, and thereby becoming the person who shoulders all the blame for the breakup.  Blame is an important part of this process.  It enables the person who did not choose to leave the relationship to still view themselves as attractive to the opposite sex and helps them to move on eventually. 

The triangular theory of love show us that in order for a relationship to be the best possible three things must be present:

1. Intimacy;

2. Passion; and

3. Decision/Commitment.

Intimacy is the “…closeness or ‘bondedness’ between two people.”  Passion is the “…emotional arousal and physical drives in the relationship.”  And Decision/Commitment is the “…decision to love someone … commitment to maintain that loving relationship.”  The total of the three results in the perfect relationship, a lofty ideal in my opinion.  Most relationships have different combinations of the three, and the combinations can change over time.  The text doesn’t take that into consideration.  In the lyrics we can observe the results of the breakdown of the corners of the triangle.  In the songs it appears, to me, that intimacy was the first corner to fall, followed closely by the others.

       At one time or another we have all had trouble letting go of something.  Letting something that has been such a large part of your life go is one of the most difficult things any on us will ever do.  Nobody likes change, and when there is emotion involved, change becomes even harder.  In the songs we see people who are stuck in one place and are trying to move on.  They say time heals all wounds, I hope they’re right.  Music helps to soothe and lets us know that we are not alone in our lives.  By sharing experiences, through song, we ease each other through life.  Happy or sad music will always be there.

By Deborah Beckers

I love organizing. I can spend hours (okay, days) making sure that everything I need is in its proper spot. It’s a weird kind of high, this knowing that everything is in its proper space and that I can now move forward with a clean slate.

Or, I could just be procrastinating – nah, writers don’t do that do they? *heh*

I have been struggling these past few weeks, trying to find a rhythm again, but I just kept hitting that wall.

 It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. 

- Leonardo da Vinci

 Thank Goddess for my critique partner. She gently suggested to me, a week or so ago, that maybe I wasn’t the linear writer* of my dreams, maybe I was a scene writer**.

It was a revelation. Why couldn’t I “scene out” my story, breaking the scenes down into location, GMC, purpose and point of view?

 So that’s what I worked on last Saturday and what an eye-opener that was. I now have a fully plotted/scened novel – 58 scenes total. Each one on a note card; each one has a sentence (or two) to prompt me as to what the scene is supposed to accomplish. I figure I can do four scenes per week giving me a completed “Draft Zero” in 15 weeks.

 Plotting by scene also helped me see a few holes in my story that needed shoring up. I know that this is just the first step in completing the story, but I have to know that I can get it down on paper. Making it not suck will be for Draft ONE and onwards.

 I have to admit, I was intimidated by the larger numbers – 58 scenes seems doable, 100,000 words or 400 pages? Not so much.

 So everyone is in their corners waiting for their scenes to be written, my muse is raring to go and the characters are already whispering ideas in my head.

So, fasten you seatbelts pumpkins, we’re cresting the top of the rollercoaster, ready to plunge into the unknown…

 You really never lose until you stop trying.

- Mike Ditka

Oh beware, my lord, of jealousy;

It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock

The meat it feeds on.

~William Shakespeare, Othello

Every one of us has felt the seeds of jealousy, as a giver, as a receiver. Anyone who claims not to have is either lying or incredibly naïve.

What I want to talk about today is Professional Jealousy, specifically as it relates to my writing and my writer friends (and idols).

I love what I do.

I love making up things for the entertainment of others (as my friends will attest to), but it’s not my first love. My first love is reading, being transported to another place by amazingly talented people. If I had to choose between the two, reading would win without hesitation (it might kill me not to write, but I can’t imagine a world where I couldn’t escape into a book).

I think this is why I have almost never been jealous of another writer’s success. The more great books get published, the more great books there are for me to read.

Do I want what they have? You bet I do. I know how hard this business is and I know how hard authors work (even if they are in their pajamas). Why should I feel lessened by their success?

I still believe that with skill, hard work, a good story and bit of luck, I will make it. Every finished manuscript, every new sale, every book that gets published gives me hope. I know that my name will be on one of those great books, face out, in a bookstore.

How can I be jealous of people who have the same dream I do – I won’t hold that against them. When they realize that dream for themselves it just proves to me that it can be done.

In possibility there is hope, and hope has more power than jealousy.

If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang.

~Charley Reese

The Petit Fours & Hot Tamales

Deborah was the winning bidder for an honorary blog membership with the Petit Fours & Hot Tamales on Brenda Novak’s 2010 Online Auction to Benefit Diabetes Research.

More about Deborah:

“I’m single and live just outside Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I have a 72-year-old and a cat that live with me. The last two sentences may be related. I’m lucky. I have a day job that I like and I have the luxury of spending my spare time doing something that I love. Writing. I have been actively writing romance for five years. My novels tend to have edge-of-your-seat action, a sharp edge of humor and something a bit out of the ordinary in them. When I’m not working on my writing projects (or chained to my desk at my day job) I enjoy lurking in my neighborhood bookstore and planning vacations that I sometimes actually take.”

Deborah says she was very excited to win the auction. She’s been a reader/lurker on the Petit Fours Web site for a while and is looking forward to joining a great group.

“I’m looking forward to meeting “you” and everyone!”

Please help us welcome Deborah Beckers to the PF&HT family by commenting on her first post.

THIS AIN’T NO BEAUTY PAGEANT

By: Deborah Beckers

I like contests. I find them to be valuable, if biased, sources of independent opinion.

Let me explain. No wait…that will take too long, let me sum up!

You have this manuscript. See? Everybody loves it. See? But is your Baby ready to go out into the big cruel publishing world? I mean your MOM loves it, and God knows she’s picky. But how do you know it’s ready?

I am a planner and a perfectionist. I have a hard time imagining sending out my MS without someone in the industry taking a peek at (at least part of) it first.

This, for me, is where contests come in.

Where else can you get the opportunity to put your MS in front of people who don’t know you from Oprah? Who can look at your little darling and tell you, without a thought as to what your feelings might be, and tell you the truth – Whether you want to hear it or not.

But do YOU want to hear it?

I have a writer friend who entered a contest (not to be named here) and when she got her score sheets back had one that loved it and wouldn’t change anything, one that liked it AND pointed out areas that could use some work, and one who said “Obviously this is the first thing you have ever written…” and offered no constructive feedback.

All the extremes at once.

My contest experiences went pretty much the same way, but for me the value in them was not in the finaling or winning (not that I’ve done either), but in the feedback.

For the past three years I have been a judge for my RWA chapters writing contest and this year I stepped up to become a category coordinator. Why? I want to give people the kind of feedback I look for in contests. I want to sew a seed of an idea that will spark an “a-ha” moment in another writer. I want good writers to get better and get published.

Hey! Maybe it is a pageant; except I’m not going for world peace. I want showing, not telling. I want descriptions that pull me out of the real world and into the book. I want characters that make me cry in a good way. I want grammatically correct sentences that don’t make my eyes bleed; and maybe, just maybe, a little world peace.

What I really want? People passionate about writing.

My advice for contest feedback? Just throw-out anything that stinks of sour grapes and concentrate on what is common between the judges. My manuscript was stronger for the changes that I made and it pushed my Baby one step closer to publication.

I’d be interested in knowing what other people’s experiences have been…