Please listen…

For me, inspiration comes from what I can read, what I can watch, and equally, what I can hear. A song or a movie score can provoke images and story as much as reading something in the newspaper, watching something on telly, or observing someone while I sit and have coffee. For that reason, my mp3 player is never far away, and there is a CD player in every room in the house, apart from the bathroom.
Music inspires.

But not albums - let me make that clear. Because it’s very rare that an entire album can carry off inspiration fully, deviating as they often do through changing moods and landscapes. I can never quite come up with a story with an album in mind. But a mix-tape? Well, that’s different. With a mix-tape I can stick together like-minded music, music that describes the scenes in my head perfectly.
And I am no stranger to mix-tapes.

When I was a teenager, I had more mix-tapes than I had tapes of albums. More often than not, mix-tapes would be almost identical, apart from one or two songs. There is an order to mix-tapes. You can’t just throw them together on a whim. Each song must compliment the previous one – like a jigsaw puzzle, or the way paragraphs are ordered on the page. There’s a discipline to mix-tapes (which is why I pull my hair out when someone puts a mix-CD on shuffle – what is the point?!!). With the introduction of recordable CDs, mix-tapes were easier to make, had more space to add tracks, and were a perfect medium... until the mp3 player arrived.

Play-lists have become the new mix-tapes. And I have numerous play-lists on my mp3 player, mostly play-lists for each of the books I’ve written and will write. Frontier, for example, has been foremost in my thoughts. The setting of the story is “Sweat and Oil” Sci-Fi, where frontiersmen clatter about in junk-ships, moving from planet to planet as long their craft can sustain them, where societies are as lawless as those in the first decades of the “Wild West”, where prostitution, gambling and drinking are rife, because there’s nothing much else to do. No one knows how things work any more, the science that moves them from place to place, or creates breathable atmospheres on alien worlds, is lost because they are so far removed from the centre of civilisation: Earth. It’s anarchic. It’s dystopian. And boy, it’s playing in my head like a movie trailer, moving from a relative short teaser of a couple of minutes, to a ten or fifteen minute preview. I won’t say too much about the plot here - it’s still being formed from my grey-matter - but the mood will be Blade-Runner meets The Unforgiven. Very gritty. Very dark.

Will it be the next novel I write after the Secret War trilogy is completed? Maybe. We’ll see. But for now, I only have the trailer in my head - that and a list of songs that form a soundtrack to Frontier.
Before now, I could only list what these songs were below, but Amazon has allowed me to share my “mix-tape” with you. So to the right, below the quoted reviews for my books, is an mp3 player with partial versions of the songs that has inspired Frontier. So please feel free to listen, and/or download them from Amazon - you may have some of these tracks already, but if not, give them a go. You shouldn't be too dissapointed...