A (musical) hint of things to come

Release day for 680 Miles Away is still three weeks away (April 2!), but I wanted to give you all a little audio appetizer—the official 680 Miles Away Spotify playlist.

I recall in some of my college film classes—and probably literature classes, too—talking about locations or cities that are so central to the plot and themes that they become, in a sense, characters in their own right. Well, in my case, it’s music. Music seems to become a character in many of my stories. And that’s never been truer than it is in 680 Miles Away.

The protagonist, Evie, is a musician. A prodigy, in fact. A violinist with perfect pitch. Because music plays such a huge role in her life, she and other characters mention many real songs and artists throughout the novel, so I decided to make an official playlist that includes every single mention.

So, without further ado:

But wait! There’s more!

Music not only plays a role in the stories I write, it plays a role in my writing. I mean the actual writing process. I can’t write without music, and it has to be the right music.

For Bergman Manor, for example, I would turn on music from the 1920s (it takes place in 1925) or the score from an Alfred Hitchcock movie (for the suspenseful scenes).

When I started writing 6 Blocks Home, it became more about understanding the characters than the mood of the story. I wanted to get inside Sam’s head, so I started listening to what she would listen to. That meant listening to a lot of classical music, especially this playlist of requiems.

With 680 Miles Away, I started making my own character playlists. I made one for Evie first, of course, since she’s the protagonist. But then, her clarinet-playing coworker, Finn, wanted his own playlist, too. And in the end, Sam—yes, the same Sam who made me listen to all those requiems during 6 Blocks Home—finally got her own playlist (including some of those requiems, of course).

Here they are: