Music Fueled My Writing Career: A Guest Post by Susan Helene Gottfried

Please welcome to A Three Way Tie: Susan Helene Gotttfried. Check out her website here for more information: http://westofmars.com/

I have this policy: whenever I see someone broadcasting that they are looking for authors willing to write them a guest blog post, I check out their blog. I want to make sure I will fit in, of course. A Rock Fiction author probably won’t be winning over many fans if she writes what she thinks is this great post about how she hates country music – and then hands it over to a blogger who posts exclusively about her love of country music.

That’s why I got excited when I poked around Larissa’s online world. We have a lot in common, and that’s always so very nice to see. It hopefully means that you guys, her friends and readers, will like me and my books, too.

Ahh, my books. Rock and roll in a book, that’s what I write. It’s the utter truth to say I turned down more than one job at more than one record company because I couldn’t figure out how to work for a label and have the time to devote to my fiction.

It wasn’t an easy call to make. I’d spent about five years pining to be one of those people behind the magic of a rock band. I wanted to stand in the wings and look out, beyond my band, and see the expressions on the faces in the audience. So hungry, so passionate, so happy to be there...

The biggest problem with this dream was that it did – and still continues to – fuel my fiction. The more I’m around music, even listening to it, the more I want to get inside it and write about it. About the people who make it and the people who help make it – the promoters, the radio station personalities, the stage crew, and on and on. Even the spouses and birth families. It all fascinates me.

Most people outgrow these fantasies of their youth. While I am at peace with the road I chose, there’s still a part of me that misses the music world. There’s something about it that gets into a person’s blood; it truly is one of those things that you either have or you don’t.

But life is full of compromises and sometimes, you have to step back in order to gain the most. In my case, I gained a full-time life as a literati. I write books. I edit books for others. And now, I review them, too, for a very old, well-established review organization.

The only way to get here was to walk away from the music world I loved. I had to give up sixteen-hour days, endless hustling, music and more music. Dinners out, followed by nights spent in clubs, hearing my band, or my friend’s band, or some band we were all about to fight over...

Doesn’t sound so bad, right? As much as I’d have loved to have been part of that world until I got too old and had to be put out to pasture, I love what I do even more. I’ve become an expert in Rock Fiction, I get to spend my days with fictional people of my own creation and, as an editor, with fictional people of someone else’s creation. I get to play with words, with language. This lets me see, daily, how important the words we use really are.

Best of all, it lets me get out and about the blogosphere and meet new people. Many of them, like Larissa, are people I want to become friends with. Oftentimes, I get to watch that happen.

Here’s hoping it does.

Thanks again, Larissa, for hosting me today.

Thanks S for gracing us with your presence on my blog! :D Anyway, if you want to know more, here are the links once again!

Website: http://westofmars.com

Check out here ALL of her books here.