Inspirations, influences and six ominous words
I've been thinking about this
blog post for a while, and by chance during that time I've come across a few
articles and blogs about what inspires other writers to write.
I've studied them avidly (in
between string at my computer screen and procrastinating, you do see) and there
seem to be a few recurring factors: travel, music, family, and just to be
awkward, I'm gonna throw in one of my own…FOOD!
I'm going to talk about food last
because I have a feeling once I get started on that I'll never shut up, and I'm
going to nix travel because, to be honest, I never venture far from my home on
the northern fringe of London to have anything interesting to say. I'd love to
visit an exotic country, soak it all in, and come home and write a steamy, edgy
novel inspired by the sandy beaches and sultry seas. But it ain't never gonna
happen.
Instead, I'd like to witter about
those odd flashes of genius that come to us in the strangest of places. You
know, those weird moments when a whole book is inspired by a single sentence.
My upcoming novel with Dreamspinner Press is a good example of this. I was in
the shower one day when six ominous words popped into my steam clouded brain: he rarely let me fuck him. I couldn't
get the phrase out of my head for days, and a few months later, Slide was complete. Off the top of my
head, I can't even remember if the phrase made it into the finished book, but
those words still haunt me.
Music.
Now this is a doubled edged sword for me. Without it, I very much doubt I'd
ever finish a book, but on the flip side, I can't write a word if I actually
have it playing. At least, not music with lyrics. Classical music, film
soundtracks in particular, work much better for me. Recently, I've found myself
tapping out a contemporary London based novel with the Gladiator score roaring
in my ears. Weird, but hey, I never said I was normal.
I also find that it helps to
kinda fine tune my playlist to the general tone of whatever I'm writing. The Roads series is based in Chicago, and
the main protagonists are pretty young, cool and edgy. Ash is a tattooist and
an artist, and Pete, his wonderful, stubbly paramedic lover, is covered in his
ink. When I was writing them, I listened to a lot of urban music…dark drum and
bass, and dubstep. Being a Brit chick, most of it was London based, but it
helped. Or, at the very least, let me think I was cool for a while.
At the beginning of the year I
wrote a novel that was far more earthy. In Only
Love, a wounded veteran is paired with a vegetarian carpenter. The book was
mainly set at a cabin by a lake in Oregon. For this book I listened to a lot of
acoustic guitar music. Jose Gonzales and Ben Howard. Bon Iver and Mumford and
Sons. I'm such a cliché.
Family:
Totally. Just not my own, and I think that's because, like everyone with a
relatively stable background, I consider my family to be pretty dull and
mundane. Instead, I tend to look to others for inspiration. I have a wonderful
gal pal of Irish origin who was my inspiration for Pete's mother Maggie in the Roads series. Maggie is Italian, warm
and completely crazy. Just like my friend, I couldn't just make her up.
Food, glorious FOOD! Is there a better inspiration? For me?
Probably not. My life revolves around food, at home and out at work. I've
worked in restaurants and kitchens my whole life and food plays a central role
to my family life. I'm a pretty lousy housewife, and a mediocre mother, but I
do at least feed my brood good, home cooked food and rarely a meal goes by when
I'm not plotting a way to combine stuffing my face with my addiction to a good
meaty romance.
It has been almost too easy to
weave this into my work. In the Roads
series, Pete doesn’t cook at all, and Ash only rarely, but they bond over a
shared love of real Chicago deep dish, and their relationship with Pete's
mother revolves around her hearty, soulful peasant food. In Only Love, my wounded war vet Jed is
newly diagnosed with a chronic stomach disorder on top of his recovery from
some horrific injuries. Enter Max, his hippy, vegetarian roommate who, without
even knowing it, organically cooks his way into Jed's heart. Even my porn star
boys in Bullet, my upcoming Loose ID
novella, bond over some homemade Mexican food.
It gets everywhere, you see. I
just can't help myself, and my current project is my most indulgent yet. Gypsy Rain began life as a sweet little
tale of a Cornish fudge maker and his mysterious gypsy lover, but the sequel
has since moved to a gritty, volatile London kitchen. I'm having a whale of a
time with this book, embracing both my chef roots and my inner angst whore.
Life is good :-)
So yeah, that's my take on some
of the most common inspirations, but of course, the greatest inspiration you
can have is yourself…your own emotions and experiences, and while I've
certainly never been a shy Texan tattoo artist, or an enigmatic brooding war
vet, I still put a lot of myself into each and every character, and I don't
think that will ever change.
About Garrett Leigh
Hmm, where to start? Garrett
lives in a small commuter town just north of London with her husband, two kids,
a dog with half a brain, and a cat with a chip on her shoulder. She's 29, and
now she's reached that milestone, she intends to stay there for the foreseeable
future.
Garrett has been writing just
about her whole life, but it's been about three years since she decided to take
it seriously. It got to the stage where she had to give the men in her head a
voice, or have herself committed.
Angst. She can't write a word
without it. She's tried, she really has, but her protagonists will always, always,
be tortured, crippled, broken, and deeply flawed. Throw in a tale of enduring
true love, some stubbly facial hair and a bunch of tattoos, and you've got
yourself a Garrett special.
Garrett is a contracted author at
Dreamspinner Press, Loose ID and Extasy books. She also self publishes from
time to time at Black Jazz Press.
Garrett is a freelance cover
artist at Dreamspinner Press and Loose ID, and she does her very best to
produce all her own cover art. The covers you will see below are all hers. She
goes indie style as well for those who self-publish, just drop her a line at blackjazzdesign@gmail.com
For book enquiries contact
garrettleighbooks@gmail.com
Links and Social Media
http://garrettleigh.com/
https://twitter.com/Garrett_Leigh
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5893561.Garrett_Leigh
Out Now
Blurb
Cornish fudge maker Seb Wright is anticipating and dreading the upcoming
tourist season with equal measure. The cash injection is more than welcome, the
long hours in the sticky, vanilla scented kitchen less so.
A few days into the first tentative sparks of summer a shadowy Good
Samaritan catches his eye. Vagrant Dex is a new face in town…a beautiful,
sullen enigma, and yet with each busy day that passes, Seb finds himself
becoming more and more attracted to the mysterious, young man.
A young man who seems destined to become the heartbeat of a summer he’ll
never forget.
Excerpt
He was on his third trip
between the cottage and the shop when the heavens opened. Briefly, he couldn’t
believe his rotten luck, until he spotted Dex shuffling up the street, once
again soaked to the skin.
For a moment, he
stared. The bruises on Dex’s face had faded to a dull shade of greenish yellow,
and from a distance, they could hardly be seen.The image of him huddled in the
doorway of the beachwear shop flashed into his mind, and he found himself
suddenly, irrationally, angry.
Were they really
still there? Really still in a place where Dex was hiding from a summer storm
with nowhere to go? Still in a place where he went home to his comfortable bed
every night with no clue where Dex laid his head?
Hell, no.
Something inside him
snapped. He propped the heavy cooling slab he carried against a dry stone wall,
pulled his hood up, and started down the road. Paying the rain no heed, Dex was
walking with his eyes down, so he didn’t notice Seb until he was
practically on top of him.
“Come home with me.”
Dex raised his head,
blinking in surprise. “What?”
“Come home with me.
You can’t sleep out in this.”
“Says who?”
The defiance in his
eyes broke Seb’s heart. Dex had never admitted that he had no place to call
home, and it seemed he never would. “Says me,” he said shortly. “I’m working at
home tonight, and you’re coming with me.”
Dex stared at him,
his face inscrutable, and the silence stretched on and on, punctuated only by a
brutal clap of thunder. “What do you want from me?”
Seb stepped closer
and lightly touched the fading marks on Dex’s face. “I want you to be safe and
dry, even if it’s only for one night. I can’t… fuck. I can’t leave you out
here. Please don’t make me.”
Buy links
Coming Soon
Slide is the first of the
four part Roads series being
released by Dreamspinner Press October
14th 2013. On the same day its accompanying free short
story, Marked, will be released too. They will be followed by Rare and Freed early spring 2014.
Blurb
Don’t
look back. Don’t you ever look back…
Shy tattoo artist Ash has a troubled past. Years of neglect, drug abuse,
and life on the streets have taken their toll, and sometimes it seems the deep,
unspoken bond with his lover is the only balm for wounds he doesn’t quite
understand.
Chicago paramedic Pete is warmth, love, and strength—things Ash never
knew he could have, and never even knew he wanted until Pete showed him. But
fate is a cruel, cruel mistress, and when nightmares collide with the present,
their tentatively built world comes
crashing down.
Traumatic events in Pete’s work life distance him from home, and he
doesn’t realize until it’s too late that Ash has slipped away. Betrayal,
secrets, and lies unfold, and when a devastating coincidence takes hold, Pete
must fight with all he has to save the love of his life.
****
More than Life
More than Life is a novella set in Kosovo, coming out with Extasy
Books sometime, the details are still pretty vague, but here's the working
blurb.
Blurb
An extraordinary bond forged in
war, shattered by death and saved by love.
Set in the Kosovan war, Mikail a
young ethnic Albanian catholic, fights in the underground resistance, smuggling
intelligence and precious cargo out of war torn Pristina. Isa, an enigmatic CIA
operative becomes an unlikely ally, and when a secret mission brings them
together, heat, passion and a love they’ve never known consumes them. They
forge a deep bond, but the war around them continues to rage, and as Serbian
forces close in on Pristina, Isa makes the ultimate sacrifice to save his young
lover.
Four years later, Mik lives in the
shadow of the Albanian mountains, trying to rebuild his life with what remains
of his family. His grief for Isa weighs heavily on his young shoulders until
one day a lone man appears in the forest. Is the broken stranger the love Mik
believed was gone forever, or is he just a dream?
****
Bullet
Part of the Blue Boy Studio series, Bullet
will be released by Loose ID sometime this year. The details are still vague,
but here is the working blurb.
Blurb
Levi Ramone entered the gay porn
market for one reason, and one reason only–he needed the cash to pay his
momma's spiraling gambling debts.
Seven years later, he's a veteran
with a reputation as one of Blue Boy Studio's most ruthless tops, and when his
boss suggests it's time for a change, he finds himself staring down the barrel
of a gun.
Figuratively speaking, at least.
Enter Sonny Valentine, a go-go
dancer at Blue's sister club, Silver's. Levi has secretly admired Sonny's
beauty for years, but there's one problem–he can't stand Sonny and the feeling is entirely mutual. When Levi learns
Sonny is to play the third part in a scene he considers his worst nightmare, he
figures things can't get any worse.
But when preparations for the
scene from hell collide with tragic events in his personal life, he finds his
fast growing, red hot attraction to Sonny the one thing left between him and a
bullet.
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