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If you want to know how it is a novelist decided to produce a CD, I’ll tell you. For me, music is the most emotionally evocative art form. Like a lot of people I know, I can be brought to tears within the first three bars of certain songs, or feel my heart lifted, or a memory or sensation triggered so powerfully I’m taken to a whole other place. A while back -- following several years of researching the subject of love in ways that were not always easy -- I packed up my car with my computer and my boom box and checked into a little motel room on the New Hampshire/Vermont border where I stayed for a couple of weeks, writing the first draft of Where Love Goes. Once a day I’d drive into the town of Brattleboro, Vermont and treat myself to a sandwich and a new CD. Then I went back and wrote some more. My chief influence during that period, besides my own strong feelings on the subject of love and relationships, were the songs I listened to. I don’t think of the music I played as strictly country music, although a lot of the songs came out of Nashville. I think of these as simple, honest songs that tell stories about all the different things that can happen when a man and a woman fall in love and get together. They’re songs about true feelings. In my opinion, these songs also contain some of the best writing that’s being done these days. My novel, Where Love Goes, is filled with the songs my characters listen to, much as my own life is filled with those songs. The lyrics of the music these people play serve as a way of expressing -- either to themselves or to the people they’re with -- the things they long for and the things that break their hearts. The songs I was listening to as I wrote my novel reminded me of those things. And because I had created a soundtrack for myself when I was writing my story, I wanted readers to have the chance to hear a similar soundtrack as they read it. At one point in Where Love Goes, as the man she loves plays a song for her, the main character says it feels as if it isn’t a mandolin he’s plucking, but her heartstrings. These songs pluck at my heartstrings that way. Listen to samples* of selected tracks, then order the Where Love Goes Soundtrack, CD or cassette, from the Joyce Maynard Catalogue. Since this represents the one and only time a writer has been nuts enough to undertake producing her own novel-soundtrack, I’m guessing it’s destined to become a collectible of the future. Get them while they last!
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