Spark Guest Post: Write the Silence, Invite the Music by Karyn Pearson

Today we welcome Author Karyn Pearson to Writer’s Fun Zone as she stops along her Paranormal Fantasy Spark book blog tour. Enjoy her post on the ideal environment to write.

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A lot of aspiring authors find that part of the problem they find themselves struggling to write has to do with the environment they’re trying to write in. We’ve heard the stories of great authors like J.K. Rowling who famously wrote the original draft of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on cocktail napkins in a cafe she frequented, Ray Bradbury, who could write anywhere so long as he had a typewriter, or Ernest Hemingway, who wrote while standing, and so many countless others.

So what is the ideal setting for writing? The honest answer: whatever works best for you. As long as it works for you, that’s all that matters. For me, my ideal writing setting varies. Sometimes I need silence to think, to organize sequences of events. I envision scenes in my mind in silence and find the words to describe them. Yet there are also times where I’m listening to music and images and scenes come to mind, the action fitting in seamlessly with whatever song I’m listening to as its score.

But when it comes to writing, there are times where I write best where I work best when it’s just me alone with my thoughts. Other times, I find myself writing to music that matches the tone of whatever I’m writing. In times like these, I often end up writing in time to the music, typing faster and faster, or slower, as the tempo of the music picks up or slows down. My prose is sharp on accented notes, or soft and gentle when the music is marked dolce. The action intensifies on a crescendo and dies down on decrescendos. Everything follows the music.

And yet, there are other times still, like right now as I sit here typing this post, when I have neither silence nor music, but the sound of the television on for background noise. How can I write in such a distracting environment? Very carefully. It takes a great deal of concentration. Especially in my case since I have two distractions in my living room, one being the TV and the other, my two dogs, Nikki and Jamie (a female German Shepherd/Labrador Retriever mix and a male purebred German Shepherd, respectively). But by some miracle I manage it.

However, my best work emerges when I write late at night. It’s when everything is silent, when the world around me is sleeping. In those periods, I lose myself in my words and dive right into the universe I’ve imagined. It is then, in the dark, that I feel truly alone with my work. I write, I craft, and I create without restraint or reservation. In the night, the words just flow from my fingertips and onto the page. In the night, the creative spirit takes hold of me and doesn’t let go.

Title: Spark

Series: The Hellfire Series

Author: Karyn Pearson

Genre: Paranormal, Fantasy

Publisher: The Writing Network

Formats Available In: Digital

Release Date: June 23, 2013

Blurb: For centuries, the powers of Heaven and Hell have been at war, locked in a perpetual stalemate. Fifty years ago, the war spilled out on Earth and the last modern age of man ended. Humanity now finds itself at the brink of annihilation, barely surviving in small pockets of civilization scattered across the globe. But even in the direst of circumstances, the human spirit lives on.

Now, in this post-apocalypse, humanity has but one choice: resist or die. In order to combat the forces of Hell, man has learned to fight, training from their youth to hunt the demons that threaten their very existence.

Twenty-five years ago, a demon hunter dared rise against an ancient demon family, the Saligia—the Seven Deadly Sins—and was cursed for her defiance. The curse appeared in the guise of an innocent: the huntress’s own daughter, Ardentia, who had been born with a demon soul attached to her own.

In the present day, Ardentia, now grown, seeks to free her mother from her curse by hunting down the demons responsible. But the road ahead will be difficult now that the demon within her has awakened. Trusting him is dangerous, especially when he can turn on her at a moment’s notice. Others have warned her that succumbing to the demon will be her own downfall.

Now Ardentia must decide what she’s willing to lose: her mother’s freedom or herself.

Excerpt:

The demon snapped his fingers and the daemonis igni behind Ardentia grew blindingly bright and white-hot, the flames reaching over forty feet high and surging straight toward her. She froze with fear, knowing that in a few seconds she was about to die, burned alive in the fires of Hell.

“Ardentia!” Noxius was shouting. “Run! Run now!”

She was too scared to move. She could not even muster up the strength to take that first step. Somehow, even if she did run away, she knew that the flames or Gula would end up devouring her anyway.

Distantly, she could hear the voices of her comrades, yelling for her to run, to find higher ground, but still, she could not move.

Noxius snarled with irritation, muttering a stream of curses in lingua daemon.

“Idiot girl!” he hissed at her. “I’ve no other choice. I simply cannot allow us both to die here.”

And then an indescribable force slammed against the inside of Ardentia’s skull. She saw bright lights pop in front of her eyes, nearly blinded with pain, and dropped to her knees in a daze. Dimly, she could feel Noxius seizing control; his power coursed through her, flooding her with an unimaginable strength and power that she was incapable of using. Her hand started to reach for the reliquary dangling from her belt, only to feel an invisible hand within her snatching it away.

“What are you doing?” she asked weakly.

“You’ll thank me in a moment,” Noxius answered her.

Ardentia’s eyes fell shut and she thought she could hear the sound of wings being spread then close around her. If she leant to the side ever so slightly, she swore she could feel the leathery velvet of the wing brush against her cheek.

An intense heat passed over her; she realized that it was probably the demonic fire, having reached her at last. She inhaled sharply, preparing to scream as she burned in the hellish pyre, only to find that she did not need to. There was only heat but no flames. She was not burned.

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About Karyn Pearson:

Karyn Pearson is a post-grad university student with a B.A. in Anthropology, currently living in California with her two dogs. Over the years, she has created many worlds, characters, and series, which naturally makes her head a very crowded place to be.

When she’s not writing, she can be found curled up with a book, playing video games, doing research for her books on the web, or attempting to not burn the house down with another kitchen experiment, a hobby otherwise known as cooking.

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