Butterfly, a novel is a book. It comes with words for reading and very few pictures, if any.

When one of my first readers gave me feedback one of their comments was “I can easily see this being a movie, and I know exactly the soundtrack!”

Well, the book is hardly a book, yet, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves, but she picked some excellent songs that captured the mood of Butterfly, a novel.

One you might have guessed, particularly if you’ve watched the trailer, is One eskimO’s excellent “Givin’ Up.” The soundtrack for our super low budget, indie made book trailer was a toss up between “Givin’ Up” and Imagine Dragons “Nothing Left to Say.” It’s meant to capture a man on the run, who may have just seen his wife and daughter die, to borrow a plot trope from afternoon, a story, by one of my personal favorites, Michael Joyce.

As I’ve been writing (and editing, and editing, and editing) Butterfly, a novel I’ve also had a soundtrack. Usually I write to classical music, without any words to give me a Barnes & Noble-esque atmosphere in my little writing hovel. But as I sat down to finish out the fourth draft/heavy editing, I ran ear-first into Tanya Donelly’s Swan Song Series. It was the fourth volume, the one that includes “Salt” and “Cape Ann.” I’ve been a fan of Tanya Donelly from her Throwing Muses, Belly, Breeders days and I just love the mood she evokes. It’s a little bit wistful, joyful, so so good. So I went back through her back catalog of Swan Song Series and collected them all.

I kept all 5 volumes (the fifth came out in the middle of slogging through yet another edit, a welcome addition) on constant play during my early morning editing and writing sessions. It’s a story about a man losing his family, possibly irrevocably, and their attempts to get back together again, so there’s that little bit of hope and remembering the good times that I get from Ms. Donelly. In fact, should it be turned into a movie (whoa, chief, let’s not get ahead of ourselves or our hunt for an agent yet), I would beg plead and grovel to get her to write the soundtrack.

Mix in the odd song that sounds like it would belong in a hockey arena and you have the recipe for writing Butterfly, a novel. The latter songs in the iTunes playlist, in particular, got heavy rotation when I would spend half an hour to an hour at the rink, thinking through various plot points, scenes, that sort of thing. William Murphy was a professional hockey player, in his former life — a goon who dispensed and received great punishment on the ice. So some of those raucous anthems got me going through fight scenes (much easier than picking somebody at the rink to tussle with).

So there you have it. I have no idea if this is interesting or not (I suspect it’s not terribly), but the music behind the novel.

Now back to waiting for agents to get back to me. And working on the next book.