Lyrical Fantasy

With the line "If music be the food of love, play on’, Shakespeare opens his great comic play, Twelfth Night. It's one of my favourite Shaksepearean plays, though I love so many of his comedies and quite a few of his tragedies too. And perhaps I read and re-read these too many times as a youngster, and his iambic pentameter stuck with me. 

The Romantic poets - Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, as well as the great Scottish poets and balladeers also made a huge impression on me. So when love struck, (and everyone becomes a poet when love strikes), my poems sounded more classical than contemporary. 

Music is always there, in the background of Shakespeare's plays, in the rhythm of poems and ballads, in the song of the Gaelic tongue that called to me via translated works. But it did not come to the forefront until I was knee-deep crafting my fantasy stories. 

The fantasy genre has changed a lot in the last 20 years, but when I first started reading fantasy, my favourites were the works of Patricia A. McKillip, Judith Tarr, Tanith Lee - beautiful, lyrical story-telling, less epic in scale than Tolkien, but with melody and harmony in every sentence, beauty in every passage. 

Not all poems become songs, and not all my writing is lyrical, but in a genre that has become darker and more violent, I have kept to the light and sensual. My muses appear to be both gentle and passionate, and I believe my music reflects this. Whether you came here from reading one of my stories or listening to one of my songs, I'd like to think we connected on some level. So, feel free to explore and ask me anything about my music, my writing, my worlds and my characters. I'll be happy to answer your questions.

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