I’d like to thank Love Bytes for allowing me to guest blog about Dreamspinner Press’s release of my new novella, The Timpanist and the Stagehand, on Wednesday, April 13.
The act of making music has the power to transform people, especially young people becoming adults. In The Timpanist and the Stagehand, Ren passes along his knowledge of drumming to Trista, a friend’s teen foster daughter, and the experience changes both of them.
It’s admirable that some parents play Mozart to kids in the womb, but I don’t think it’s necessary to ensure that the child grows up to love classical music—or any music for that matter. People will find their own musical tastes—their own music “homes”—eventually.
I listen to a wide variety of music now, but I rarely heard classical music growing up. My dad loved bluegrass, and my best friend’s father played in a bluegrass band, so I knew all the words to many bluegrass standards at an early age.
My grandmother played gospel when I went to visit. (She loved Loretta Lynn and had all her gospel albums.) Family friends were in a gospel group, so we often heard them perform at public events.
My parents didn’t listen to the radio, but apparently my mother had been a pop music fan at one time, because she had a stack of old 45s she would let me and my sisters play. How could I forget “Get on Board Little Children (Tennessee Ernie Ford), “I’m not a Juvenile Delinquent” (Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers), and “White Silver Sands” (Don Rondo)?
We also cut 45s off the backs of cereal boxes: “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies and “I’m not Your Stepping Stone” by the Monkees. (Either we didn’t eat cereal quickly enough to get more or there weren’t that many put out.)
And someone gave us some educational 78s for children that talked about the instruments in the orchestra—strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion.
Throw in a steady diet of seventies and eighties radio, and you have my formative influences, yet today I’m a symphony-goer. And I still love bluegrass and seventies pop and—yes, I own it!—disco, along with lots of modern pop, rock, and jazz. My music “home” has lots of rooms. What does yours look like?
Blurb:
Ren Murphy is a stagehand. He’s also a loyal friend, a gifted musician, and an inspiring teacher—but most people don’t see past his job. Ren knows that crushing on the Oilton Philharmonic Orchestra’s principal timpanist, Christoph Theoharis, is a waste of time. Christoph brushes off highly eligible would-be suitors regularly. What chance would a stagehand have? Christoph doesn’t even notice Ren’s existence—until one fateful night when chance or luck or maybe fate gets Ren Christoph’s undivided attention.
Old betrayals overshadow both men’s lives, yet each sees something compelling in the other, something that won’t let either walk away. Ren and Christoph may be each other’s best hope of finding a happy-ever-after, but to do that they’ll have to forgive old wrongs. They’ll have to let go of the pain in their past before it destroys their hope for a better future. Most of all, they’ll have to find a way to believe—in possibilities and each
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Ava Hayden lives and writes in Canada but grew up in the southern United States. When not working the day job or writing, she loves reading, baking, seeing plays, going to the symphony, and hiking. Her favorite places to hike are Banff and Jasper National Parks, Kananaskis Country, and Vancouver Island.
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