Guest Post by J.D. Watts, author of The Children of Creation Series

Thank you for joining us on our stop off of The Young Adult Blog Tour. Our date on the tour has been broken up into four sections: The review, giveaway, interview, and this Guest Post with J.D. Watts! This is all thanks to J.D. Watts and TWCS Publishing House.

I'm happy to announce that J.D. Watts will be blogging with us today. Without making you wait any longer, I will now hand off the blog to her.

For me, music is practically like air. I can’t do much in my life without some sort of soundtrack, and the same is true for my writing. I have soundtracks I listen to when I need to access a certain mood or mindset and even now, when I think of my books, there are certain songs I listened to while writing them that pop into my head when I think about certain scenes.

The Convergence soundtrack is full of heavier rock like Flyleaf and Skillet, driving beats and lyrics that seem to fit the mindset of Dani in the midst of her whole world being turned on end. The music fit Dani in that first book, right along with her ripped jeans, snarky tee shirts, and dangerous looking boots, her armor to hold herself apart and in some ways protected. One of the songs that especially seemed to inspire me in terms of Dani and her struggle to get a grasp on everything she was facing was Hero by Skillet. It was just so perfect for how she was feeling, incapable of protecting herself, feeling overwhelmed and not understanding what was expected of her. If I were to make a soundtrack for a movie adaptation of Convergence, that would be a song I would beg to make the cut.

Induction, the second book of the series, has a very different feel to the first book and so my soundtrack is also very different. This book is where we see the love story develop, so in this playlist I have a lot of soft songs, and a particularly important cameo by Adele’s Make You Feel My Love, but the most important of all was my very special find by an original artist who posts on youtube. I actually found the group when looking for music I might consider ‘angelic’ and discovered the amazing sound of Stella Voci, a musical group composed of a group of women from all around the world who have never been in the same room yet have recorded and arranged the most beautiful music together. I consider Stella Voci one of the great wonders of the internet, a prime example of how it has made our world a much smaller place. One of their songs also make a cameo in my soundtrack for the book in a very, very special scene, but coolest of all was discovering the leader of Stella Voci, Kate Covington, aka katethegreat19 on YouTube and her original composition, which she also performed and posted on YouTube, No One But You. This song inspired some very special scenes for me and she was even so kind as to give me permission to use it in the video trailer for Induction when it came out. Words cannot describe how grateful I am for artists like her all around the world that create this amazing art form that both soothes and inspires. Without their art and the contribution of their beauty to the world, my writing would be far less than it is.

I hope that if you pick up my books that you might also take the time to look into some of the music that I mentioned here. I also have a writing playlist posted at the bottom of my own blog, jdwatts.blogspot.com if you ever wanted to drop in and hear some of the things that get my fingers to flying across my keyboard. I want to give a huge thanks to this blog for hosting me and my book and taking precious time and blog space to let me share. Without bloggers like you, we authors would be lost. Thank you again!