Blood Harmonies

Blood Harmonies

Back in October when I first began blogging about the new novel I’m working on, I said felt a bit superstitious about revealing the title too soon.  So in the meantime, I’ve been using the working title The Quartet while I’ve been getting on with it, and at first this seemed to make sense.

However, recently I’ve noticed that others – even some I’ve not yet met outside of cyber-tweet-space – are also now calling this book The Quartet when they get in touch.  In hindsight, it’s now obvious that by choosing to use a working title when talking about the book on my blog, I’ve not only engineered my own missed opportunity, but I’ve then gone on to actively promote the missed opportunity instead of my novel.  (Did I ever tell you that I used to be in advertising?)

So I sat down to look at the website/blog to start fixing this, and it suddenly struck me that I no longer feel the slightest bit superstitious about nailing my title to the mast.  This was an epiphany in itself, because it means  in my own mind I’ve made the transition between this being an idea I’m playing with to it being a real book.  I guess what I’m trying to say here is,  my new novel is called Blood Harmonies, and I don’t care who knows it.

If you’d like to know why I chose Blood Harmonies as the title, then check out the short working-draft excerpt from it where the central character Zoe explains why.

And come to think of it, this is another thing that’s very different about Blood Harmonies.  Normally I prefer not to share working drafts, but somehow the whole suck-it-and-see nature of blogging seems to lend itself to this.  Or maybe it’s just because I’m so into writing this novel that I’m kind of beyond caring whether anyone else thinks my baby is ugly.

So there you have it. Blood Harmonies.  Is the title growing on you yet?

Anyway, over to you Zoe…

There’s an expression vocalists have for that peculiarly stirring quality which sometimes arises when members of the same family sing together.  That moment when somehow the sound they’re creating is far more exquisite that the sum of its parts could ever be, and you start believe they’ve got someone else with them.  Someone you can’t see, but can definitely hear.  As though by being in utter unison, they’ve created an unconscious incantation, and have lured an ancestral voice back to join their chorus.

I don’t know why or how it happens.  But when it does, they call it a blood harmony.

The same thing can happen when members of a family play instruments together.  I know it can, because I’ve heard just such a shivering harmony coming from Lucien and Josef.

They’ve barely spoken to each other in years.  Not since the night my mother died.  But sometimes it’s like their collective anguish builds up and spills over into this silence they share, this silence I collude in.  When it does, the sound they achieve as they thrash their sorrow out through their bows is almost uncanny.   If I close my eyes it’s like I can feel her in the room with us, come back to lend her violin’s voice to ours, to tell us…What?  That blood really is thicker than water?    That she forgives them?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 16:01 and is filed under It's dark o'clock in the morning again. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.