Please forget the last month where I was totally intending to do regular Moonset Monday posts, and then got caught up in Christmas, New Year’s, laziness, and distraction.

This week, I thought I’d talk a little bit about what I listened to while I was writing Moonset, and specifically the song that I connect most to the book.  I’m one of those writers who has to have a specific song for every project.  Each book has one song that encompasses the entirety of it as far as I’m concerned.  I may switch between several playlists as I write – actual songs, movie scores, violins, and even the occasional white noise machine, but first I have to have that one song that makes everything make sense.

The Birthday Massacre is this electronic-synth-rock band from Canada, and they’re epic. I first heard of them while watching the Vampire Diaries, which was right about the time I started working on Moonset.  From the first song I was hooked, and I listened to them extensively all while drafting the novel.  One song in particular really seemed to resonate with me, and it is literally the most played song on my iTunes next to the song I listened to while writing Witch Eyes.

“Kill the Lights” is ostensibly about performers – whether they be actors on a stage, musicians, ballet performers, or even members of a circus.  They’re on a stage, whoever they are.  And it’s all about how when the lights go down, they put on a show, but once the show is over, everything is revealed as a lie.  They’re just performers pretending to be something they’re not.

For me, the song is perfect for the Moonset kids.  There is a build up and expectation to who they are – people expect that they know exactly what they’re getting into just because of what they’ve heard about them.  That because they’ve heard about what Jenna was like, they know what she’s capable of.  They know who she is.  As though the kids are just performers on a stage, acting out roles that have already been defined for them when they couldn’t be farther from that.  Everyone thinks that they know who the kids are, but the kids don’t even know who they are, so how could anyone else.