Category: No Ordinary Love

Soundtrack of My Life – Part 2

Posted on by Amber Marie in 4. Forever Bluebird, Blood Song, Books, Flames and Feathers, Life, Midnight Shadows, No Ordinary Love, The Bluebird Chronicles, Tuesday Ten, Writing

A few years ago, before my divorce, I wrote My Life as a Song – Part One. It was part of a writing challenge I was doing with a friend, and it was to write something autobiographical. I made a youtube playlist and everything. It was over on my personal blog that I never post to anymore, but I got this idea that I would do a Tuesday Ten in the same kind of vein, only this time, not only will it be more than ten, but I’m going to use some of the songs that I write to. Songs that have influenced plot points, characters, entire stories. Sometimes even series. I hope you enjoy them. I have made a youtube playlist as well, and included the link, because not all of the songs were on Spotify, I checked.

So, without further ado, I give you, in no particular order, The Soundtrack of My Life – Part Two.

Trenches by Beth Crowley – This song is amazing and actually inspired a few characters actually. Not that it does much of that now, but originally it inspired some of the stuff that happened in the Dohmnall series with a certain character. Now that I’ve changed that story though, it’s a little different, and it no longer applies. Though, it did inspire some of my fanfic. I have an entire series of Fanfic that should be getting written this year and published on AO3 that literally takes it’s name from the title of this song. I’ve already written a couple of the shorts that go with this series, one is posted but the other comes at the end, so it’s not.

Bluebird by Elizabeth Smart – This song is where I got Penelope’s nickname in The Bluebird. Chronicles. I know it’s originally a Destiel song, but the lyrics apply to Reid and Penelope so well. It’s my favorite thing and I love it.

Yes I Will by Backstreet Boys – I have talked about this song before. It’s the song that inspired the title of No Ordinary Love. There’s one line in the song that goes “This is no ordinary love, and I could never have enough….” I wrote the original fanfic that No Ordinary Love is based off of on paper. It was two full five subject notebooks by the time I threw it away before I left for the Navy. I used to hide in my room and write and listen to music. Because of that, I would scribble song lyrics in the margins while I thought through the next part I was writing. I noticed one day going back through the notebook that the same three words were written on almost every single page somewhere. So, naturally I titled the story that.

Please by Bette & Evermore by Dan Stevens – I have paired these two songs for a reason. If you have never listened to these songs, I challenge you to listen to them back to back. Please and then Evermore. Do it. It sounds like two people in a relationship who want the same thing, but because of shitty communication skills, they lose it. I had both of these songs on my playlist that I listened to a lot back in 2020 and one day while I walked home from work, they played back to back and I had to go back and listen again. And then again. This sparked an idea, which became the entire basis for Hold On, an Avengers Fanfic that I wrote, and published in 2020. It was my therapy after my dad died, all because of these two songs. It’s amazing the power of music.

Humbling River by Puscifer – This song was one of the original songs that inspired The Dohmnall Institute series, back when it was called Halls of Ivy. Back when it was a baby idea. Back when I was writing it alone. It doesn’t apply as much now, but it’s still on every playlist I make for that series. Every. Single. One. because I want to remember the excitement of when we first started, and why we came up with the idea in the first place.

Leave your Lover by Sam Smith – Originally, this was the song that was playing when Reid and Penelope first sleep together. In the original version, before the rewrites, before Noah became a background character, she was dating Noah at the time, and this song was EXACTLY how Reid felt. He wanted her to leave Noah for him, though he’d never actually ask that of her because he wasn’t sure he could trust his own emotions. He had never felt anything like this before.

How Did I Fall In Love With You by Backstreet Boys – Dohmnall Institute/Metanoia Chronicles and No Ordinary Love. This song is about falling in love with your best friend. It’s interesting the way that kind of happens, not just in writing but in real life as well. I love it and it fits so well with the characters that I’ve assigned it to and their eventual journey.

Castle by Halsey – Reid and Penelope. That’s it. It makes me think of them. It’s the song that’s playing when Reid and Penelope kiss for the first time.

Tennessee Whiskey by Chris Stapleton – Also a Reid and Penelope song that’s important in the third book for reasons. I can’t tell you now, but when you read it, you’ll know. That’s the song that plays.

Sacred Heart by The Civil Wars – In the original fanfic version of It Could Be Monsters, this is the song that Tess sings to Tucker. You don’t get lyrics in the new version, but this is still the song. When you get to meet these characters, and you understand their journey, I hope you enjoy it. The songs in French too, so there’s that. I absolutely love it.

The Rest of Our Life by Tim McGraw & Faith Hill – Basher. This is 100% an Asher and Bailey wedding song. That’s it. If I had to pick a single song to describe their life together, it would be this on.

Things we lost in the fire by Bastille – This is a song for Black Balloon. I think that it helps me remember the pain and the healing journey that Hadley (the FMC) is on.

Careless Whisper by Seether – Also a Black Balloon song. No explanation needed really.

I hate u, I love u by Gnash ft. Olivia O’Brien – This song is 100% Mason and Ember from No Ordinary Love. I cannot imagine any other couple in all of what I write that it fits so well, besides maybe one other couple, but I refuse to tell you about them yet.

Okay, we’re going to end it there. I know that it’s only 15 songs, but if I don’t stop there, I will go on forever. There are others that I absolutely love, and I do post a weekly playlist, but unfortunately those are just some of the songs I’ve listened to in the last week. I have posted the playlist above, so enjoy that and I will see you guys tomorrow. As always my loves, drink your water, be safe, make good choices, and don’t eat yellow snow!

Character Profile: Luca Watson

Posted on by Amber Marie in Character profile, No Ordinary Love

Luca is one of the background/secondary characters in No Ordinary Love. He’s part of the band that Mason is in, Blue Sundays. He doesn’t appear too often in the story, except in times when the whole group is together.

Luca’s life was a simple one, he grew up the younger brother to Ashton, who is also in the band. He married Twyla about three years before the book starts, so they’re just out of that honeymoon period and are happy to simply be. Luca loves to spoil Twyla and their two dogs, Max and Ruby. After being on the road, or away from home for any length of tie, Luca prefers to stay in bed for the entirety of the first day. Twyla often stays with him. They read, they talk, they just spend that time getting to know the people they’ve become while he’s been away. He loves his job, he loves his life, but he loves his wife and family more. He would give up everything if it meant safety and security for himself and his wife, but Twyla would never ask him to, though she hates it when he’s gone, she’d never ask him to give up his dream.

Luca is calm and level headed ninety percent of the time, but he’s also hyper and scatter-brained and has a million ideas all the time. He writes a lot of the lyrics and music for what the band ends up recording. The other guys pitch in as well, but almost everything is written by Luca and Alec, at least the bare bones of it. Parker usually does a lot of the music. When they’re home, it’s not uncommon for Luca to be over at Alec’s while they spend time in the recording studio that Alec has, or at Luca’s, hanging out on the back porch watching the dogs play in the yard while they work. It’s an easy existence that makes Luca appreciate what he has, but he will never stop working for it either.

I’m working on No Ordinary Love again next month and with the current re-write that I’m doing, I’m hoping to include Luca and Ashton a little more than I had before. They’re good characters, important to the story, but they’re background important. They’re helping fuel the storyline from the outside and I’m excited to get to show that a little more now that I’ve switched it to first person and part of it is from Mason’s POV. Despite the little bit that I have on him, I absolutely love Luca, and he is an inspiration to me, with the little bit I know. I can’t wait to expand on that and I hope you guys will love him too.

Well that’s it for me today. I’ll see you guys tomorrow, but for now, as always, drink your water, be safe, make good choices, and don’t eat yellow snow.

Setting Preview: Ember’s Apartment

Posted on by Amber Marie in Books, Life, No Ordinary Love, Setting, Writing

So this week we’re going to talk about Ember’s apartment. Ember is one of the MC’s from No Ordinary Love. She works for an advertising agency in Orlando and she has a loft apartment in a building and she loves it. It’s not very big, but it’s everything to her.

Ember’s apartment is a story and a half high. When you walk into her apartment, you come into the living room. If you take a left, you can find the kitchen, which is underneath the loft. There isn’t a table, or anything where you can sit and eat. It really is quite a small space. She has three stools at the counter on the opposite side of the kitchen and she sits there and does work a lot. Though mostly she eats on the couch when it’s just her. Her couch is tucked partially back underneath the stairs with the tv across from it and it is extremely comfortable. It has to be, since Shaye and Mason often crash on it. Most of her furniture has extra storage built into it, and that helps her have more in the apartment that doesn’t take up a lot of room.

Once you go upstairs, it’s her bedroom. It’s not hidden behind walls or anything like that, there’s just the bannister at the edge of the platform and the stairs. Like with most lofts, everything is open. So, she has a small desk over in the corner where she keeps anything that she has to bring home, but she doesn’t work there very often. She’s got a smallish reach in closet, and then her bed completely dominates the space. She could have gone with something smaller, but wants to be comfortable. Most of her money is put into her savings account for the house she wants to buy one day, so she isn’t too picky. Her decor is minimal but classy because while she has a famous best friend, she isn’t making that kind of money, but she still wants a nice place to call home.

Ember is simple, and her home reflects that. Though her complicated emotions about people are anything but simple. Her home is her escape, and it’s reflected in the way she chooses to decorate and present herself within that space. It’s a place for Mason to go and remember their more humble roots, and where they started together in a little neighborhood where the most important thing was ice cream on Fridays. Back when her parents were still alive.

I hope you like the little bit of Ember’s apartment that you get to see here. That’s all for me this week. I’ll see you on Monday! Have a great weekend everyone. As always, drink your water, be safe, make good decisions, and don’t eat yellow snow.

Character Preview – Natalia Patterson

Posted on by Amber Marie in Books, Character profile, No Ordinary Love, Writing

Today’s Character preview is on Lia Patterson, Mason’s girlfriend at the beginning of No Ordinary Love. Read on to learn more about her.

Natalia Dawn “Lia” Patterson is the only child. Her dad has a lot of money and she grew up very used to the rich girl lifestyle in Orlando Florida. She started dating Mason because he was the “bad boy” of Between Sundays. He had the money to keep her in the lifestyle she was accustomed to, and liked to party, which was perfect for what she wanted. She’s part of the local modeling scene and a social media influencer that likes to talk about the rich lifestyle. Mason is kind of a feather in her cap.

When he goes to rehab and tries to change his life, Lia doesn’t understand why her life must also change. She gets that his might, but she doesn’t want to sit at home all the time, she prefers to be out and about. She isn’t real fond of Ember, and it’s a point of contention for her and Mason that he’s still very good friends with her. When Lia moved in with Mason, she threw a huge fit about Ember having her own bedroom in Mason’s house. They argued about it constantly, but Mason never wavered and eventually Ember was allowed to keep her bedroom there, though it’s hardly ever used now.

Lia has a group of friends that she’s really close to. They’re other rich girls like herself, and she’s known most of them since boarding school. Though they seem superficial on the surface, they are all actually good friends. When Mason gets sober, they actively encourage Lia to curb her own partying ways for a little while until Mason is more comfortable, though Lia doesn’t take the advice her friends give her.

While she attends Between Sundays get togethers, she isn’t fond of them either, preferring the company of her own friends, though they are never invited, despite her repeated requests for them to be. The guys aren’t stupid, and they don’t want the kind of attention around them when they hang out in their homes.

There isn’t much about Lia, unfortunately, she’s got a halfway decent backstory, and after she exits the No Ordinary Love manuscript, she does continue on doing what she’s been doing. She uses the breakup with Mason to gain sympathy on her blog and her other social media, and Mason doesn’t bother to put a stop to it, preferring to leave all thoughts of her in the past. Lia plays a small but significant to Mason, part in this book and while she’s not as well developed as I usually prefer my secondary characters to be, she is developed enough for this. I have no idea how she and Mason met, other than it was at a party. I’m not sure why they’ve been together more than two years when their personalities do sometimes clash, other than Mason loves her, and when it’s just the two of them, she is very sweet and does genuinely care for him. She does love him, in her own way. I think it mostly comes down to the way she views the people she loves, which is sort of distant, and the way he does, which is very close and tight-knit. Their upbringings were so different that she doesn’t see an issue in her and Mason’s relationship and the way they operate because it’s very much like her parents; together but having very separate lives. This isn’t what Mason wants though, even though he does love her, he thought maybe they’d find a balance that suited them, though they never quite did.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Sorry it isn’t too much, but it is what it is I guess. Hope you at least enjoyed this much of what I’ve got figured out for Lia. She’s kind of an antagonistic type personality on the page, though she isn’t always like that. Anyway, have a wonderful day my friends. Happy new year!

As always, Be safe, make good choices, and don’t eat yellow snow!

I’ve been thinking

Posted on by Amber Marie in Blood Song, Midnight Shadows, No Ordinary Love, Writing

If you’re on my personal facebook, or even follow the Amber Marie Writes facebook, you may have seen this already, but I felt it worth repeating here. I had a bit of a rough year last year, as did everyone. It hasn’t gotten much better this year but I’m pushing through and I’m determined to make something good this year. This post kind of came to me after I saw a graphic in my memories and I thought it was important enough to share here with maybe a little more detail than I’d put on my facebook. Some of it is a little difficult to talk about but the overall idea is about making art out of the difficult stuff that happens.

As most of you know, if you’ve paid any attention at all over the last year, I lost my Dad March 13th of last year. What only my brother knows, is that the night before Dad died, Damien and I were at the hospital until two in the morning. We were emotional and trying to distract ourselves. I had been gearing up for Camp NaNo which happens every year in April. I had written out an outline that I had spent the last couple of months creating from a random thought into an actual story. It wasn’t easy but dealing with everything those last couple of months with Dad gave us, it gave me something else to focus on while working nights. So, my brother and I sat there, three foot from my dad, talking about this outline, talking about my ideas, to distract us from what was happening in the bed right next to us. Dad died the next afternoon. And despite everything that happened in the years leading up to that moment, and no matter how many time we told ourselves we were, we weren’t ready. I wasn’t ready.

Then the world shut down in almost the same breath as we lost Dad. We were trapped at home. People were scared. I was grieving. Hard. I had no idea what to do and my brain desperately was searching for something to do. So a couple of weeks later, when April started, I did what I had planned to do. I did Camp Nano. I set goals, and I smashed them. Quickly.

It had been a very long time since I had finished anything besides a short story. I’d get almost to the end of something and then I just couldn’t finish it. It was frustrating. I started to feel like that with this but I pushed on. I made myself write every second I wasn’t working, or helping the kids with school, or cleaning the house. I did my best. I distracted myself to escape the pain. And this amazing thing happened. On April 25th, 2020, I finished Hold On. Sure, it was just a first draft. Sure, it wasn’t anything spectacular. It was just a piece of fanfiction that I may or may not publish anywhere. It was for me. I wrote my emotions out. I took that grief and turned it into something beautiful.

My goals, as you can see, were simple, 10k words minimum. That was my goal. just something on paper. Anything. Create Art, which I created a lot of art. I really did. And to finish it. Which I did. 25 days and I finished it. Ending with 18 chapters and a total of roughly 63, 457 words. I have never won a full NaNoWriMo before since I started competing in 2013. And the goal there is only 50k in 30 days. I wrote 63k in 25 days. It was huge.

That feeling allowed me to keep going. It allowed me to keep writing and to write everyday. When it’s not a NaNo month (April and November are when I participate), the timeline I give myself is somewhat more relaxed. And by the time October of last year rolled around, I had finished 3 stories, one was primed to go to my editor, and I was working on three more, as the ideas struck. I was making art, so much art, I had perfected my writing process. I was doing so well and I knew, without a doubt that I was going to kick NaNo’s ass in November. If I could do it in April, I could do it in November.

Then my Mom died. And it was, ugh. I shut down. Immediately. It was like my brain had a moment where it went “We’ve already done this, we are NOT doing this again!” I tried to do what I’d done earlier in the year, but I’d stare at the screen and couldn’t make the words come. I just couldn’t. They were gone. The words, the ideas, they were still there, I could feel them but they were silent. For once in my writing life, the voices that guide me were silent. And it was deafening.

I didn’t do NaNo last year. I barely made it through November. Dad’s funeral, finally, then Mom’s the next day. It was, a lot. Then the kids started acting out. Jay almost missed Thanksgiving. Emily hated her 16th birthday, even though I tried. Emily has been acting out since. Sneaking out, and taking off for weeks at a time. This has been constant since November. It hasn’t made the words come, if anything they feel farther away.

I’ve started editing again, because despite everything, life goes on. As much as I’d love to sit and never have to process the things I put off at the end of last year so that I wouldn’t have to deal with it, life doesn’t work that way. So, while I still can barely write, I’ve been editing. I’ve been plotting. I will make it through whatever I have to, and not lose my identity as a writer. I have to, because who am I if I’m not?

My 2k20 Camp NaNo Goals graphic was in my memories recently, and I saw it before I’d even had my first cup of coffee and when I saw it, I immediately remembered that sense of pride I felt when I was done. I felt my chest swelling with it again. I felt my shoulders squaring and my head lifting just a bit. It may be just a simple fanfiction that got me through a large portion of my grief. 63k words that I wasn’t sure I’d ever show to anyone. But I’m so glad that I did. It was officially published on August 31st of last year. Since then I’ve gotten 22 comments telling me what a great story it is. 22 comments telling me I was good at this. 22 comments that helped me get through the hardest year of my life, so far. As of yesterday, I’m up to 107 kudos, which if you read anything on AO3, you know that isn’t that great, but it’s not bad either. And the newest Kudos was just yesterday, according to my email.

I created something that will last. I created something. I took my grief and shaped it into a stepping stone for my goals. This stone may be a bit harder and I’m still working on it. I may be juggling more than one stone right now, but that’s all they are. Stepping stones to my dreams. Stepping stones to my goals. Each painted a different color of memory. I can take this, and I can use it. Art is emotion after all.

If you read all of this, thank you. It’s really just to remind myself that even when it hurts, even when it feels like you’re going to break, you never know what’s going to happen next and that next thing, may be everything you ever needed.