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Guest Blogger: Cornelia Grey (@corneliagrey)

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Hello! I’m Cornelia Grey—welcome to the Empty Hourglass blog tour! At various tour stops, I’ll be sharing some secrets about my writing process, sources of inspiration and future projects!

Comment on each stop to be entered in a drawing for a $15 Riptide Publishing gift card and the two previous titles in the Deal with a Devil series—Devil at the Crossroads and The Circus of the Damned—in an e-book format of your choice. Thank you for joining me on the tour!

The Empty Hourglass Soundtrack

I really enjoy listening to music while I write—I always have. I find that putting on my headphones with a nice playlist really helps me focus on the story! I am very picky regarding which songs are to be played while I’m working on a specific story. I like them to fit the mood of the novel, or of a scene in particular. As an added benefit, whenever I sit down to get back to writing, hearing the familiar tunes helps me get back in the flow and pick up right where I left off.

Listening to the same song in a loop also has something like a hypnotic effect – it helps me immerse myself in the scene, shutting out all distractions. If I was listening to different songs, instead, I would constantly be distracted whenever a new one came along, and bounced from one emotion to the next depending on the mood of the song…

For whatever reason, The Empty Hourglass was mostly inspired by songs by Florence and the Machines… the sometime melancholy, sometimes even eerie atmosphere was precisely what I was looking for. And now, every time I listen to her album, I can’t help but be brought back to Jethro and Thomas’s adventures.

I would like to share with you a few of the songs I was listening to while writing The Empty Hourglass. I hope they will fit the atmosphere and tone you have in mind… 🙂

Florence and the Machine – Seven Devils

Seven Devils set just the right tone, eerie and somewhat haunting, for the mysterious circumstances going on at Jethro Hastings’s mansion.

Florence and the Machine – No Light

For whatever reason, No Light ended up being more or less the soundtrack of the time I spent in Wales, visiting a friend, while I worked on this novel. It was perfect for the more emotionally intense scenes… it still makes my stomach flutter whenever I listen to it.

Florence and the Machine – Rabbit Heart

Rabbit Heart is a more light-hearted song, and it was perfect for the lighter scenes of the novel. I associate it especially with Mina, the ghost girl inhabiting Jethro’s garden—whenever I listen to this song, I can almost see her skipping around, her long braid bouncing as she chases after birds, and dangling her legs while she sits on a tree branch.

I hope you enjoyed this little snippet of my writing soundtrack, and I hope these songs resonate with you and with the impression you got from The Empty Hourglass! I’m always eager to add new songs to my playlist, so by all means feel free to suggest your favorites in the comments 🙂

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The Empty HourglassAbout The Empty Hourglass

Thomas Escott has always wanted to be a toymaker, yet just as he achieves his dream, an accident claims his right hand. He’s certain his life is over—until he hears about groundbreaking prosthetics being made by a reclusive inventor.

Jethro Hastings is perfectly content to live alone up in the mountains working on a secret masterpiece: a humanoid automaton that will change the scientific community forever. He’s behind schedule, and the date of the unveiling is fast approaching, so when Thomas shows up on his doorstep offering help in exchange for a mechanical hand, Jethro agrees. Time, after all, is running out on another deal he’s made: one with the devil.

The devil gives Jethro’s inventions life, but he can just as quickly take life away—Jethro’s, to be exact. As the sand in the devil’s hourglass falls, marking the time until the end of the deal, inventions go haywire, people get hurt, and Thomas realizes he needs Jethro just as much as his prosthetic. Now he must find a way to save Jethro’s soul, but negotiating with a devil is just as difficult as it sounds.

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About Cornelia Grey

Cornelia Grey is a creative writing student fresh out of university, with a penchant for fine arts and the blues. Born and raised in the hills of Northern Italy, where she collected her share of poetry and narrative prizes, Cornelia moved to London to pursue her studies.

After graduating with top grades, she is now busy with internships: literary agencies, publishing houses, and creative departments handling book series, among others. She also works as a freelance translator.

She likes cats, knitting, performing in theatre, going to museums, collecting mugs, and hanging out with her grandma. When writing, she favors curious, surreal stories, steampunk, and mixed-genre fiction. Her heroes are always underdogs, and she loves them for it.

Connect with Cornelia:

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Giveaway

To celebrate the release of The Empty Hourglass, Cornelia is giving away the two previous titles in the Deal with a Devil series—Devil at the Crossroads and The Circus of the Damned—in an e-book format of your choice, plus $15 in Riptide credit. Leave a comment to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on April 16, 2016. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following the tour, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!

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Comments

  1. Thank you for the post and for sharing your playlist =) I listen to a lot of Florence + The Machine myself. I have to agree that there is something hypnotic about their music.
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