Can’t sing, can’t dance

I rally am hopeless at singing; I first realised this when I was probably about nine or ten and someone recorded our class singing a song to send to another school. They played it back to us and I could hear this terrible loud but very enthusiastic voice and suddenly realised it was me! I daresay most of the other children were not much better, but I realised then that I couldn’t sing. It didn’t actually matter, I kept on doing it because at school then we had singing lessons through into secondary school where the teacher would play the piano and we would have either hymn books or song books.

Similarly I just can’t dance, I have a very poor sense of rhythm, get easily distracted, don’t my right foot from  my left foot, can’t keep in time, forget what I’m doing… Thank goodness I wasn’t born in an age when going to a dance meant doing ballroom dancing! As it is I love going to gigs and parties when i can leap about doing my own thing, dancing to my own little rhythm!

Just as I really wish I could sing, so I really wish I  could dance… However, the wonderful thing about writing is that my people, my characters can sing and dance and they often do! In The Stalking of Rosa Czekov, the boyhood band of Rudi and Luka are reformed as Swank 2, the heroine of the story, Tyke becomes their dancer and singer, and music percolates the narrative. in ‘Loving Judah’ there isn’t much singing or dancing, but Aislin seems to have a mental jukebox running in her head and various songs seem appropriate to things that are happening to her. In ‘Night Vision’ the characters go to see the fabulously named ‘Jay-Bob’s Rapscallions’, at a Strand nightclub, the Bolton Spanner (which features in several of my books) My completed but unedited story, ‘Lucky Portbraddon’ has a young man who owns a music shop and is in several punk bands as well as writing all the songs he sings.

So I can’t sing or dance… but my characters are great at it!

If you haven’t read any of my novels, here is a link:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_9?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=lois+elsden&sprefix=lois+elsd%2Caps%2C150