Listening to... hiphop

Outkast - Spottieottiedopaliscious


My characters for my new book began as real people -- Paris Hilton and Jason Newsted (former bass player of Metallica). I chose the latter because he seems like the quintessential Nice Guy and I thought I'd like to write about a QNG.


And at some point he turned into a black guy. So now my character is a combination of Newsted and Pharrell Williams. Which has really helped move my plot forward.


And it means that now I'm listening to hip hop instead of metal. But Williams likes all kinds of genres, especially rock, and his own band (N.E.R.D.) is a mixture of hip hop and rock, so the heavy metal will still find a place in there. He'll be an interesting hero by the time I'm finished with him. Interesting to me, anyway. ;-)

XXX

Literary agent Rachelle Gardner posted a question on her blog about books that her readers would be embarrassed to admit they read/loved. Since Gardner specializes in Christian books, many of her readers are Christian. And it's interesting to see that the main thing that embarrasses them is sex. They're embarrassed to admit they've enjoyed books that contained sex.

But not books that are horrors, or violent, or gory. So as people have pointed out before, and my brother recently brought up: Why are we so much more shocked by sex (in movies, in books) than by violence? Why is much of North American society more hung up on a potentially-life-giving act, than on a life-taking one? This seems to be a North American thing--or maybe countries colonized by Britain. Even ex-French-colony-Quebec is more cool about nudity.

The only area where perhaps this isn't true is in music. There's a lot more tolerance for "Let's Get It On" and "Sexual Healing" than for, say, gangster rap.