Sleigh Bells & Ink Wells Blog Hop

I'm in fine company with a dozen fellow authors for the Sleigh Bells & Ink Wells Blog Hop. At the end of this post, you will see a link to the other authors participating in the hop and I hope you will visit and discover a world of new writers and books.

For this hop, I wanted to share some of my inspiration for my brand new mystery/suspense novel, Remain In Light (which is out now in eBook format and will be available in paperback mid-January). Remain In Light is the second book in The Venus Trilogy, preceded by Conquering Venus. I'm working on the outline for the third novel now. My goal with this trilogy was to write each book so that it could stand alone, yet connect a larger story and characters together.

The story that links the trilogy is this: In 1968, Irène Laureux's husband was murdered during the Paris riots and his body dumped near Notre-Dame cathedral. Thirty years later, she finally catches up with his killer. With the help of American writer Martin Paige, Irène will illuminate decades of secrets and lies only to discover that her husband's death is part of something far more sinister.

As a writer, I'm influenced by books, films and music that I love. The spirit of Lewis Carroll, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Carl Jung and good old Agatha Christie are alive and well in my novels. There's gumshoe detectives, a hint of the paranormal, Jung's theory of synchronicity and wayward Americans who discover that  Paris has a dangerous underworld that most tourists never see.

If you're a music fan, you'll probably notice that chapters in both Remain In Light and Conquering Venus are named after some of my favorite songs. The music of Miles Davis, Kate Bush, Vanessa Daou, Massive Attack, Samuel Barber and Bjork was constantly playing while I was writing.

The trilogy has a purposeful cinematic quality because I've been greatly influenced by directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Wim Wenders, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Sally Potter, Louis Malle, Jane Campion, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. If you love those old black and white New Wave films, mixed with an edge of danger and menace, chances are you'll get into The Venus Trilogy.

The next stop on this hop is at Sharon Heath's blog, which you can access by clicking this link. For further proof of synchronicity, Sharon happens to be a Jungian analyst. I wonder what she'd make of Irène and Martin?

The other bloggers taking part in the hop: Smoky Zeidel, Patricia Damery, Debra Brenegan, Malcolm R. Campbell, T.K. Thorne, Anne K. Albert, Elizabeth Clark-Stern, Melinda Clayton, Ramey Channell and Leah Shelleda.