As many of you know, I’m a music teacher for my IRL job. And we “lifer” musicians, we’re a weird bunch. So it’s fairly unsurprising that I’d choose to write on musicians as wonky entities in romance for today’s Wonk-O-Mance post, entitled “Beautiful Music.” Beautiful, yes, but messed up nonetheless.

A peek at what I wrote:

Nothing compares to the cool slide of faux-ivory keys beneath the pads of my fingertips. My hands settle into position of their own accord—my favorite is E-major, which goes white-black-white, one-three-five. I love the stretch of the octave, E4 to E5, while my left hand drifts ever lower. Brushing, stroking: It knows exactly where it’s going, but hell if it won’t take the most leisurely, teasing route into that strident bass-clef chord, the one that knows my soul so very well. There’s a slow, minute pattern of vibration that radiates from temple to temple, but it’s happy. Warm. It curves around my skull until the rhythm finds the little divot above my nape, and then it circles there until endorphins streak through my limbs to tingle in my nerve endings, like sinking quickly into a hot bath.

And this is just in the first five seconds I’m at my piano. I feel thusly every. Single. Time.

Is it any wonder that musicians often come across as slightly crazy? There must be something essentially unbalanced within their psyche in order for music to balance them back out again.

Please head on over and check out my contributions to the seven-author consortium blog, and spend some time reading the other posts—we’ve had some great interviews recently, especially last week’s with Tamara Morgan, which gave me a feverish bout of grabby-hands for her current release and her upcoming summer one (about a lentil farmer! and Shakespeare! dude!).