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My guest today is Kate Mueser, author of The Girl with Twenty Fingers, listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jch0608GqlA

• Premise for the novel: after a disastrous recital ends her dream of becoming a concert pianist, Sarah lands in Munich playing Mozart duets with a grouchy elderly widower and uncovers secrets from his wartime past and from her own family.
• The true story behind the novel: a 24-year-old Kate, a spare room, a grand piano, and an elderly couple in Bonn who became her Mozart duet partners for two years.
• Grief and the piano: the editor who told Kate the book was her own grief process for a lost performance career, and how she turned it into a celebration of music for anyone, professional or not.
• Breaking out of the classical bubble: why Herr Steinmann loves jazz and 1940s music as much as Mozart, and why concert-trained musicians sometimes forget that music can also mean jumping around the living room.
• Why Mozart: he played four-hand works with his sister, his “simple” music leaves nowhere to hide wrong notes, and his duets are the first chamber music nearly every young pianist learns.
• The perils of practicing wrong notes, and why Bach is Carol’s Mozart.
• Sarah the food magazine editor who can’t cook: control, perfectionism, a job that feels like self-punishment, and Kaiserschmarrn and pretzels for the senses.
• Who gives and who receives the greater gift: why an unlikely friendship across a 60-year age gap has to be a two-way street.
• Writing a character who was a child during the war, his friendship with a Black American soldier, and the question of how any of us would respond to the history unfolding around us.
• Reading from The Girl with Twenty Fingers: Sarah’s master’s recital in New York, featuring a turquoise shift dress, a ruthless audience, and Mozart’s D minor concerto.
• What’s next: three unpublished novels about an opera singer whose family explodes on sabbatical, a would-be rock star turned band manager, and a cellist with a paleontologist husband and a biathlete son, plus four poems and short stories published this year.
• Advice for new writers: refine your craft, put yourself in the path of serendipity, and try flash fiction or poetry to come back to your novel with fresh eyes.

Read more from Kate Mueser at https://katemueser.com/

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Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

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My guest today is J.C. Corry, author of The Storyteller's War: Geoffrey Chaucer, Reluctant Spy, listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ATuNBbQ2na8

• Premise for the novel: a genesis story for Geoffrey Chaucer. In his mid-twenties, he's drunk, unpublished, and desperate to win Pippa, and sent to Spain under cover of the wine trade while the Castilian Civil War rages.
• Was Chaucer really a spy? How researchers Crow and Olsen's Chaucer Life Records and Marion Turner's Chaucer: A European Life turned up a real, unexplained safe-conduct pass through Navarre in February 1366, and why "he was probably there as a spy" is the closest thing historians have to an answer.
• Why Chaucer, and why four novels about him: a university professor at UVic who made Middle English bearable, and the "proto-Renaissance" life Chaucer actually lived between the docks, the wine trade, and the royal court.
• Why the 14th century keeps pulling historical novelists back: the rise of English as a literary language, the Black Death cracking open the feudal system, the birth of Parliament, and Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, which draws a line from Chaucer's world straight to our own.
• The real love story underneath it all: the push and pull between Pippa and Chaucer's writing that JC calls "the spine of the series," and the historical fact that the two married but spent long stretches apart, both bound to royal service.
• Mercenaries for hire: Sir Hugh Calveley, Sir John Hawkwood, and Bertrand du Guesclin, and how a lull in the Hundred Years' War left soldiers with nothing to do but sell themselves to the highest bidder.
• Writing real historical figures next to invented ones, and the balancing act between staying true to how people actually lived and spoke in 1366 and not losing a contemporary reader along the way.
• On-location research: retracing Chaucer's route from London to Bordeaux, Pamplona, Logroño, Burgos, and Nájera, tasting a centuries-old liqueur, and finding the exact cloister that inspired a particularly gruesome scene with Pedro the Cruel.
• Writing his first battle scene: a $300 book called To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle, his father's WWII helmet with three bullet holes in it, and keeping Chaucer from disappearing inside his own war story.
• A reading from The Storyteller's War: Chaucer and Pippa sparring with his parents over marriage, money, and who really owns his attention, the manuscript or her.
• The moment JC hopes listeners walk away thinking about: the internal war Chaucer is fighting between love and ambition, running underneath the external one.
• What's next: The Storyteller's Reputation is with the publisher awaiting word, and book three, The Storyteller's Silence, is in research.

Read more from J.C. Corry at jccorry.com

Support the show

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...