Soundtrack Sunday – “Masterpiece”

It seemed like time to get a little normalcy back to the blog and I haven’t done one of these since October.

I’ve two weeks left on one of these meds (the other is for life), though last week got me down to a low enough dose that I can function better now and I haven’t needed benzos to compensate. No panic attacks and tachycardia for a couple of weeks, and no longer lying in bed crying and praying it’ll end soon.

Am I in remission? Who knows! I just want to get some projects finished so I can afford groceries again.

We’re getting close to Dweller on the Threshold‘s release, but I’ll wait and do that soundtrack later in March (also head over to Patreon on March 1 if you want to get an eight-chapter preview!). The last couple of weeks I haven’t been able to write anything new, but I pulled out the Waverly Jones books I finished last year to get them into a more reasonable shape.

I’m very much in love with them.

I can’t believe after struggling all those years with the first book that I not only have two done but they hold up and I’m so excited to write more (I wish, in fact, I had a half a dozen done that I could read back to back right now).

As you can see on the series page as well as with the jacket copy for The Killing Beach, when she was seventeen, Waverly’s sister was the last known victim of a serial killer who went dormant, though her body’s never been found. The Crossroads Butcher killed in groups of three before moving onto a new location, so prior to her sister, there were two other victims, and the high-profile case brought visiting officers–including the brilliant and compassionate Detective Sebastian Kyle, who Waverly fell in love with despite discouragement on his side of things (her therapists would call it “infatuation”–and that’s why she won’t talk to them anymore).

If teen-girl-inserts-herself-in-a-serial-killer-investigation-and-falls-in-love-with-a-detective-who-vanishes-mysteriously sounds familiar, well…

Similarities end there, however–Waverly is a very, very different person. But plenty of songs on Waverly’s soundtrack came from watching Audrey/Cooper vids on YouTube.

Such as this one–“Masterpiece” by Madonna.

From the moment I first saw you

All the darkness turned to light

This is all in the past, of course–Sebastian Kyle has been missing for over a decade, no leads on his whereabouts and his body hasn’t been found (yet), but being drawn back to her hometown amidst a major case, a lot of memories come back.

Like being in love with a masterpiece.

It seems to me is what you are

A rare and priceless work of art

Stay behind your velvet rope

But I will not renounce all hope

I could write entire essays about how I will never ever forgive anyone for how Audrey was treated in The Return, but I think a big part is that as a young girl (seven when it aired), I really admired her. Here was a smart, curious young woman like so many of the heroines in books I read (eg Nancy Drew) trying to investigate a murder, and though gently, respectfully rebuffed by the older man running the case (because she was eighteen!), she still tried to help. Repeatedly. After the premature end of the show, with all this potential the character had…we find out in the intervening years she was raped by an evil doppelganger, had the evil child, did absolutely nothing with her life, went crazy and ended up in a mental institution.

That was not my Audrey.

That was not the capable, resilient person I’d admired since I was seven. That was not the young woman who vowed one day she’d be grown-up and on her own and Cooper had better watch out.

Or, y’know, who went undercover and threatened a dude in an effort to find out who killed Laura Palmer.

Yeah, I’ll die mad about it.

But at least I’ve got Waverly.

She’s an adult now, she’s a private investigator…and she doesn’t like people. She’s got anxiety. She’s obsessive. Super manipulative. She talks to the hallucination of her dead sister. Sebastian Kyle was very much her polar opposite even back then and definitely now, and maybe that’s partly why she clings to the memory of him still.

Along with wondering what happened to him.

And I’m right by your side

Like a thief in the night

I stand in front of the masterpiece

And I can’t tell you why

It hurts so much

To be in love with a masterpiece

You don’t get to meet Waverly until next year (May 30 2023) but I am SO excited to share this book with y’all.