Things that inspire me – #HistoricalFiction #Ballet #Giveaway

By MG da Mota (Guest Blogger)

Inspiration comes from very different things and sometimes from quite unexpected sources. For example, years ago when I visited on holiday the Portuguese Islands of the Azores, I saw a beautiful house, a little derelict, but which I could see it had once been glorious. It stood in the middle of a garden and small park with tall, ancient trees. I remember looking at it and asking my husband to take a picture because I’d need it for a novel. The impact of the house and the islands with their rugged, in places wild, beauty was so strong I instantly felt a story and its characters populating my head. I tend to have a small notebook in my handbag or rucksack and I took it out and jotted down furiously the ideas that seemed to explode inside my brain. After returning home, I eventually wrote a novel entitled The Dark Side of Dawn. 

Music, great opera or ballet also inspire me. I wrote a novel based on grand opera and a type of voice I particularly like (a tenor’s voice) with an Italian title as a homage to opera, Canto di Tenore. This novel is currently out of print but I will be revising it and republishing it at some stage. Of course the book in this tour, Arabesque¸ was inspired by ballet and ballet dancers. 

I can also get inspiration from dark events. For example in my trilogy The Triptych one of the characters is imprisoned for a few years in a basement by a man and forced to have his child. I heard a similar story in the news and it didn’t let go of me until I began writing the novel. Of course for this trilogy the other inspirations were the biography of the intriguing, unconventional life of Guilhermina Suggia—a Portuguese cellist from the first half of the 20^th century—and the beauty of the instruments made by Antonio Stradivari, particularly his cellos. People are aware of the violins but know little or next to nothing about the cellos.

A poem can also be the inspiration for a novel and I’ve had a couple of cases when that happened, as for example my novel Unbowed, inspired by the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley.

Historical periods or events are often a source of inspiration like East Germany before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in Arabesque and Portugal during the years of WWII in my novel Stars Maintain Their Glow.

I hope to have shown how many different things can inspire me to write a novel. The point is that a writer never knows (or at least I don’t) where inspiration will come from. Often when I least expect it an idea just turns up in my head. It is probably different for other people but this is how it is for me personally.

Blurb

A woman living alone in a coastal Sussex town in 1998 plants a copper beech sapling at 3 a.m. on a dark, cold night. Why? 

A ballet dancer in 1960s East Germany is oppressed, longs for escaping with his little daughter but not his wife. Why? Will he make it?

In 2022 Karsten von Stein, widower and principal of the Royal Ballet, with two young children, meets Ivone Benjamim, a Portuguese, newly-arrived principal dancer. They discover a magical chemistry when dancing and soon it transfers to their private lives.

Against the background of ballet and its dancers, a woman called Grace tells her story from a rehab centre. Obsessive, delusional she begins believing Ivone robbed her of the man of her dreams—Karsten. And then a skeleton is found in a garden...What connects all these people and their stories?

You’ll be the audience facing the stage of this balletic novel.

Excerpt

Prologue

Southeast England, late November 1998

She looks out of the window. Dark night. Black but clear. Twinkling dots punctuate the raven velvet of the sky. Stars shimmer cold and icy. Their light slightly wavering. She knows it is the Earth’s atmosphere. But that’s neither here nor there. It doesn’t matter a jot. Not at this moment anyway.

Darkness is the important thing. No moon. New moon. Why do people refer to a new moon when there is no moon or when one cannot see the moon from our revolving, ever turning blue dot? The moon is still up there in the sky. It’s just that at some point during its orbit its farther side from us is facing the sun. So the side facing us is dark and we can’t see it. As simple as that.

Tonight is new moon. An ideal night. She opens the window quietly and glances at the houses to her right first, then to her left. Like hers they are all immersed in silent darkness. People sleep. She looks at the luminous hands of her alarm clock on the side table. The shorter hand points at the number three, or close to it, and the long hand at somewhere between ten and fifteen. Probably around 3:12 in the morning. Her house stands almost but not quite alone on top of the hill. To her right, looking from her bedroom window that faces the back garden, there are two houses. The one closest to hers is empty.

About the Author

M G da Mota is Margarida Mota-Bull’s pen name for fiction. She is a Portuguese-British novelist with a love for classical music, ballet and opera. Under her real name she also writes reviews of live concerts, CDs, DVDs and books for two classical music magazines on the web: MusicWeb International and Seen and Heard International. She is a member of the UK Society of Authors, speaks four languages and lives in Sussex with her husband. Her website, called flowingprose.com, contains photos and information.

Website: https://www.flowingprose.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/m.g.da.mota

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margarida-mota-bull/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mgdamota/

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