Guest Author Donna Thorland Talks Musical Soundtrack for The Rebel Pirate (+Giveaway)

Please welcome Donna Thorland to Book Binge for an exclusive Q&A. She’s here promoting her book, The Rebel Pirate.

About the book:

1775, Boston Harbor. James Sparhawk, Master and Commander in the British Navy, knows trouble when he sees it. The ship he’s boarded is carrying ammunition and gold…into a country on the knife’s edge of war. Sparhawk’s duty is clear: confiscate the cargo, impound the vessel and seize the crew. But when one of the ship’s boys turns out to be a lovely girl, with a loaded pistol and dead-shot aim, Sparhawk finds himself held hostage aboard a Rebel privateer.

Sarah Ward never set out to break the law. Before Boston became a powder keg, she was poised to escape the stigma of being a notorious pirate’s daughter by wedding Micah Wild, one of Salem’s most successful merchants. Then a Patriot mob destroyed her fortune and Wild played her false by marrying her best friend and smuggling a chest of Rebel gold aboard her family’s ship.

Now branded a pirate herself, Sarah will do what she must to secure her family’s safety and her own future. Even if that means taking part in the cat and mouse game unfolding in Boston Harbor, the desperate naval fight between British and Rebel forces for the materiel of war—and pitting herself against James Sparhawk, the one man she cannot resist.

BB: What is the musical soundtrack you imagined to go along with THE REBEL PIRATE?

Donna Thorland: I trained as a filmmaker and at USC they encourage you to make a scene work without the music first (thank you Tom Holman and David Bondelevitch), so I tend not to imagine score except when I think it would be integral but there are two places in my first book, THE TURNCOAT, where I would have used music if I’d been making the movie.

The first takes place as the hero and heroine are riding through occupied Philadelphia after curfew to an assignation at a cottage in the Neck. It’s tense passage in the book, and I’ve always imagined The King’s Singers version of the Welsh ballad “All Through The Night” to accompany that scene:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000TDUTJ0/ref=dm_ws_tlw_trk14_B000TDUTJ0

And there’s a scene near the end of the story when the heroine meets with Washington after she’s completed a mission for him at great cost to herself, and sees the army she has helped him build at Valley Forge. I’ve always imagined the American Fife Ensemble playing the “Brickmaker March.” Real film geeks who have read the book will appreciate that the march would be diegetic, that is, it would be played by the military band in the scene.

http://www.amazon.com/Brickmaker-March/dp/B003WP3R8M

For THE REBEL PIRATE, it’s even tougher. Perhaps, we’ll have to resurrect Erich Wolfgang Korngold to write some new music! He gave us the scores for such wondrous Errol Flynn vehicles as Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk.

Giveaway:  One lucky commenter will win a copy of THE REBEL PIRATE by Donna Thorland (US only, sorry!)

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Good luck!

A huge thank you to Donna Thorland for stopping by Book Binge and hanging with us today.  Enter the giveaway for your chance to win a copy of THE REBEL PIRATE!

The Rebel Pirate Blog Tour continues:

March 3- Bitten by Books
March 4- Fresh Fiction
March 5- Book Binge
March 6- My Book Addiction and more
March 10- Writer Space
March 11- Romance Dish
March 12- The Royal Review
March 13- Savvy Verse and Wit
March 14- The Maiden’s Court

About the Author: A native of Bergenfield, New Jersey, Donna graduated from Yale with a degree in Classics and Art History. For many years she managed architecture and interpretation at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, and wrote and directed the Witch City’s most popular Halloween theater festival, Eerie Events. She later earned an MFA in film production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Donna has been a sorority house mother, a Disney/ABC Television Writing Fellow, a WGA Writer’s Access Project Honoree, and a staff writer on the ABC primetime drama, Cupid. Her screenwriting credits include episodes of the animated series, Tron: Uprising. Her short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Albedo One. The director of several award-winning short films, her most recent project, The Night Caller, aired on WNET Channel 13 and was featured on Ain’t It Cool News. She is married with one cat and divides her time between Los Angeles and Salem. (Source)

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