My Life Does Not Have a Rockin' Bass Track

Those were the words of my third ex-husband. He saw the soundtrack of my life being much more akin to the soundtrack from "The Little Rascals," rather than the soundtrack to "Fight Club."

What's your soundtrack? A recent study has shown that listening to happy music not only elevates your own mood, but can be good for you. My gut feeling is that it's true. I can be moved to tears of joy by music. I can also be moved to tears of grief, rage and hopelessness. And I listen to that kind of music far more than I should. My family knows exactly what I've been listening to in the car by the look on my face when I get out.

With the widespread availability of iPods and other devices that put enormous musical libraries into containers the size of cigarette packs, it's a common sight nowadays to see people plugged in everywhere - at work, at the gym, walking down the street, at the grocery store. In effect, everyone's life now has a sound track.

I have put my sound track to work for me. Each story I write has its own soundtrack so that if I'm interrupted in the middle of something, I can slip right back into the mood I was in when I wrote it. Normally it's music from the area or era of my story, but it can also be techno or country, or whatever it is that made me think of that story in the first place. It's sad to think that many of my characters have lives that are utterly governed by a rockin' bass track, but I myself am tootling along.