"Gimme the beat, boys, and free my soul. I want to get lost in your rock n roll and drift away."
It was probably appropriate that the first book I, a lifelong music aficionado, sold for publication was a story set largely in a club where music plays a central, often critical, role.
The Python is the place to see and be seen in the Edmonton I envisioned for Divinity & the Python. As a nightclub, The Python is fully aware that it is slick, sexy...and a little bit sinister. It revels in its edginess, and as such puts on its cocky best when the local hockey gods - Ladies and Gentlemen, your Edmonton Oilers! - choose to stroll through its doors. The Python lauds the team with a theme song - a vintage track, yet one with a sly, whiplash smile not unlike that of Hockey God Cameron Weste himself. Here it is:
Yet while The Python blatantly flaunts its sinful side, Divinity, the true power-house of supernatural ability, squats silently downtown. Once a funeral parlor with a morgue in its basement, no amount of scrubbing has been able to lift the strange stains off its downstairs floor, and sometimes the stained glass upstairs fills the whole sanctum with color...even when there is no sunlight coming in from outside. Nonetheless, Divinity is not scary.
Unless it wants you scared.
The old morgue is Shaynie's rescue project that rescues her right back, and rather than being a person haunting a building, it is a building that has somehow become a person. Oddly (and sometimes unnervingly) the scenes that occur within the old morgue generated some of the deepest serenity I have ever felt as a writer...even when those very scenes were fraught with malice and eerie mojo. Divinity is both a sinner and a saint, and even now, several years post-publication, I am uncertain as to how safe the old morgue really is.
I suppose it depends on what one's intentions are when one visits it.
Sarah McLachlan, the Grande Dame of many ethereally arcane tracks, released Ice - and it captures the essence (or dare I say spirit?) of Divinity better than any other.
Not that Shaynie is always inclined to listen to her old morgue. In fact one night - ever after referred to as Hellnight - Shaynie, freshly split from her boyfriend, tosses all caution to the wind. But her intention to party hard detonates wildly - and harshly - in her face. She wakes injured. Violated. Horrified, and scrubbed clean of every memory other than a song that, throughout the story, functions like a mind-control mantra and dark directive:
Ahem. I mentioned that I am a music aficionado. That's true, and yet other music lovers have accused me jokingly (and sometimes nastily) of heresy, because here's a confession: I hate The Beatles. Hate 'em. Always have, always will. And so it was with a perverse sort of pleasure that Let It Be became the twisted hymn of Hellnight. <chuckles up sleeve>
Moving on....
Cameron Weste has a whiplash-smile and a sexy strut. Noel Nelson, his teammate (and second banana) snipes: "He's given more rides than Greyhound" and <cringe> he's right.
Still, Cameron is (and remains) impossible not to love, and every time he came strutting into The Python I laughed out loud (yes: sitting at my kitchen table, alone with my scribbler, I would laugh. Because writer = insane lunatic. Google it. It's true.). The following track is, definitively, Cameron Weste's theme song:
The action isn't always lighthearted, though. When Shaynie's stalker accelerates his threats to the point where even her cop brother, Andrew, cannot protect her, and Cameron is on a road trip playing hockey out of town, Shaynie evokes what she hopes will be a protective measure surrounding her precious Divinity: a ring of white candles and salt. It was mesmerizing to imagine her, working clockwise in a circle while a blizzard rages 'round, and this little-known track, with its unusual, hypnotic rhythm, played on repeat as I crafted that particular scene:
But stalkers are people too, right?
Right?
<frogs croak. Crickets chirp>
Shaynie's stalker is ruthless, omnipotent, and has temper-fits like a child. His mechanics escalate, ever carelessly (and fatalistically) throughout the story...yet the saddest part behind the scenes - where I, as the writer, knew far more about this character than the reader ever learns - was a deeply troubled and fantastically lovelorn lunacy. A guy who knew, in his heart, how vastly sick he really was. Here's his theme song:
Cameron and Shaynie are drawn to each other from the onset of eye contact, yet danger, lost memories, and lies tear them apart again and again. Still, Shaynie - who has vowed before the story even opens that she's done with men - longs for Cameron...even though he hurts her over and over, and despite the fact that he is literally begging his agent to get him traded OUT of 'Deadmonton'.
Still...he bought her that beautiful necklace, didn't he? And they shared that creamy chocolate ganache that night in Divinity when he showed up drunk and she was scared...right? And then she slept, alone and yet safely, under that amazing ceiling of stars he has in that incredible bedroom...didn't she?
So maybe if the timing was different...
perhaps if they didn't have such wildly different goals...
if there wasn't a stalker, a Hellnight, and so many half truths, no truths, and flat out lies....well, maybe. Just maybe they could completely be in love....
Here is Shaynie & Cameron's love song:
PS: If you have not read Shaynie & Cameron's love story, click right HERE: https://www.amazon.com/Divinity-Python-Secrets-Shadows-Randall/dp/0994026404/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1554484602&sr=8-3
And, if you have read their story, and would like to be a guest at their wedding, then follow me HERE: https://www.facebook.com/Bonnie-Randall-Writer-377492995704708/ because Andrew's story gets released this month, and if i remember correctly, he re-meets the love of his life at Shaynie & Cameron's mountain wedding...