No Roots - Alice Merton
Lone Ranger - Rachel Platten
As is my wont, I've turned these songs over in search of characters I can connect them to ... and come up blank. These are both tales of wanderers, and more than that, wanderers by choice, without strong ties to where they've come from or the specific intention of finding some place to put down ... well ... roots.
Both my current novels in progress - Surgeburnt in draft stage, Unnatural Causes in final edits - center on a single location. Obviously, that's easier from a descriptive standpoint, but given the fact that I worldbuild obsessively, I certainly could send my cast further afield. Scylla and Charybdis is a novel of journeys, but Anaea is deeply informed by where she has come from. I lack the kind of rootless-by-choice drifter the songs above describe. Perhaps it's because I'm a homebody at heart; perhaps it's that the type of stories I tend to tell don't lend themselves well to this kind of wandering.
Or perhaps it's a phase I have yet to get into. I find I tend to go through loose trends / themes with my writing. Right now, it's snarky narrators, women with attitude who tend to bring a tongue-in-cheek air and sarcasm to their world. Who knows where I will travel next?
