The Storm Bottle by Nick Green Ten's list, and Giveaway $25!!!

The Storm Bottle Swimming with dolphins is said to be the number one thing to do before you die. For 12-year-old Michael, it very nearly is. A secret boat trip has gone tragically wrong, and now he lies unconscious in hospital. But when Michael finally wakes up, he seems different. His step sister Bibi is soon convinced that he is not who he appears to be. Meanwhile, in the ocean beyond Bermuda’s reefs, a group of bottlenose dolphins are astonished to discover a stranger in their midst – a boy lost and desperate to return home. Bermuda is a place of mysteries. Some believe its seas are enchanted, and the sun-drenched islands conceal a darker past, haunted with tales of lost ships. Now Bibi and Michael are finding themselves in the most extraordinary tale of all. Book Trailer  
Praise
'I loved it... An absolute winner.' - LA Weatherly, author of the Angel Burn trilogy
 'A writer who knows how to grip the imagination, make you sit on the edge of your chair, and make you laugh out loud.' - Michelle Lovric, author of The Undrowned Child, The Mourning Emporium and The Book of Human Skin
 'If you only ever buy one Kindle book in your life (although that sounds a bit unlikely, now that I stop and think) this has to be it.' - The Bookwitch blog.

Author Nick Green
 Nick Green is a UK children's and YA author, best known for his trilogy The Cat Kin, published in the UK by Strident Publishing and in Germany by Ravensburger, and also as a BBC audiobook. He has appeared on BBC radio talking about his books, and has been shortlisted for two UK children's book awards. He regularly does school visits and other children's literary events. The Storm Bottle is his first straight-to-Kindle novel.

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Author's tens list:

Storm Bottle Blog Tour Tens list Deal Sharing 5/19‏

The Top 10 of musical inspiration

I don’t write while listening to music. That’s because if I’m writing, I’m not really listening, and if I’m listening… you get the idea. I’m not someone who just likes having music on in the background. I mean, think about it. Someone busted a gut learning how to play, sing or compose like that, and you’re repaying their efforts by three-quarters ignoring them? Did they blister their fingers or vocal chords so that you could use them as wallpaper? It’s one of the reasons I don’t like jazz bars. I like jazz just fine. But I hate the way everyone sits there talking while the musicians are giving it their all. That’s just… rude.

So I don’t write to music. But music does often spark the ideas that lead to the writing. My top ten list here is of the artists in my CD collection who are most likely to get the creative wheels turning. Some of them inspired specific books, or events in those books, while others just helped to get the neurons firing. Turn up and enjoy.

10. Bach.

I know, Bach should really be number one. Like a lot of people, I think he’s the greatest composer who ever lived. But I’m talking specific writing inspiration here, not the objective quality of the music. When I first started writing fiction, at university, I had very little classical in my collection, but one tape was of a few Brandenburg Concertos. Now those pieces (especially Brandenburg 3) are forever associated in my mind with those first tentative steps into a story.

9. Brumel / Tallis / Palestrina etc

The ethereal voices of Renaissance period music are the original chill-out music. And if that sounds like a flippant dismissal of some of the greatest geniuses of all time, then that’s just me trying to hide how much they get to me. Listening to something like Brumel’s Earthquake Mass can bring about an altered state of consciousness, almost. And that’s when the best ideas can creep up on you.

8. Bjorn Lynne.

You’re thinking, Who? But that’s what the internet is for. Go and google him, now. Okay? Quick summary: Bjorn Lynne is a Norwegian composer and multi-instrumentalist, who started out composing music for the old 16-bit computers of the late 1980s. Later on he started producing long epic albums based on sci-fi themes or actual fantasy novels. It is actually a serious ambition of mine to have him ‘do’ one of my books. For now, I’ll have to be content with getting my ideas from his magical soundscapes.

7. Croftville

Just in case you thought Bjorn Lynne wasn’t obscure enough. The artist ‘Croftville’ is actually a friend of mine, Alan Cumming (no, not that one), and he composes albums of guitar music… and he doesn’t release them. Why? I’ve asked him that many times. All he does is send them to me and a few other close friends, and then he records the next one. I find the music itself gives me plenty of ideas, but the real inspiration comes from this odd, almost perverse practice of his. Why compose music that hardly anyone ever gets to hear? I think his point is that the music is an end in itself. That’s a very valuable thing to remember for any artist, whether musician, writer or whatever. When I put on a Croftville CD, I feel both a sense of privilege and a sense of reassurance: you don’t always have to chase a huge audience. Sometimes just creating is enough.

6. Porcupine Tree

No, I’m not winding you up, there is really a band called Porcupine Tree. They refuse to explain why. I think the reason is that they started out being very psychedelic, and the name stuck, but now they’ve gone dark and brooding so it doesn’t really suit them. Be that as it may. I love Porcupine Tree for the way they never follow trends but make them instead – they were playing Radiohead and Muse long before Muse and Radiohead were – and then when someone else makes a million out of their ideas, they just shrug and start exploring new territories.

5. Vangelis

Ah, someone you’ve heard of. Vangelis is best known for his soundtracks – Chariots of Fire, Bladerunner and so on, but there’s a lot more to him than that. Some of his soundscapes were instrumental (pun intended) in inspiring many of the underwater sequences in my book The Storm Bottle. In particular, there’s a sequence in the book involving the song of a humpback whale, and I had a definite Vangelis piece in mind when I was writing that.

Vangelis, along with singer Jon Anderson, also helped to inspire the second book in my Cat Kin trilogy, Cat’s Paw, with their song ‘I’ll find my way home’. Being lost and seeking home was a key theme in that story, and much of it came from listening to that song. The song even finds its way into the book, but you have to read carefully to spot it.

4. Yes

Speaking of Jon Anderson – he was also the lead singer in the progressive rock group Yes. At their best, Yes are my favourite band of all time. In the past they’ve made some extended pieces that are like nothing else on earth, smashing the rules of music and reassembling them in amazing new structures. The best Yes songs are too far-out and abstract to have inspired any particular ideas for my writing. But what they do is blow my mind wide open, so that what seemed impossible and crazy suddenly isn’t anymore. Best tracks to check out: ‘Close To The Edge’ (the whole album), ‘Awaken’ and ‘Heart of the Sunrise’.

3. Mike Oldfield

There’s so, SO much more to Mike Oldfield than Tubular Bells. Some people still think of him as a one-hit wonder, but I wouldn’t even rank Tubular Bells in his top  five albums. At his best he’s both a virtuoso and utterly bonkers. For inspiration, the pastoral ‘Ommadawn’ or the mad-epic ‘Amarok’ (one track, one hour) are the tops.

2. Dream Theater

Think heavy metal, then add subtlety, and sensitivity, and an insane amount of brain power, and you have some idea of the old DT. Some would say they’re too clever for their own good, and I often don’t really feel like listening to them – but their music is so packed full of startling ideas that I never fail to get ideas from it. There is one particular scene in The Storm Bottle, when a hurricane descends upon the island of Bermuda, which I wrote almost to the template of a Dream Theater song. The music rose and fell and pitched like the various violent phases of the storm, and I ended up following it very closely. I’ve never written anything that way before, which is why Dream Theater gets a special mention.

1. My dad

My dad spent all his working life as a professional musician. He convinced me it was always best to pursue the thing you love doing. So this musician is the single biggest reason why I write.

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