Promotion
To celebrate the release of Sing Like No One's Listening by Vanessa Jones on September first 2020, blogs across the web are featuring original content from Vanessa, as well as ten chances to win a finished copy plus a grand prize giveaway!
Sing Like No One's Listening
Written by Vanessa Jones
Contemporary, Mental Health, Romance, Music
Published September 1st 2020
384 Pages
Add to Goodreads
Purchase from Amazon or Indiebound
Written by Vanessa Jones
Contemporary, Mental Health, Romance, Music
Published September 1st 2020
384 Pages
Add to Goodreads
Purchase from Amazon or Indiebound
A moving story of grief and healing, sure to be a pure joy for any musical theatre aficionado.
Nettie Delaney has just been accepted into a prestigious performing arts school, the very same school her superstar mother attended. With her mother’s shadow hanging over her, Nettie has her work cut out for her and everyone is watching. To make matters worse, Nettie hasn’t been able to sing a single note since her mother died. Whenever she tries, she just clams up. But if Nettie’s going to survive a demanding first year and keep her place in a highly coveted program, she’ll have to work through her grief and deliver a showstopper or face expulsion.
All may not be lost, however, when Nettie stumbles upon a mysterious piano player in an empty studio after class. Masked behind a curtain, can Nettie summon the courage to find her voice? Or will the pressure and anxiety of performing come crashing down?
My Five Worst Auditions Ever by Vanessa Jones
In the very first scene in Sing Like No One’s Listening, the main character Nettie has a disastrous audition at the performing arts college she is desperate to get into. In honour of this, I thought I’d share my own worst audition experiences with you from my time as a performer in West End shows. Worryingly, there were lots to choose from!
Close the door on your way out
If I remember correctly, this was my second callback for Les Misérables at the Palace Theatre. I was up for the part of Fantine and, buoyed by the two successful auditions I had under my belt, I was feeling positive. Good, even. I knew my material, my voice was in great shape and I walked into the studio with the air of a girl who knows what she wants.
The song went well, I had a short interview with the panel, who seemed to like me, and that was that. No mistakes, no bum notes. Yay me! I thanked the team and went back over to the door, and that was when it all started to go downhill. I couldn’t get out of the room. The door was stuck. I pulled and pulled with all my might, rattled the handle, I even tried putting my fingers in the gaps at the sides to prise it open, but it was no good. I’ve had a fear of being locked in a room since I was little and the door handle came off the inside of my bedroom door, and my mind jumped straight to the worst case scenario, which involved locksmiths and the fire service and having to wait all day in a room full of important showbiz people who didn’t want me there.
After a minute, the casting director noticed that something was up. He asked me if I was alright.
No! I gasped. The door’s stuck. We’re trapped in here.
The corner of his mouth twitched. Darling, read the sign.
I looked up, and to my horror, saw a large sign reading Push. Humiliated, I touched the door and easily made my way out of the studio, the echoes of laughter following me down the corridor and pretty much all the way home.
Wishing you would somehow remember your words
This was my final recall for the part of Christine in The Phantom of the Opera. I was nervous beyond anything I’d ever known before. The first song the musical director asked me to sing was Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again, which is one of Christine’s main ballads. I got through the first verse okay, but when the chorus hit, I blanked.
Shall we go again from the chorus? said the musical director, a little annoyed.
Uh, sure, thanks, I said. This was a one off. Put it down to nerves. Next time would be better, now that I had warmed up. He played me in, my brain going into overdrive to find the words. But nothing.
I’m so sorry, I said. Could you remind me of the lyrics, please?
The casting director looked at me as if I’d just told her Prince Charles was outside waiting to audition. It’s wishing you were somehow here again? she said drily. The... title of the song?
I’m still waiting for the call.
I’m only doing this for kicks
Dance call, can’t remember the show. Could have been Beauty and the Beast. Something with a lot of kicks, anyway. We’d learnt the routine and it was my turn to be called up to dance. Everything was going well until my shoe suddenly came loose (how?) and flew off into the air. The room looked on in horror as it connected with... the choreographer’s face. Ice was fetched, a chair brought out and a thousand grovelling apologies were made by me. When the names of all the people who had made the cut were read out, the casting director said Vanessa, actually, scrap that. I mean, fair enough.
Cry Me a River
This one actually wasn’t funny at all. On my way to the audition, which I was running late for, a girl in my carriage on the train started having a fit. Alarmed, I went over to see if she was okay, which she clearly wasn’t. I was unsure what to do, apart from make sure her head was cushioned and that she wouldn’t hurt herself, which I’d read somewhere. After I’d done that, I called down the carriage for help. The other passengers looked up from their newspapers and phones, and then ignored me. Like, who does that? Panicking, I pulled the cord for the train to stop and waited for the paramedics to arrive. As soon as they did and I could see that she was going to be fine, I ran all the way to my audition, arriving sweaty, late, stressed, and angry that no one had helped me. Someone on the panel asked me if I was okay, and instead of saying, Yes, just a bit of a rush to get here or something equally as bland, I told them the whole story. And what’s worse, I ugly cried the entire way through, and continued to do this during my song, which unfortunately wasn’t the kind of song that lent itself to tears. They were sympathetic. I did not get the job.
High Enough For You?
This was a casting for a brand new, off West End show. The kind of job you hope you’ll land because it could be the start of something much bigger. A chance to create a role, the prospect of a West End transfer, an Olivier award... At this stage in development, however, they couldn’t even afford an accompanist on the piano, so it was stated on the breakdown that we would be asked to sing acapella. Which would have been fine if I hadn’t randomly decided to start my song almost an octave too high. When I realised my mistake, I stopped and changed keys, right? No. I decided to push on to the end. How difficult could it be? The result was an ending that was now something only dogs could hear, especially in my Lina Lamont voice, which was the only way I could get up there. No Olivier. This time.
Something I’ll never forget is when I came out of that audition, I saw a girl who’d been in the year above me at college, waiting to go to class in another studio. I told her I’d ruined my audition by singing too high, and she said, Oh, don’t worry about it, I’ve had so many bad auditions I couldn’t even count them. It’s part of the job.
It stayed with me, the way she was so unfazed. The more I thought about it later, the more I realised how right she was, failure is part of the job. As soon as I accepted that, not only did I start to do a lot better in auditions, but I didn’t stress as much about them. It’s like, yes, we all want to do well, but sometimes it’s okay to fail. You can just get back up and try again. Possibly learn something. And who knows? Maybe there’s something better around the corner...
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Giveaways
One person will receive a finished copy of Sing Like No One's Listening. US and Canadian residents only. Ends September 13th 2020. If you are under sixteen years of age, please ask your parents for permission.
Win a copy of Sing Like No One's Listening and a wireless bluetooth karaoke microphone. US and Canadian residents only. Ends September 13th 2020. If you are under sixteen years of age, please ask your parents for permission.
About The Author
Vanessa Jones trained at Laine Theatre Arts and went on to be a musical theater actor in West End Shows, including Sister Act, Grease, Guys and Dolls, Annie Get Your Gun, and Mary Poppins. She began her writing career with a stage play for a fringe theater and also works as a freelance copywriter and editor. She lives in England with her fellow chimney sweep.
As part of the Bloomsbury Australia blog tour, I'm celebrating the release of The Priory of the Orange Tree by celebrating the the magnificent females of acclaimed author Samantha Shannon's Queendom.
Written by Samantha Shannon
Adult, Fantasy, Dragons
848 Pages
Gifted by Bloomsbury Australia
Add to Goodreads
A world divided.
A queendom without an heir.
An ancient enemy awakens.
The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction but assassins are getting closer to her door.
Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady in waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.
Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.
Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.
Eadaz Duryan
Eadaz is a young woman placed within a foreign kingdom to safeguard the Queen. Eadaz resides within the palatial compound, her forthright sincerity winning the favour of the Queen as she is elevated to a lady of the bedchamber and secretly safeguarding Sabran against cutthroats. Although committed to the mages of the Priory of The Orange Tree, Eadaz is conflicted by her affection for Sabran. Her close proximity to Sabran will endanger the Queendom and her life.
Queen Sabran Berethnet
The Nameless One, a dragon that brought upon the Grief of Ages that decimated Queendoms is rousing once more, the prophesy leading Sabran, a young Queen coerced into matrimony for political alliance to conceive a daughter. Sabran is an independent woman and although tenacious and resolute, her anxiety and affliction is palpable. Suitors for her affections are presented to the court, Sabran expected to choose a notable partner and conceive to protect her Queendom against the slumbering dragons. She is plagued by nightmares of children lost within the forest, of mages who practice forbidden magic.
Without a Berethnet heir, the Queendom will be overthrown.
Tané Miduchi
Tané Miduchi is a young woman born of a lowly caste and an aspiring dragonrider. On the eve the Choosing Day when riders will learn heir fate, she rescues a young man that emerges from the ocean and risking the Draconic Plague, arranges the stranger to be concealed illegally upon the island peninsula. In her position as student, Tané has experienced blatant socioeconomic and classist prejudice. Degraded and tormented as a successful young woman on the threshold of entering the prestigious Dragonriders.
Females Of The Queendom
The Donmata Marosa, Crown Princess of the Draconic Kingdom of Yscalin.
The Dowager Duchess of Zeedeur. Kalyba, the Lady of the Woods.
The Pirate Captain, sovereign of the Sundance Sea with forty thousand pirates under her command.
Mita Yedanya, The Prioress.
And, Dragon Nayimathun of the Deep Snows.
Who run the world
Of our matriarchal societies. Of women in authority. Women who aspire. Women who achieve. It's diverse women. It's women who love women. It's females who are vulnerable, resilient and determined. It's women at our finest. The heroine. The villainous. The Priory of the Orange Tree is a celebration of women. Let queendom reign!
No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough.
To celebrate the new paperback release of the incredible The Mime Order, book two in The Bone Season series, today I'll be sharing an excerpt from The Mime Order from the sensational Samantha Shannon. For those of you who are yet to discover The Bone Season, it's an incredible and unique fusion of fantasy, dystopian, science fiction and with an intense and slow burning romance that will surprise and enthrall readers. Stay tuned for my review of book one coming soon.
The Mime Order The Bone Season Book Two
Written by Samantha Shannon
Add The Mime Order to Goodreads
Paige Mahoney has escaped the brutal prison camp of Sheol I, but her problems have only just begun, many of the survivors are missing and she is the most wanted person in London...As Scion turns its all seeing eye on the dreamwalker, the mime lords and mime-queens of the city's gangs are invited to a rare meeting of the Unnatural Assembly. Jaxon Hall and his Seven Seals prepare to take centre stage, but there are bitter fault lines running through the clairvoyant community and dark secrets around every corner.Then the Rephaim begin crawling out from the shadows. But where is Warden? Paige must keep moving, from Seven Dials to Grub Street to the secret catacombs of Camden, until the fate of the underworld can be decided.
THE MIME ORDER EXCERPT
"It’s rare that a story begins at the beginning. In the grand scheme of things, I really turned up at the beginning of the end of this one. After all, the story of the Rephaim and
Scion started almost two hundred years before I was born – and human lives, to Rephaim, are as fleeting as a single heartbeat.
Some revolutions change the world in a day. Others take decades or centuries or more, and others still never come to fruition. Mine began with a moment and a choice. Mine began with the blooming of a flower in a secret city on the border between worlds.
You’ll have to wait and see how it ends. Welcome back to Scion."
LONG STORY
She appeared at 6 A.M. She always did.
My hand snatched a revolver from the table. The theme for ScionEye was playing. A sweeping, theatrical composition, based around the twelve chimes of Big Ben.
I waited.
There she was. Scarlett Burnish, Grand Raconteur of London, white lace frothing from the top of her black dress. She always looked the same, of course – like some hellish automaton – but on occasion, when some poor denizen had been ‘killed’ or ‘assaulted’ by an unnatural, she could exude manufactured distress. Today, however, she was smiling.
‘Good morning, and welcome to another day in Scion London. Good news as the Guild of Vigilance announces an expansion of its Sunlight division, with at least fifty more officers due to be sworn in this Monday. The Chief of Vigilance has stated that the New Year will bring new challenges to the citadel, and that in these perilous times, it remains critical for the denizens of London to pull together and—’
I switched it off.
There was no breaking news. Nothing, I thought, over and over. No faces. No hangings.
The gun clattered back on to the table. I’d been lying on a couch all night, flinching upright at the softest sound. My muscles were stiff and painful; it took some time to manoeuvre into a standing position. Every time the ache began to ebb, a fresh wave would come, surging from a jolted bruise or strain. I should be heading for bed, as was my custom at dawn, but I had to get up, just for a minute. A glint of natural light would do me good.
Once I’d stretched my legs, I switched on the music player in the corner. Billie Holiday’s ‘Guilty’ drifted out. Nick had dropped off a few forbidden records from the den on his way to work, along with the small amount of money he could spare and a pile of books I hadn’t touched. I’d found myself missing Warden’s gramophone. You could get used to being lullabied by the lovelorn crooners of the free world.
It had been three days since the escape. My new home was a dingy doss-house in I-4, tucked away in a warren of Soho back- streets. Most voyant establishments were ramshackle dumps, hardly fit to live in, but the landlord – a cleidomancer, whom I suspected had opened a doss-house just so he could finger keys for a living – had kept this one free of rodents, if not the creeping damp. He didn’t know who I was, only that I had to be kept out of sight, as I’d been beaten badly by a Vigile and he might still be out looking for me.
Until we sorted things with Jaxon, I’d have to keep moving between rented rooms, one every week or so. It was already cost- ing a fortune – I was managing, so far, with money Nick had given me – but it was the only way to know for sure that Scion couldn’t track me.
With the blinds down, not a single ray of light entered the room.
I opened them, just a little. Golden sunshine struck my raw eyes. A pair of amaurotics hurried past on the narrow street below. On the corner, a soothsayer was on the lookout for voyant clients who might fancy a quick reading. If he was desperate, he might risk approaching an amaurotic. Sometimes they got curious; sometimes they were spies. Scion had long since had agents provocateurs on its streets, tempting voyants to give themselves away.
I closed the blinds again. The room turned black. For six months I’d been nocturnal, my sleeping pattern matched to my Rephaite keeper’s; that wouldn’t change in a hurry. I sank on to the couch, reached for the glass of water on the table and gulped it down with two blue Nightcaps.
My dreamscape was still fragile. During our confrontation on the stage – when she’d tried to kill me in front of an audience of Scion emissaries – Nashira’s fallen angels had left hairline fissures there, allowing memory to drip into my sleep. The chapel, where Seb had met his end. The chamber in Magdalen. The filthy, twisting slum of the Rookery and Duckett’s psychomanteum, where my face grew monstrous and misshapen and my jaw snapped off, brittle as old ceramic.
Then Liss, her lips sewn shut with golden thread. Dragged outside to be fed to the Emim, the monsters that had haunted the woods around the colony. Seven bloody cards spun in her wake. I reached for them, straining to see the final card – my future, my conclusion
– but as soon as I touched it, it screamed in a tongue of fire. I jerked awake at dusk, drenched from scalp to toe in sweat. My cheeks were damp and burning hot, and my lips tasted of salt.
Those cards would haunt me for a long time. Liss had predicted my future in six stages: Five of Cups, King of Wands inverted, the Devil, the Lovers, Death inverted, Eight of Swords. But she’d never reached the end of the reading.
I groped my way to the bathroom and washed down another
couple of the painkillers Nick had left for me. I suspected the large grey one was some kind of sedative. Something to ease the tremors, the churning stomach, the need to grip my gun and not let go.
There was a light knock at the door. Slowly, I picked up my gun, checked it for ammo and held it behind my back. With my free hand, I cracked the door open.
The landlord stood in the corridor, fully dressed, with an antique iron key on a chain around his neck. He never took it off.
‘Morning, miss,’ he said.
I managed a smile. ‘Don’t you ever sleep, Lem?’
‘Not often. The guests are up at all hours. There’s a séance upstairs,’ he added, looking weary. ‘Making a right racket with the table. You’re looking much better today, if I may say so.’
‘Thank you. Did my friend call?’
‘He’ll be here at nine tonight. Do give me a bell if you need anything.’
‘Thanks. Have a good day.’
‘And you, miss.’
For a doss-house landlord, he was oddly helpful. I closed the door and locked it.
At once, the gun slipped from my hand. I sank to the floor and buried my face against my knees.
After a few minutes I went back into the tiny, airless bathroom, peeled off my nightshirt and inspected my injuries in the mirror. Most visible were the deep gash above my eye, closed with stitches, and the shallow wound that curved across my cheek. Everything was worn thin, whittled down. My fingernails were flimsy, my skin was sallow and my ribs and hipbones bulged. The landlord had given me a wary look when he’d brought my first tray of food, eyeing my lacerated hands and black eye. He hadn’t recognised me as the Pale Dreamer, mollisher of his section, protégée of the White Binder.
As I stepped into the cubicle and turned the dial, darkness crept into my vision. Hot water poured over my shoulders, softening my muscles.
A door slammed.
My hand swiped a hidden blade from the soap dish. My body pitched itself from the cubicle, straight against the opposite wall. I concealed myself behind the door, buzzing with adrenalin, holding the blade to my heart.
It took a few minutes for my heart to slow down. I peeled myself from the wet tiles, slick with sweat and water. Nothing, it’s nothing. Just the séance table upstairs.
Shaking, I leant on the sink. My hair hung in damp coils around my face, brittle and dull.
I looked my reflection in the eye. My body had been treated as property in the colony, dragged and grabbed and beaten by Rephaim, and red-jackets. I turned my back to the mirror and ran my fingers over the little threads of scar tissue on my shoulder. XX-59-40. That brand would be there for as long as I lived.
But I’d survived. I pulled my shirt over the brand again. I had survived, and the Sargas would know it.
ABOUT SHANNON
Samantha Shannon was born and raised in West London. From 2010 to 2013 she studied English Language and Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she specialised in Emily Dickinson and Principles of Film Criticism. In 2012 she signed a book deal with Bloomsbury Publishing to publish the first three books in a seven book series, beginning with The Bone Season. Film rights to the novel were optioned by Andy Serkis's London based production company The Imaginarium Studios in 2012, and acquired by Twentieth Century Fox and Chernin Studios in October 2013. The Bone Season has been translated into twenty nine languages.
The Mime Order is out now in paperback through Bloomsbury for $19.95 online, or in all good bookstores
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