Dale Hurst – Author - Dale Hurst is an author, journalist and broadcaster.
  • Home
  • About Dale Hurst
  • Buy My Books
  • Blog
  • Podcast – The Dale Hurst Writing Show
Home
About Dale Hurst
Buy My Books
Blog
Podcast – The Dale Hurst Writing Show
Dale Hurst – Author - Dale Hurst is an author, journalist and broadcaster.
  • Home
  • About Dale Hurst
  • Buy My Books
  • Blog
    • Lust & Liberty
    • Sin & Secrecy
    • You Can Hear Chopin
    • Short Fiction
    • Poetry
  • Podcast
    • Season 4
    • Bournemouth Writing Festival 2024
    • Season 3
    • Season 2
    • Season 1
  • Get in touch
Browsing Tag
you can hear chopin from the attic
Blog You Can Hear Chopin

You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic: The Story So Far

4 November 2020 No Comments

It’s been a while since we discussed the wartime thriller. So let’s bring you all up to speed…!

Too often on this blog do I seem to be saying, “It’s been a while!” Apologies — been gone a few months. Needed a bit of a break from the fiction side of things while things picked up on the journalism side. Sales of Sin & Secrecy have been disappointing, to put not too fine a point on it — I’m putting that down to people being careful with money due to the pandemic. And also, I started a Masters in Creative Writing & Publishing at Bournemouth University, which has been taking up my time too. More on that if you’d care to hear it, but in a future post. This update is to be dedicated to my latest major project, You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic.

The last in-depth update I issued about this project was back in January 2019. And the main reason that nothing noteworthy happened to it in all that time is that I ended up revising and publishing Sin & Secrecy instead. It was always my plan to come back to it, and now, after a hiatus of nearly six months, I finally got back into it last weekend.

WHAT IS YOU CAN HEAR CHOPIN FROM THE ATTIC ABOUT?

In a departure from the settings explored in The Berylford Scandals, i.e. Regency period England, this new novel, You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic transports us to Berlin in 1943. Most of the action is set at the Heinrichsturme Hotel, one of the last luxury establishments in the city neither doubling as a hospital or a barracks, nor blown apart by bombs. The story follows Heinrich Oeunhausen, the precocious young manager of the hotel, whose duties are divided between keeping his guests satisfied, his business operational, and his staff safe. All of these are impeded by the presence of a gaggle of SS officers and other Nazi Party members, led by the formidable Standartenführer Leopold Upfauer.

Heinrich is pressured to join the Party himself, but is reluctant to do so for a number of reasons, not least because his young wife Sofie is mentally ill and a target of the Nazis. For her protection, he has her shut away within the hotel, her condition placated only by music provided by Itzhak Zylberman, an elderly Jewish musician who must play endlessly for the sake of his life. As if all these secrets weren’t enough, Heinrich’s latest trouble comes in the form of glamorous and impetuous journalist Cordelia Knesebeck, whose snooping quickly risks exposing everything he has set out to hide. But she has an agenda of her own, and soon enough, one is forced to help the other, with no shortage of casualties along the way.

 INFLUENCES AND INSPIRATIONS

Originally the idea came in a dream – literally the image of a pair of people climbing up to an attic, where they find an old man playing Chopin on the piano – specifically the Nocturne in G Major (one of my favourites). That slowly developed the more I thought about it into a story of false imprisonment – I don’t know when that all warped into the wartime thriller it has become now. Some of you may think there’s a parallel there with Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, the story of classical musician Władysław Szpilman. The story is a light inspiration, admittedly, but my Itzhak Zylberman will be an entirely different kind of character in the grand scheme of things.

The hotel setting is partly down to familiarity, as I have spent a lot of my working life in such establishments, so there are plenty of experiences to draw from. Both dramatic and comedic (there will be some light moments in this novel or it’s going to be awfully heavy). The decision was also made from an intellectual perspective — how hotels in Germany ran during the war is a largely unexplored topic (in fiction, anyway). As such, it will be fun to research.

Meanwhile, the characters’ appearances, personalities, and interrelationships are partly inspired by the people I was closest to at the time — my friends and colleagues from my days working at Nationwide Building Society.

Want to know more? Let me know if you want a Chapter Preview or a Character Profile for the next post about You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic. Why not let me know in the comments? For more author news and views, my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages are here.

Continue reading
Reading time: 3 min
Written by: Dale Hurst
Blog

5 Tips for Staying Creative in Quarantine

6 April 2020 No Comments

In this state of quarantine, it’s easy to let our brains turn to mush. We have to keep the creativity alive, and here’s a few tips for doing so…

How’s everyone doing in quarantine? Well — I hope! I’m doing my best to stay busy — I still have a podcast to produce and, of course, edits on the book. But even then, keeping my creativity going is proving a bit of a struggle. Especially when sitting back and watching Netflix all day is such a tempting alternative.

On my Facebook and Instagram channels these last two weeks, I ran a series of basic posts. All of which added up to five tips for staying creative while in quarantine. And to expand on them, I have laid them out below.

1. Simply: Try to do Something Creative Every Day

5 Tips for Staying Creative in Quarantine 1

Put simply, my first piece of advice is: try to do something creative every day. It’s not only a means of being productive, but it can be beneficial for your mental health. And you don’t necessarily need to work on a specific project – just do something random for its own sake if you have to. Write a random poem or blog post (as I am right now), or post a photo or video. And don’t forget that research, planning and editing still count towards the creative process. Just in case you can’t bring yourself to finish that chapter today. Tweaking and adding to plans for future stories is one of my ways of feeling productive at the best of times!

2. Write Everything Down!

5 Tips for Staying Creative in Quarantine 2

The best ideas generally come from doing monotonous tasks. Lord knows you’ll probably be doing a few of those while working from home. Keep that creativity flowing for later use and write those ideas down. I would be a rich man indeed if I had a pound for every good idea I didn’t put in a notebook somewhere. Some may form the foundation for a major project.

To name a good example of mine: You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic – the wartime mystery thriller I have had on the back burner for the last year or so. True, it was partly inspired by a dream, but the overall plot was steadily developed while I was working an office job at Nationwide Building Society. I took many of the characters’ personalities and idiosyncrasies from people I worked with (some of my closest friends among them).

3. Look Everywhere for Inspiration

Bit of a moot point, I grant you — given we can only go out once a day for exercise. But we still have that valuable resource — social media. Draw inspiration from wherever you can. I have a lot of artistic friends; photographers among them. And some of the imagery they captured prior to all this coronavirus nonsense flaring up is truly beautiful. Whether that’s a seascape, a photo of a forest or a nighttime image.

One of my absolute favourite photos, taken by a very good friend of mine, Callum Shirley (chuck him a Like or Follow for some brilliant shots), is of Knowlton Church. Looks like the sort of place that could be associated with a ghost legend. With the rather hauntingly desolate surroundings and bleak weather, it has inspired a part of the setting for a new horror-mystery story I’m planning bit-by-bit in the background.

4. Free Writing is a Useful Practice

“What is Free Writing?” you may ask…

It’s something I highly recommend, whether to blow out the creative cobwebs or as a tool for gaining momentum on a project. It is exactly what it sounds like – writing freely on anything you feel like until you run out of steam. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t have to be relevant to your current project. You can save it in a Word document or in a binder, or just throw it away. Equally, you might find the beginning of a chapter you were looking for. Maybe even the foundation for a brand-new story!

Again, to use an example from my own experience, I refer to a passage in Lust & Liberty, pertaining to the moon that I produced while doing a bout of free writing. I had this poetic description of the moon in my head and, while I had no use for it at the time, I wrote it down. And it ended up being the beginning to Chapter 47 of that novel:

Excerpt from The Berylford Scandals: Lust & Liberty — Chapter XLVII: In the Garden in the Small Hours

The moon was a grand, giant pearl of striking, eerie, silver luminescence; a haunting sight to behold suspended motionless amid the black, starless sky, as though it were a ghostly ship abreast great waves of purple and smoke grey cloud. A singular great streetlamp of spectral aspect almost lighting the path to another world. A beacon of the ether, summoning home the spirits of the dead and dying…

5. Share Your Creativity

Last but not least, let’s not forget to share what we’ve been creating. We need entertaining now more than ever while we’re in quarantine. So, for goodness’ sake – share your creativity with your connections and, by extension, the world. Set up a blog, as a couple of my fellow writers have already done. Or keep it simple and just use your social media channels.

For the purposes of this segment, I really wanted to let you read a poem or short story about a lobster who smokes cigars with his owner. But at the moment, it’s not quite flowing in the way I’d like. So you’ll have to wait for that…

In the meantime, please feel free to share links to your own creative musings. Whether that’s stories, photos, videos — I’d love to know how you’ve been staying creative during this quarantine period.

And for more news and content or to get in touch, please follow my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages.

Continue reading
Reading time: 4 min
Written by: Dale Hurst
Page 16 of 18« First...10«15161718»

About me

Dale Hurst is an author specialising in historical fiction, mystery, crime and black comedy.

Popular Posts

ANNOUNCEMENT: New Book in Progress

15 November 2018

No Time Like the Present…

1 July 2018

“To Err is Human…”

4 August 2018

You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic: A Brief Overview

24 January 2019

Categories

  • Ballad of a Godless Man
  • Blog
  • Characters
  • Food Writing
  • Journalism
  • Lifestyle
  • Lust & Liberty
  • Podcast
  • Poetry
  • Short Fiction
  • Sin & Secrecy
  • Travels
  • Writing
  • You Can Hear Chopin

Dale Hurst

  • About Dale Hurst
  • Get in touch

Recent Posts

  • Silhouettes – all you need to know
  • Progress Report — February/March 2025
  • Progress Report — January 2025
  • Progress Report — December 2024
  • Progress Report — November 2024

Dale Hurst

  • Email
    dale.hurst93@gmail.com
  • Address
    Poole, Dorset
© 2020 Copyright Dale Hurst // All rights reserved