Book Insights: Needing Harmony Series

Fun fact: I made all my covers! I hope they work.

Book One: All the Discord

Book Two: Finding a Melody

Book Three: Losing the Rhythm

Book Four: Holding the Tempo

Book Five: For a Song

Book Six: The Last Refrain

It's a wrap! Six wonderful books now available for you to consume. I hope you are or have enjoyed Cadence's story. In honor of Cadence and the Needing Harmony series, I thought I'd do a kind of deep dive into the series and what it's about with some insights into the writing of it.

Tropes

This book has a lot of tropes in there. Many of these came from my own curiosity and others just happened, and I'm glad they did. For the sake of time, I'll talk about the top three tropes for the series.

Reverse Harem

I don't write spicy romance and many of my readers know this. I'd say even the romance is very...very...very slow for some readers. But I'm okay with that. My approach to reverse harem stories are born from my favorite slow burn series to begin with. I love that exploration of building relationships together. In romance in general, I'm slower with it in my writing. I like exploring the formation of those relationships while dealing with the situations they're facing. I tend to lean into plot heavy stories. Overall, I think I did okay. In the case of Cadence, it was about her finding her people. People who made her feel loved and wanted, especially considering her past. The guys did this for her. Where she was left behind by her dad, abused and neglected by her mother, and had to say goodbye to a dear friend, the guys became a constant to her as they proved to her that they're there for her, even when times got tough. And in reverse, she proved she was there for them too.

Fun fact: Amazon likes to take this series out of the reverse harem sub genre.

Music Therapy

If you read my author notes at the end of the books, then you'll know this series is precious to me. Now I guess I should share the why. This story was born out of depression. Nothing as serious as what Cadence had to face. When things hit me too hard, I would sit down and cry while writing this series. Especially in the first couple of books. Writing about Cadence got me through my own darkness and it became therapy on its own. I wanted to explore what music does for people—what it has done for me. Music is so powerful. When times are tough, when there is too much to process, it's easy to put on my headphones, blast music, and get lost in it. Cadence relies on music in this series, and I wanted to explore what it can do for others. How it can be utilized to face darkness like abuse, neglect, and loss. And I went so far as to produce the songs for the first three books! That was a different kind of experience too and I don't plan on becoming a songwriter ever. But it was a fun process to try out for the series and it was mind blowing to hear the songs I wrote turned into music.

You can find the songs on my YouTube channel.

Family Bonds

Oof...I don't really know what to say here. I had to walk away from writing on multiple occasions because of this. There was Cadence with her mother and with her father for sure, but even the guys had their own situations. The goal here wasn't to actively show the abuse or the need to be saved from it. I wanted to explore the after. The healing, the learning to move forward, the acceptance, and I hope I did some good there. It was such a dark topic to dive into and there was a lot going on here that I tried to keep in mind. I think the hardest part I wanted to explore was not only Cadence with her unstable mother, but also Justin and his dying father. It's never as clear cut as we'd like it to be. It's messy and dirty and scary and confusing. Writing Justin's arc with his dad was hard overall, even just trying to write it here is hard, but I'm happy with how it came out.

Series Exploration

I think the tropes explain this pretty well. This is a series is about Cadence's after. After her mother beats her so badly she was put in the hospital the summer before her final year. Her healing, her growing, her vulnerability.

It explores questions like:

How does trauma affect different people?

Why is music healing for people?

What does it feel like to be a survivor?

How does someone move through their trauma?

What are ways to face their trauma?

How does someone forgive or accept what has happened?

Trauma covers such a wide range of experiences, and people carry it in vastly different ways. I don’t know that there are definitive answers to these questions—and I didn’t try to provide them. What I hoped to do instead was offer moments of recognition. To sit with the discomfort. To show that healing isn’t linear, forgiveness isn’t required, and vulnerability doesn’t arrive all at once.

Goodbye, Cadence <3

I'm so happy for Cadence's happy ending and also so sad that it's over. But I also know if I tried to keep writing this series, it'd risk the story. I need to let them go to enjoy their young adulthood, college, and the logistics of their relationship in peace. Plus it allows me to move to other stories I've been itching to write.

See you in my next project!