I've written about it before, but I have a thing for music and my tastes tend to skew young. But, I'm no music critic, a la Cranky Cuss. "I just know what I like."

When I'm writing, I find my characters revealing themselves in certain songs. In both the music and the lyrics. Sometimes, it feels as if the songs were written with my story and the characters in mind. Shortly after I started blogging here, I discovered an awesome website called lala.com, a cloud-based music service. (Don't try to find it; it no longer exists.) It allowed users to sample from a huge library of music for free and download songs for only ten cents each to your online collection and then embed those songs onto your website or blog for free. The embed icon was perfect. It had cover art along with a color bar that progressed as the song played. I used it regularly.

Then big bad iTunes stepped in, bought it out and unceremoniously shut it down. There's been talk that iTunes is working on a similar service, but it's almost a given that it won't be as affordable and that it will be much more restrictive. Plus, I've found that a lot of the alternative tunes I discovered on lala.com are nowhere to be found on iTunes. Bah humbug.

So, I've been searching high and low on the internet, trying to find a suitable subsitute, one that isn't too expensive, is user friendly, has a large music library and a cool embed icon.

I may have stumbled across a suitable substitute. It's called Playlist.com. The only thing it's lacking is single-song icon. But once you connect, you can share a song for free as a single-song playlist. And, as with lala.com, I've been able to establish an online music library and listen to a large (free) library of music while I work.

I created a playlist of the songs that seemed to speak to me the most when I was writing The Cure. Sometimes it was the lyrics, sometimes the mood the music evoked, and occasionally it was the combination that seemed to convey something about my story. Or at least something I felt as I was trying to put the story down on paper. And I do love the looks of the playlist itself. (You have a choice of colors.)

Advance Warning: This is a vampire romance novel, so you get the gist of where the songs are going. But, even if you're not into either romance or vampires (you can skip Kelly Clarkson and Etta James), there are some good tunes here. I promise.

While I love all the songs and the artists on the playlist, right now I have a Neon Trees problem. There was actually another song by them I wanted to include, called Your Surrender, but it wasn't on Playlist.com. Can't have everything.