Rosemary Clooney in 1952

'The evening breeze caressed the trees tenderly
The trembling trees embraced the breeze tenderly
Then you and I came wandering by
And lost in a sigh were we...'

When I started writing Cold Crash, I researched popular music in 1952. I found ‘Tenderly’ by Rosemary Clooney and listened to it a lot. My protagonist Max and her friends listen to ‘Tenderly’ in more than one scene.                                             

And then I researched a bit more and found that Rosemary Clooney didn’t release any singles at all in the UK until 1953, whereas Cold Crash is set in 1952. Fortunately, Max has an American grandmother, and I’d already put in she’d recently received a parcel from America. And voila, the parcel included a Rosemary Clooney record. Pamela Painter and Anne Bernays have an exercise called ‘Gifts to Yourself’ in What If: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. I’m not sure this is quite what they meant, but it saved my scenes!