Yesterday on Twitter (I’m trying) a musician asked me if I listened to music as I wrote. The answer was no. I wish I could. I simply can’t write and listen at the same time. Each takes all my energy, all of my attention. I don’t seem to have the knack of letting one bleed into the other. Both stun me –I’m a rabbit in the headlights. I’m equally stunned at how some writers do write to music, whatever the genre. Maybe it’s because I see certain melodies as memories, and certain songs as stories. For me, Bowie’s Five Years and Gram Parson’s She are two of the best short stories I’ve ever heard.

Diamond Star Halo is out now and it belongs to the reader not to me, and so I’m out of the blue room (for a short while). As I blink in the light, I see that the novel does have another life, and so there is more work to do, but it’s fun work because at last I can turn the volume up.

Diamond Star Halo is not just riddled with music – it’s riddled with new songs. I wrote these songs and I’m no songwriter. My father was. I wrote these songs easily because they belong to my fictional band Tequila – seven golden brothers and a hung-lipped girl called Jenny, all the way from America. Tequila are a mash up of The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Kings of Leon, The Band, maybe The Felice Brothers, and certainly Band of Horses. There are other bands and singers in there too, but these guys and one gal are also Tequila my fictional band.

I knew how I wanted them to sound, without putting one record on. I would send the lyrics to my father, Fritz, and he’d send back an mpeg with his interpretation of the song. It was fun. He recorded Tequila’s signature tune, Stallion Boys. Ever the demanding daughter, I wrote, ‘I want it to sound Cosmic American Music, like fun Gram, OK, Fritz?’ When it came to a song that mourns a character’s untimely death, Fritz came back with a folk dirge. The chords ran, D/A/D most of the way through. I didn’t notice this chord change on the page until I was slotting the written songs into the final draft. I had Fritz’s songs on mpegs but I couldn’t listen to them anymore. Fritz had died and our family was lost.

Now the book is out there I still can’t listen, but other musicians have come on board. Rob Philips has composed new music for The Boy’s Song, and he’s re-imagined Fritz’s takes. In May I’m reading with an entire band at the Lincoln Book Festival. I’m beyond excited. I heard a rumour that there will be a slide guitar.

I’d like more musicians to have a go. I may not be able to listen to music as I write, but I’m all ears now. So I’m sending the songs out there – Jack, Meg, Brendan, Florence, Joni, Polly, Cerys – have a go!

Fred Connor’s MySpace page

The venue was gorgeous, the revamped Booths Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye. The new owner, Elizabeth, had clad it in wood panelling, littered it with sofas and a group of incredibly handsome American women.

I walked on to the stage to Marc Bolan and T Rex’s Get it On. With a main character and a novel called Diamond Star Halo it was inevitable and it was great.

‘How important is David Bowie to you?’ Peter Florence asked and I rambled on, trying to get back into my obsessed, teenage mindset. We jumped from Bowie to John Irving, and I was glad; I was on familiar ground.

It’s strange talking about what you’ve done, but as a contemporary writer, you have to. The interview, the reading group, the bookshop, the festival circuit, they are all part of the deal. You often formulate the hows and the whys and the great ‘what is it?’ while you are actually up on that stage. Sometimes it’s nice to think on the hoof. Sometimes it isn’t. At this event I realised that, among other things, I’d written a novel about the domestic side of rock n’ roll, because Diamond Star Halo is dominated by women; women who look after these roaming men, these rock stars. After all, the novel begins in 1977.

We talked about the difficulty of capturing the moment of live music on the page. We talked about the dead horse Crazy Love who has to be buried again and again in the novel. We talked about the family I had created; Halo, Vincent, Molly, Ivan, Dolly, Nana Lew, and of course, Fred. We talked about the process of writing and re-imagining other books in your own work. We talked about Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and we played Kate Bush’s song. It was lovely to hear Kate again.

Finally, one of the handsome American women at the back asked me what my favourite song was. It’s a hard question. As hard and impossible as ‘what’s your favourite book?’

‘The Flying Burrito Brother’s version of Wild Horses‘ I told her.

‘Can we hear it?’ she asked.

‘You know it’s a very long song,’ I whispered to Peter.

‘6.22,’ a man in the front row said.

‘Sorry?’ I asked.

‘That version of Wild Horses is 6 minutes and 22 seconds.’

‘We’d better fade out,’ said Peter, ‘or we’ll be up here all night.’

Listening to Gram Parsons, I wouldn’t have minded.

Diamond Star Halo has been chosen as The Hay Festival’s Book of the Month for January 2010.