Blogs by Flo Fitzpatrick
Paris Nocturne: Inspiration
10/11/2025 8:19:21 AM
Coming up with Paris Nocturne by merging two ideas.
About 15 years ago I came up with a plot for a time-travel that would send my heroine, a singer, 300 years into the future via the New York City subway. The Uptown“A” would speed up and terrify everyone into believing it was about to go off the rails, then stall at W. 192nd Street, which is the stop for The Cloisters museum.(Sidenote: if you ever visit NYC…put The Cloisters on your list of musts!) Heavily-armed, Ninja-looking guys in black would board the train and the heroine would be taken prisoner. She’d wind up with a Resistance group hiding out in what used to be The Botanical Gardens and discover she’d traveled into a very dystopian future where NYC was being ruled by technological fascists. Creepy in itself but worse…Music had been outlawed. The tentative title was “The Last Note.”
But my plot was more action/adventure/science fiction than romantic suspense and my brain wasn’t comfortable trying to come up with ways to overcome a society which was extremely advanced in terms of technology. I enjoy researching but to achieve what I wanted for the story was looking more like I’d have to learn to be a computer hacker… and an agent for the CIA.
The good news for The Last Note was that I had to come up with a reason for how society had “devolved” into a culture-hating totalitarian state. While I was jotting down ideas, Hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey. Major areas of the city were flooded and boom! There it was…the “what if” I’d been looking for. What if most of New York City was gone, thanks to a catastrophic natural disaster, like a hurricane followed by a tsunami? What if the folks governing decided to shut out the rest of the country and ended up choosing rebuilding and tech advancements over humanity.
Throughout history, strict authoritarian societies have been created after a disaster with someone in power deciding to “keep the masses in line.” Someone who decided the arts generally provide inspiration for people to rise up against oppression, so best clamp down on culture sooner rather than later. So, completely outlawing music was a logical extension of the horrors of the new city.
I had my future society, but I still didn’t want to mess with technology. I also wanted a scarier vision of “this could happen within the next twenty-five years if we don’t find a way to stop climate change” so I changed the date to 2061. But the story still wasn’t right. I put the work-in-progress aside.
Enter Covid in 2020. Watching another disaster hit the world seemed to signal it was time to revisit The Last Note. I still didn’t want as much science fiction and technology and physical action. I needed more romance. (Don’t we all?!) I wanted my heroine to have a chance to actually make a difference in the lives of people around her without trying to hack into networks or blow up Internet cables or storm into heavily guarded government buildings with the Ninja/Resistance team.
Backtracking again, in 2016, I’d started work on what was to be a women’s fiction/romance set in Occupied Paris, with a heroine who hears the voice of a singer on a recording, falls in love with that voice, and is just nutty enough to travel across the Atlantic to meet him before the Germans march into France in 1940. The tentative title was Nights in Paris. But it was too romance-oriented and needed a jolt of…something. Perhaps, instead of traveling across the Atlantic, my heroine could travel back through time?
I looked at what I’d written in The Last Note and in Nights in Paris.
I had my heroine… a singer who was sassy and ready to rumble against the powers that be…whether those powers were thugs I called The Enforcers in 2061, or Nazis in 1941. She was originally to be named Shiloh Meridian, but I wanted the last name to be Christopher for a little play on words with Winnie the Pooh’s “Christopher Robin,” (there were reasons...really!) so she became Cori Christopher.
I had a “new” Manhattan ravaged by a hurricane and a tsunami turning the city into a wasteland in terms of the arts in 2061.
I had a reason for my rebellious singer to want to escape 2061.
I had a love at first “sound” with the hero, Noel Matheson.
I had that hero, also a singer, and member of the French Resistance.
I had (hopefully) a non-stereotypical villain…a German officer (who went through a variety of name changes before he became Johann Bauer.)
I’d wanted a sequel to Haunting Melody for years. Not in terms of the same heroine but a chance to bring back the enigmatic, impish Fiona Belle Donovan as the facilitator for different time travelers, and add a little humor to the mix.
I just needed a new title that, unlike The Last Note, spoke more to hope than despair, or, unlike Nights in Paris, had a bit too much romance and not enough music.
I had Paris Nocturne.
Paris Nocturne http://bit.ly/3Hi67yr
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