Just Buy the Book

How a Dare at an Indian Restaurant Led to Two Operas, Two Novels, and a Trilogy I Never Planned

18 November 2025 ~ 3 min read

In 2015, I came home from Italy after performances of my art song Odusseia and went to dinner at an Indian restaurant near my house. Somewhere between the naan and the vindaloo, I told my friends I wanted to write an opera. One of them looked at me and said, “Oh, that’s easy. Just buy the book How to Write an Opera.”

I took that as a challenge.

So I wrote two. Both music and words—libretto and score, the whole thing. The process of writing opera taught me something I hadn’t expected: I loved writing words as much as I loved writing notes. In a composition, you control rhythm, harmony, texture, dynamics. In a libretto, you control all of that and character, dialogue, story. I was doing two jobs at once and discovering that the second one—the writing—was pulling at me harder than I’d anticipated.

Around the same time, I found Kurt Vonnegut’s short video The Shapes of Stories. In it, he maps narrative arcs on a simple graph—fortune on one axis, time on the other—and shows how every story, from Cinderella to Kafka, follows a recognizable shape. It’s funny and brilliant and it lasted about four minutes, and it changed the way I understood what I’d been doing. Music has shape. Sonata form, rondo, theme and variations—these are narrative arcs expressed in sound. Vonnegut was describing the same architecture I’d been trained in, just in a different language. I’d been writing stories my entire career. I just hadn’t been writing them in words.

That realization led to The Year of Shadows. I’d been carrying Poe and Berlioz in my head for years—two obsessives who transformed personal anguish into revolutionary art—and now I had the tools and the confidence to put them on a page instead of a staff. I found two wonderful editors who taught me what I didn’t know about prose: how to manage point of view, how to pace a chapter, how to trust the reader. The compositional instincts were already there—rhythm, tension, silence. What I needed to learn was the craft specific to fiction, and I had the good sense to find people who could teach me.

When The Year of Shadows was finished, I said I wouldn’t write anything else. The book was complete. I was satisfied. Then Vonnegut pulled at me again—his philosophy, his humor, his insistence that the universe runs on absurdity—and before I knew it, I was writing An Apology to the Cosmos. Just one book. A standalone. A cosmic janitor in Cork, Ireland. Nothing more.

That one book became a trilogy. But that’s a story for another blog.

— Liam