Reflections on art, process,
memory, and the long road
between drafts.
Writing Process
Murder in the Shadows: Why
Poe and Berlioz Make Perfect
Partners
Both men were outsiders, romantics, obsessives. Both transformed personal anguish into revolutionary art. Putting them together in 1830 Paris—solving murders while the seeds of detective fiction take root—felt inevitable.
Historical Research
From Symphony to Stage:
The Berlioz-Smithson Love
Story
The true story behind The Dream Was Too Beautiful—how an Irish actress’s Ophelia drove a French composer to madness, genius, and one of music’s most radical symphonies.
Craft & Mythology
The Morrigan's Game:
Finding Celtic Gods in
Modern Cork
The Celtic gods never left Ireland. They’re only waiting in the shadows. Notes on weaving ancient mythology into contemporary fantasy.
Craft & Mythology
Pop culture got them wrong. The bean sí is a mourner, not a monster. The púca offers rides, not ruin. And the clurichaun will absolutely rob your wine cellar.
Music & Story
A pianist took a train from Salzburg at her own expense to perform a piece one more time. The story of Odusseia’s journey from a Dublin pub to an Italian stage.
Writing Process
A college assignment about the Odyssey collided with a Dublin pub session, and somehow a thirty-minute orchestral epic came out the other side. The story of how Odusseia was born.
Historical Research
Edgar Allan Poe never went to Paris. He set the birth of detective fiction there anyway. Where the novel’s history is real, where it’s invented, and why the distinction matters.
Music & Story
There is a sound a woman makes over the dead that no one teaches her and everyone recognizes. Ireland called it the keen, and it very nearly died out. How my new keen for two voices and copper cauldron—and a keener named Nóra—led me to the sound at the heart of Melisma.
Craft & Mythology
The novel Melisma has five main characters, and not one of them ever meets another — separated by as much as five centuries and every border a map can draw. So what holds a novel together when its people never can? Not blood. A sound.