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.
Writing Process
Before I wrote novels, I wrote music — and for a career I chased one sound: the wordless run of a human voice, bent past words. Music let me make it. It took a novel to follow it across five centuries and into the bodies of the people who carry it. Why Melizma is the book I was always going to write.
Historical Research
The first time I poured real maple syrup on a plate in Southern California, the person across the table asked me what it was. She wasn’t joking.
Music & Story
The Morrígan gives Seán a flute carved from her own raven’s wing. Anyone who hears it is compelled to speak the truth. Why a composer chooses a specific instrument for a character the way a novelist chooses a specific voice.
Music & Story
One song appears seven times in The Morrígan’s Game—more than any other. It’s a love song that’s also a ghost story, a melody that never resolves, and the emotional spine of a love story between a janitor and a sentient nebula.
Historical Research
Ninety musicians. A written program. An audience that included Liszt and Chopin. The night a twenty-six-year-old composer stood before Paris and said: this is what obsession sounds like.
Music & Story
The cosmos asks “What’s the point?” and Cork answers with a pub quiz. Why the funniest book in the trilogy is also the one where a man dissolves into living music and the Devil has nothing left to say.