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.
Historical Research
The ceremony at the heart of The Image is documented, down to the flutes and the fire-drill stars. Here is what Sahagún and Durán wrote down—and the one thing I moved.
Historical Research
For three days in July 1830, Paris threw out a king. Hector Berlioz spent them locked in a room finishing a cantata while bullets hit the shutters. On what the Three Glorious Days really were, why they had to go back into my novel, and what happens to an American who stands in the crowd and comes out invisible.
Writing Process
Two cities, one year, and a rule on an index card: nobody travels. Why The Image refuses the portal, and what it cost to keep the door shut.
Writing Process
At the back of The Anatomy of Shadows is a two-column table: on the left, the tales and poems Poe would write over the next nineteen years; on the right, the chapter of the novel where he first meets the thing that becomes each one. On the raven, the letter, the painter, the locked room — and the year that never happened but explains everything.
Music & Story
A thousand-year-old conch behind glass at LACMA, and the one question a music historian isn’t trained to ask: what would happen if someone played it?
Writing Process
My novel has a new name. Over years of good editing, the two things it was built on — the July Revolution and the Rue Morgue murders — had quietly been cut. On putting them back, and why The Year of Shadows became The Anatomy of Shadows.