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
Bean sí is not “banshee.” Tigh Ceoil is not “House of Music.” Why Irish words live untranslated inside the Trilogy—and why the sound of Cork Irish is as much a character as the people who speak it.
Craft & Mythology
A man at a craft fair carved my name in Ogham on a stone necklace and told me to wear it into Newgrange to “activate” it. I laughed. Then I walked inside a five-thousand-year-old passage tomb, and I stopped laughing.
Music & Story
Twenty-four songs. Twenty-four chapters. One woman walking through winter. No way home. A new novel is born.
Character Inspiration
When I sold my parents’ house, I kept almost nothing from my childhood. One thing I kept was a fifty-page Classics Illustrated comic book about Edgar Allan Poe. Many years later, he walked into my novel.
Writing Process
One book was supposed to be enough. Then the characters got angry, a legend from the western islands wouldn’t let go, and a week in Cork changed everything.
Character Inspiration
My music history teacher would ‘drop the needle’ on a random record and we had to name the composer. The day he dropped it on Berlioz, I recognized something I’d been waiting to hear my entire life.