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
Every semester begins with the same problem: how do you get a room full of people to care about music they’ve never heard? That’s not a teaching question. That’s a writing question.
Character Inspiration
One character created everything and keeps showing up as Amelia Earhart, Duke Ellington, and a courthouse clerk with too many pens. The other is a sentient nebula learning to be human.
Craft & Mythology
WB Yeats is too good. Put him at the top of a chapter and he wins no matter what. So why does the same trilogy use a Yelp review as an epigraph three chapters later? On tuning forks, key signatures, and the voices that open a chapter
Craft & Mythology
Hell got a corporate rebrand. Nine levels of modern torment, a cryptocurrency called DoomCoin, and George Carlin as your guide. Welcome to orientation.
Character Inspiration
Claire, the woman who opens and closes the novel Melisma, is invented — with one exception. Her DNA test, and the scatter of strangers it gave her instead of a homeland, were mine. On the one true thing inside a fictional woman, and why the whole novel turns on it.
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 Melisma is the book I was always going to write.