Night After Night And Show By Show
My love affair with Lissie began with Fight for You, a song she co-wrote with Morgan Page. I heard it many times over on my wife's Pandora station. I usually tune out dance tracks, but my curiosity was piqued. I had to find out who was on the other end of that radiant...
Accountability
Rachel Donnelly's story arc opens with her sitting in her editor's office waiting to corner him about an article she turned in days ago. Her investigation into the source of a chemical spill uncovered what amounts to textbook political graft. The city offered a no bid...
Flipping the Script on Guns
Something remarkable happened in the wake of tragedy in Parkland, FL. America witnessed a generation waking up politically, and it’s been fascinating to watch teenagers snatch the mic back from the extreme right. There have been so many defining moments, from Emma...
Calculating Mortality
In my college days, I tore through Robert Heinlein's catalog between semesters. The stories were entertaining, sure, but there was a common thread that Heinlein came back to time and again in his fiction that captured my attention. Narratively he had an obsession with...
Breaking up the Band
We first see Jenna Donnelly onstage in an empty night club. Her band is meeting to practice days before a big show. She sits with guitar in hand and legs folded under her, playing for no one but herself. Her Strat glistened candy apple green under a single spotlight....
Blending Genre
While wandering the labyrinth otherwise known as the query process (submitting letters and partial manuscripts to agents and publishers), I found myself facing the question of genre. Just what is this book? What audience would enjoy it? First and foremost BURIED BY...
The Opening Squeeze
If there was one section of the book I agonized over, it had to be the prologue. It's not that the scenes there were difficult to write; it's more that I kept circling back to the first few paragraphs to refine them. I thought it was taking a little too long to...
A Musical Trinity – The Last Paul
When I sit down at the keyboard, it's all about shifting gears to get into the right frame of mind. I have playlists for that, but sometimes I'll just reach for a specific artist or album to set a mood. I thought a lot about that process while crafting scenes with...
Musical Influence, Fictional and Otherwise
What's going on in music in the year 2028? That was one of the trickier aspects of world building for me, and to be honest we only get snapshots of it by the end of BURIED BY THE SOUND. That, of course, is by design. The book opens with Jenna Donelly sitting on stage...
Why We Dream of Space
Last week the world witnessed a spectacle courtesy of Elon Musk and SpaceX. There's a lot to unpack in the Falcon Heavy launch, but for me it was a moment of exhilaration, proof of what humanity is capable of when we dream of big things. We are not bound to this...