Crimson and Clover - Tommy James & The Shondells

The Walkabouts - The Light Will Stay On

This song inspired the core idea of the novel but is not on the soundtrack. But it is very much a song I am grateful for because all my thinking of this story began here. It was over a decade ago, I think around 2011. Of course life often interferes with art and the years between 2011 and 2022 were reserved for loss, pain, therapy, and finding a life again. The story I am finishing is not the story I began, but the core ideas where I sat down and began writing was in Nano 2015. I didn't have much of a draft and it took me months in 2016 to finish something that was merely an idea that was eventually used in a much different story. I believe stories are like this, they are created, then evolve in the womb where they are fed, thriving over months or even years as we write new drafts and discard them over and over, maybe due to boredom or because we are transformed ourselves by what life can become and what life can do to us. We are not the writers we were previously. This is what happened to me. All those years of loss and anxiety and pain, of learning to be a decent human being again, to build a new life in what was strangely becoming an unstable world. In 2021, I was barely human after Covid and there was more loss. I had lived along for an entire year, too, rarely seeing the face of my own children. I was a widow not knowing what I should do with myself. I was always working a little on this story, but by 2023, I had a very different book. In 2024, I wrote a draft that needed a lot of work. It was much too big, too full of plot, too full of everything. In 2025, I almost lost my vision and I could not write at all until the summer months. And that is where I am now, starting work again. I either give up or start again. I am not known for giving up and if the fates are kind, I will see this story published. Failures have taught me a lot. Loss has taught me a lot. I am a better writer now. (Dated October 4, 2025.)