The Playlists Behind My Books

I cannot write in silence. I have tried. It does not work. My brain fills the quiet with grocery lists and anxious thoughts and the memory of every embarrassing thing I have ever said. Music is the only thing that shuts all of that off and puts me inside the story.

Every book I write has its own playlist. Not a casual collection of songs I like. A carefully curated emotional soundtrack that I build before I write a single word. The playlist is part of the outlining process. It is how I find the emotional frequency of the story. Once I have the right songs, I know what the book feels like. And once I know what it feels like, I can write it.

The Kings of Ridgeview playlist is heavy. Stadium anthems mixed with late-night confessionals. The kind of music that sounds like adrenaline and regret at the same time. There are songs on that playlist that make me feel like I am standing on a football field at night with the lights still on and everyone else gone. That is the emotional space I need to be in to write those characters. The high of the game and the silence after it.

Hallow Masquerade has a playlist that sounds like a haunted ballroom. Classical strings layered with electronic distortion. Lana Del Rey at her most theatrical. Florence and the Machine at her most desperate. Songs that sound beautiful on the surface and devastating underneath. That duality is the entire book.

The Romano series playlist is grittier. Blues guitar. Moody R&B. Songs about small towns and big secrets and the kind of love that feels like coming home to a house that might be on fire. There is a warmth to it that the other playlists do not have, because the Romanos, for all their darkness, are a family. And family has a warmth that even danger cannot extinguish.

Daughters of the Drowned required something different entirely. I spent weeks searching for music that sounded ancient and modern at the same time. Tribal drums layered with ambient electronics. Vocals in languages I do not speak. Music that sounds like it is coming from underwater. Each god has their own sonic identity within the playlist. The god of storms sounds different from the god of fire. The god of decay sounds different from the god of shadow. The music tells me who they are before I put them on the page.

I listen to the playlist on repeat while I write. The same songs, over and over, for months. By the time a book is finished, those songs are permanently fused to the story in my brain. I cannot hear them without seeing the characters. I cannot hear them without feeling the scenes. They become inseparable.

Some writers use mood boards. Some use character sheets. Some use outlines that stretch for fifty pages. I use all of those things. But the playlist comes first. It is the foundation. It is the emotional architecture of the book. Everything else is built on top of it.

One day I will share them. When the books are out and the characters belong to you as much as they belong to me, I will open the playlists and let you hear what I heard while I was writing. I think it will change the way you read the stories. I think you will hear the music in the prose and realize it was there all along.

Until then, just know that every scene you read was written to a song. Every kiss. Every fight. Every revelation. There is music underneath all of it.