Month: May 2021

Our lyrical raw materials: Cemetery –> Stars/Planets –> Band –> Apology Letter –> Unsent Invitations. Musically it’s a pretty song that takes things down a notch compared to the tunes that preceded it. And that’s the slalom course I tried to ski here. Other connections were also in play. The opening line “Ladies roll by…”…

Many of the songs on A Love Extreme have phrases I adore so much they became non-negotiable blueprints for L Extreme chapters from the earliest drafts. Here the magic words were “jambox” and “Halloween.” Inserting a jambox as a recurring prop was relatively easy. Working Halloween into the book’s timeline proved more difficult… Why was…

A dream, a frame story, and a flashback walk into a novel based on lyrics from a double album by Benji Hughes who also stars as the protagonist. Kidding aside, the thrill of working on L Extreme was the kitchen-sink zaniness of the structure. As I began to identify the throughline of the plot, songs naturally…

Chapter 1 of L Extreme ends the dreamy non-dream with “and then I fall asleep,” so we naturally kick off the main action with Benji waking up. After making the switch to fiction, my original concept for the book was a set of loosely connected short stories. Take the same characters and settings and let them…