The inspiration behind my Young Adult Romance novel 💙💖📚
+ a peek into my creative process! ✨
Hello friends! If you’re new here, I’m the author of Middle Grade Horror Books THE FORGOTTEN GIRL, THE GIRL AND THE LAKE, and YA Romance novel RHYTHM & MUSE
(psst… I may or may not be working on another book or two right now! 👀)
Just like I did with THE FORGOTTEN GIRL, I wanted to give you a comprehensive newsletter all about RHYTHM & MUSE, to celebrate its paperback release!
RHYTHM & MUSE follows our main character Darren, a teenage Black boy, who’s wrestling with perfection. He has a huge crush on the new girl, the popular podcast host Dillie, of Dillie D and the Place to Be. He frequently daydreams about her (affectionately calling them Dillie Daydreams) to the point where his best friend, Justin, says he needs to get out of his own head and ask her out.
Darren, ever the perfectionist, feels like he only has one chance to get it right. So naturally, he puts off even asking her.
Enter Dillie: She’s running a contest to find a singer for her podcast theme song. Although Darren used to sing all of the time (emphasis on used to for embarrassing reasons he won’t talk about) and even playfully wrote a song for the contest, he definitely won’t send it in.
But his song -which is a love song he wrote about Dillie- gets anonymously sent to her podcast and becomes a hit. Darren has to decide will he come out of his shell, start singing again, and admit his love to Dillie, all by taking ownership of this anonymous song, or let it fade into oblivion, forgetting about his crush and his music.
You’ll have to read to find out!
I started thinking about this novel when I wrote THE FORGOTTEN GIRL, and after I was finished, I started drafting it in 2018. It was around a time where I was reading a lot of Young Adult Romance, but rarely seeing any with Black main characters. I wanted to write that, something fun and light for my high school self. Something that is easy, makes you laugh, and has a guaranteed happy ending. I think we all need books like that!
It’s so funny because I started thinking about RHYTHM & MUSE around the time I got married. Little did I know, by the time it released, I would have two baby boys! I love the fact that they can read a book about a Black boy main character when they get older.
A fun little peek into my creative process: here’s one of the songs I drafted for RHYTHM & MUSE years ago, by hand, in a notebook. Everything I write starts in a notebook. This is a bit of a SPOILER, since it’s towards the end of the book!
I can also be seen working on it in a little Moleskine journal here.
For more context on how important this story is to my heart, read this essay I wrote for the School Library Journal called Cute, Sensitive, Funny, Creating a Happily Ever After.
Check out this interview where I’m “interviewing” Darren! It has a few spoilers in it, so check it out once you finish reading RHYTHM & MUSE!
Thank you for your support in reading it, I would love to know what you think! And if you’d like to preview the first chapter, I’m reading it in this video! Or, if you’d like to read the first chapter yourself, check it out here.