Existing at the edge
I’ve always been drawn to women who exist at the edge of mythology. Artists who shape a generation and then vanish into it. The idea of a musician whose music defined someone’s coming-of-age, only for them to meet years later, felt electric to me. Intimate. I wanted to explore what happens when admiration turns into proximity. When inspiration becomes flesh and breath and flaws.
How does music inspire the story?
Music shaped the story that would become Written on Vinyl long before the chapters did. I built a playlist before I built a timeline. The tone of the novel lives in that soundscape. Smoky harmonies, 70s textures, aching guitar lines. Songs that feel like they’re both confession and performance at the same time. I wrote certain scenes with specific tracks on repeat until the rhythm of the sentences matched the rhythm of the music.
But if I’m being honest, this book exists because of one song.
“Bella Donna.”
There’s something in that track that feels suspended between power and vulnerability. It sounds like a woman standing in the aftermath of something—love, fame, betrayal—and choosing to remain visible anyway. Not untouched. Not unscarred. Present.
That voice belongs to Stevie Nicks.
Over the years, I’ve become fascinated not just with her music, but with the mythology surrounding her. There’s Stevie Nicks the woman: the songwriter, the survivor, the working artist. And then there’s Stevie Nicks the myth. The silhouette in black. The tambourine. The almost-supernatural icon people project onto.
Those two versions coexist. They are not the same.
Celeste Moon was born in that tension.
She is not Stevie. She is not a fictional retelling of Stevie’s life. But she is inspired by the idea of what it means to become larger than yourself in the public imagination. To have your pain aestheticized. To have your voice belong to millions of people who feel like they know you.
Celeste exists in that space.
Not as imitation. Not as biography. But as an exploration of what it means to live inside your own mythology and what it takes to step out from it long enough to be loved as a person.
The rest of the playlist fills in the emotional architecture around that spark.
Which songs inspired the character?
Some songs belong to Celeste: the rise, the unraveling, the defiance, the reinvention. Tracks that feel like stage lights and headlines and the particular loneliness of being watched.
Some belong to Vivian: the ache of idolization, the slow realization that the myth is human, the complicated shift from admiration to confrontation.
And some live in the space between them. The arguments. The charged silences. The moments where power tilts and rebalances. Where love is chosen instead of assumed.
Not every song on the playlist maps cleanly onto a scene. Some of them were just there while I wrote, setting the temperature of the story. But together, they shaped the emotional rhythm of the book.
If you press play before you read, you’ll hear the story underneath the story.
At it’s core…
Written on Vinyl asks a simple question: can you love the person once the myth dissolves?
The myth is loud. The woman is quieter.
I wanted to write about both.
To listen to the full playlist, click here.
