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Showing posts from July, 2025

Essay: The Music of 'Comings and Goings'

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  © 2025 Alex Diaz-Granados 🎧 The Soundtrack of Stillness — Music as Memory in Comings and Goings What if a mixtape could hold a heartbeat? In Comings and Goings – The Art of Being Seen , music is neither garnish nor nostalgia-bait—it’s emotional brushwork. Each track, from the thundering bravado of Twisted Sister to the trembling quiet of Beethoven’s Adagio cantabile , is chosen with surgical tenderness. Not to dazzle, but to reveal . Eric Carmen’s “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” , hiding Rachmaninoff like a bruise beneath silk, becomes a turning point—not for plot, but for perception. Kelly hears what others miss. And that’s how we know she sees Jim too. Billy Joel’s “This Night” doesn’t seduce the moment—it steadies it. It enters like a held breath and leaves like a trace of skin on cotton. There’s a stripped-down elegance to the aesthetic curation here: each piece of music echoes a kind of duality. Pop songs with classical skeletons. Ballads that hum with memory. The mus...

Where Did You Get the Idea for Your Most Recent Book?

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© 2025 Alex Diaz-Granados It’s funny how inspiration works. With Reunion: Coda —the novel I published less than three months ago—the idea took years to bloom. In fact, it first sparked back in 2000, when April, someone I never actually met, read the early manuscript of what eventually became Reunion: A Story . Maybe because I subconsciously associated the idea of a sequel with her, I didn’t begin writing Coda until 2023. That’s a 23-year gestation period. The final product? A novel over 500 pages long. But my latest book? It arrived almost by accident. The first nudge came from my friend Juan Carlos Hernández, who asked me a deceptively simple question: “What are you writing next?” I didn’t have a good answer. I was still knee-deep in promoting Coda , still recovering from the two-year marathon of writing it and from the whiplash of two cross-country moves in under a year. The truth was: I wasn’t ready to know what the Next Story was. Because once you know, you have to write it. Sti...