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

© 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.

Still, Juan’s question echoed. And one night in Miami, reading through Coda with fresh eyes, I came upon this passage:

I haven’t thought about Kelly in years, but the memories flood back…
Maybe this is why Heineken became my beer of choice.

And just like that, I sat up in bed and muttered, “This means something.” It wasn’t just a line. It was a doorway.

What if I wrote about that moment? About Jim’s first time with a girl—about that night with Kelly after the college party from hell?

I didn’t want to write another novel—not right away. I’m not on Stephen King’s deadline, and the literary world isn’t exactly knocking down my door for a thousand-page epic. But a short story? That I could do.

The idea lingered—like the taste of Heineken on the back of the tongue. And the more I let it linger, the clearer it became. As I wrote in a recent post:

Kelly wasn’t loud, but she kept showing up—like a song you’d forgotten, until it plays again at just the right moment. And suddenly, you remember everything.

The story that followed became a companion piece to Coda—a moment of truth wrapped in memory, music, and the ache of choosing to stay when leaving might’ve been easier.

And that, dear reader, is how I wrote my most recent book.

 

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