On Writing and Storytelling: A Surreal Little Moment from the Audiobook Release

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🎧 A Surreal Little Moment from the Audiobook Release

One of the strangest and most wonderful parts of releasing an audiobook is hearing a narrator bring your scenes to life. You think you know every beat of your own story… and then someone else performs it, and suddenly it feels new again.

What really surprised me was the preview Audible chose. Of all the scenes in Reunion: Coda, they picked the moment in The Moonglow Club — the one where Maddie looks at Jim across the table they’re sharing and asks him to dance. Hearing that performed hit me harder than I expected.

Here’s a small piece of that scene:

I glance at Maddie and see that she has a flush on her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes. She looks at me and smiles. Then she says, “Do you want to dance?”

“To ‘Little Brown Jug’?” I raise a skeptical eyebrow. “All you’ll get is your toes being stepped on – constantly. The rhythm is a bit too fast for me, I think.”

Maddie’s smile fades as if a passing cloud has eclipsed the moon over Manhattan. The spark in her hazel eyes dims a bit as well. “Party pooper.”

“No, no. I’m just trying to save your toes from going home tonight all sore. They used to call me ‘Two Left Feet Jim’ in school.”

For some reason, Maddie finds that nickname amusing, and her smile, that bright, self-confident smile, returns – but doesn’t quite reach her eyes. A trick of the lighting in the Moonglow, perhaps, or maybe it’s the two Heinekens I’ve consumed talking. But for a second there, I sense that odd feeling that characters in Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett’s stories get when they get a visit from mysterious dames at their offices late at night.

“You? Danced in school?”

I shrug. “Yep.”

She laughs, half amused, half skeptical. “College? Or high school?”

 “College. I was too much of a high school – “

“Nerd?” she finishes for me, and I’m not sure if she’s being cute or if she was the type of girl in high school that looked down on boys like me – the grades-before-all-else, shy, and awkward guys usually depicted in the movies as uncool, comic relief characters who play second fiddle to the jocks and bad boys on campus.

I gaze at her, looking for any sign of disdain in her expression. There’s none.

“Yeah, you could say that. No, I took dance classes in college. Mom insisted. She said it would be good for me. You know, to socialize. And be a bit physically active.”

Hearing that moment performed — the warmth in Maddie’s voice, Jim’s hesitation, the swing of the music behind them — felt like rediscovering something I wrote years ago. It’s surreal in the best possible way.