The Book Series Now Has a Soundtrack
This is the hundredth entry in this Grimoire, and rather than spend it on a retrospective, I want to spend it on the strangest shelf in the Cosmic Grimdark library: the songbook.
My novels now have original music. Not playlists of other people’s songs that feel right, which is what authors have traded around for decades, but songs that belong to the series the way a chapter does: written in the voices of specific characters, referencing events that happen on specific pages, and held to the same continuity law as anything else that wears the world’s name. The newest two are “Rojo the Vigilante,” a hunting song for the man who works the Syndicate’s districts by night, and “Forked Tongue,” a cabaret number with venom in it, sung at the castle’s expense. They joined a shelf that already held several recorded numbers and an anthem, “The Eyeless Reigns Supreme,” that plays over the games page for anyone who clicks the little note in the corner.
Does a book series need songs? No. It does not need cover art either, and nobody argues covers are optional anymore. A song is canon you can hum. It survives outside the book in a way prose cannot: it rides in a car, it loops while someone does dishes, it gets hummed at a stranger. A blurb asks for your attention. A hook takes it. For a series trying to be a world rather than a shelf of spines, music is the cheapest passport there is.
Three Verses Hold a Whole Person
The craft surprise was compression. I have given Rojo whole chapters. The song gives him three verses and a chorus, and the discipline of that squeeze taught me things about him that the chapters had let me defer.
Prose is forgiving. If a character’s essence is smeared across forty pages, the reader assembles him gradually and nobody notices the author never had to say the whole man in one breath. A lyric has no forty pages. Whatever goes in the verse has to be load-bearing: the way he moves, the thing he wants, the price he has already paid. Everything else falls away, and what falls away tells you what was ornament all along. I came out of both songs knowing my own characters better than I went in, which is a strange thing to say about people I invented years ago.
The other discipline is idiom. A character’s song is not just their story set to any music. It is their music. Rojo’s number had to move the way he moves, unhurried, certain, a man who has already decided how the night ends. Escarlata’s had to burn the other direction, all heat and theater, a performance that dares the room to look away. Choosing an idiom for a character is the same act as choosing their diction in dialogue, and it can go wrong the same way: hand a character the wrong register and readers who know them will flinch before they can say why. I threw out ideas that were fine on their own terms because they belonged to some blander person who does not exist in my books.
One Voice Per Throat
The test every song had to pass is the same one I hold dialogue to, and it is the most useful tool I own.
Strip the attribution. Take a verse, or a line of dialogue, or a sentence of narration in a character’s register, and show it to someone who has read the books with no name attached. If they cannot tell you who is speaking, the voice is not done. It does not matter how good the line is in isolation. A good line in nobody’s voice is a stock photo, professional and weightless. Both of these songs went through that filter verse by verse, and the verses that failed got rewritten until a reader could catch the speaker from the cadence alone.
This is also my answer to the question I get asked most about AI in a creative practice. The machine in this workflow is the studio. It renders a finished performance in minutes. What it cannot do is know who Rojo is. It has never met him. The lyrics are mine for the same reason the dialogue in the novels is mine: voice is the one asset in this whole enterprise that cannot be rented.
And between the writing and the rendering sits a third job, the one nobody sees. The studio hands you take after take, and most are wrong in ways it cannot hear. I chose the music itself, and could tell you exactly why this take and none of the others. When a verse fought the tempo, I bent the words until they rode it, so the lyrics bent to the music as often as the music bent to them. That part of the work feels least like typing and most like playing an instrument: learning where the thread gives, where it holds, and how hard to press. Nobody hears that job in the finished song. They only hear whether somebody did it.
Where the Songs Live
For now, the songs live where the series lives, and each corner of it keeps its own music room. The three games built from the books went free in the browser this month at alejandroashes.com/games, and all three were built with a stage in them: the Guildhall keeps an opera, the pirate harbor has La Ópera de los Borrachos with a diva who takes requests, and Castle Courtesana runs the Velvet Box, the house’s own listening booth where every song of the night sits on its own bar. The Velvet Box is where the two newest numbers debuted, verses inscribed beside the music so a player can read along with the record. The anthem keeps the front door of the games page for anyone who clicks the note in the corner.
The shelf has registers, too, which I did not plan and now consider load-bearing. “The Eyeless Reigns Supreme” is nobody’s number. It is the world singing about itself, the way a main title theme does, and it belongs over a landing page for exactly that reason. The character songs work the opposite muscle. An anthem argues for a universe. A character song argues for one person in it, and that turned out to be the harder brief, because a universe can absorb a vague line and a person cannot.
A proper listening page for the whole songbook is on the someday list, and the songs will outlive whatever stage they happen to stand on this year.
Full Circle
There is a symmetry in which characters got these songs, and the hundredth post is the right place to admit it.
Esmeralda and Escarlata is where all of this began, and the books came first. I had written two and a third of them myself, the old way, and they had found their success before AI entered the picture at all. My entire history with the technology back then was a year of dabbling: Canva layouts, some art generation, nothing that resembled a practice. Then, out of plain curiosity, before this site existed and before AI work became my career, I opened a conversation with Claude Sonnet 3.5 about the world I was already writing. What changed was not the authorship. It was the pace. The series finished at a speed I could not have sustained alone, and everything this Grimoire has documented in the hundred posts since, the pipelines and the style laws, the illustrated codex, the reader, the games, grew out of that acceleration.
So there is a symmetry in the fact that the newest songs on the shelf, written after all the others, belong to the E&E cast. The catalog circled back to the ones who started it all.
One hundred posts ago this blog set out to document what AI changes about making books. The change keeps landing somewhere nobody was arguing about, and music is the cleanest example yet. The studio used to be the expensive part of a soundtrack. What is expensive now is what was always expensive in the books: knowing your people well enough to speak in their voices. I learned these tools listening for two of those voices. The songs are for them.
