CHAR LUERLOCK

Nights Burn Like Incense: Available for Preorder Today! Out this Halloween!!

Synopsis:

Dark energies hang heavy in the hazy Los Angeles skyline. An ominous tarot card, a heated argument, and a baggie of chili powder and hair precede the untimely death of club kid Mickie's boyfriend. Police quickly rule out foul play, but considering the weird vibrations as of late, Mickie's not so sure. Meanwhile, former rock star Eris is homeless again. Experimental industrial band KV7 broke up half a decade ago, reducing the jilted front man to couch-surfing and reliving glory days through old Polaroids and drugged-out nostalgia. A chance meeting between two individuals haunted by lost loves and mourning dilapidated dreams in the City of Angels leads to Mickie and Eris plummeting together into the LA underground in their search for closure, encountering promoters, plugs, punks, and party animals along the way.

I am immensely proud of this book. I honestly believe it to be the best thing I've ever written. It's much shorter and more accessible, in my opinion, than my last one, clocking in at a little less than 70k words (or just around 200 pages). It's an easy read born of a lot of love for the nightlife, the city, music, and all of the heartbreak, euphoria, and growing pains of your early twenties.

Read the first 10 pages for free HERE!!

Preorder the ebook HERE! Paperback will be available to order upon full release on October 31st!

By the time we were driving towards San Diego I could feel the fatigue of the day setting in. It was around 1:30 AM, and I’d been up for nearly 20 hours. As we drove out along the 5 freeway into the strange no-man’s-land along the shore between Los Angeles and San Diego, blasting IAMX albums, I felt myself starting to nod off. In the back of my mind I grew nervous about timing. Our ETA was around 3:30 AM, and we’d still need to park, check in, I’d need to remove my makeup and shower, and I realistically couldn’t foresee myself laying down to sleep any earlier than 5:00 AM or so. The near-all-nighter was painful to even imagine, more so when envisioning that the VIP was set to start at 6:30 PM. If I wanted even 6 hours of sleep I’d be waking up at 11:00, giving myself little time to explore the city, eat, and get ready before the show.

With these anxious thoughts circling like vultures in the back of my head I began drifting off, in part hoping that I could make up some of the sleep I was anxious about potentially losing, in part simply from genuine exhaustion. I could see dark hillsides and an empty stretch of road out the window, and my consciousness seemed to flicker in and out of waking reality as IAMX songs blurred together on the radio.

I remember hearing Angel say, “We just hit 66,666 miles!” in the driver’s seat beside me.

In my hazy, sleep-delirious memory, it was as if these words triggered some sort of shift in reality. We did not know it yet, but we were suddenly far from our regular existence, careening down the road towards a deconstruction of all sense or reason. We had entered The Twilight Zone, as they say.

Nights Burn Like Incense — Book Cover Reveal!!

Designed by the phenomenal @lysistra 💜

Synopsis:

Dark energies hang heavy in the hazy Los Angeles skyline. An ominous tarot card, a heated argument, and a baggie of chili powder and hair precede the untimely death of club kid Mickie's boyfriend. Police quickly rule out foul play, but considering the weird vibrations as of late, Mickie's not so sure. Meanwhile, former rock star Eris is homeless again. Experimental industrial band KV7 broke up half a decade ago, reducing the jilted front man to couch-surfing and reliving glory days through old Polaroids and drugged-out nostalgia. A chance meeting between two individuals haunted by lost loves and mourning dilapidated dreams in the City of Angels leads to Mickie and Eris plummeting together into the LA underground in their search for closure, encountering promoters, plugs, punks, and party animals along the way.

This actually is something that has come up beyond the conversation I had with him in a way; he’s talked a couple of times about how the true meaning of Last Rights’ lyrics revealed themselves over time, what he thought was about his ex-girlfriend were really about himself, and this is one of the reasons the album’s liner notes didn’t include the lyrics:

“It was kind of a personal time in my life where I was messed up, I was in my own hell basically. So I'd like to leave that very interpretive...I didn't include it because at the time I lashed out at a lot of people that were around me and very close to me, like my ex-girlfriend and a lot of songs are based upon what I thought I saw her do, which may or may not have been true. At the time it was very confusing and in retrospect now I see that I was basically lashing out at myself, I could probably turn each one of those words back at myself and go 'yeah, that was more about me than anybody else'. I'd be more willing to publish the lyrics now with subtext saying 'this is all about me', a little bit of a disclaimer.” (source)

I remember I found that really striking at the time and it totally shifted my view of how much you really need to know ahead of time before you dive into your writing. Not the actual story beats, I know I need to plan those, lol. I can’t write without having a strong outline to work off of. But I don’t need to actually sit down with some big finalized crystal clear answer to the exact intention behind my stories. Just by putting words to a page the story becomes an authentic expression of yourself in that moment, a time capsule of your experiences and interests and anxieties and inner conflicts and the things you love and hate the most.

Whenever I look back at finished projects of mine it’s actually crazy how much they’re imbued with the circumstances of my life in the moment I was writing them in ways I couldn’t have articulated in the present moment. Waxed and Feathered is so intensely influenced by the fact that I began it when I was in my last year of community college before transferring to a university. I had just turned 18 and I was so desperate to move out of my parents’ house but so terrified of what the future and adulthood had in store for me. It was such a transitive, emotionally tumultuous time in my life full of so many unknowns. When I was actually writing the damn thing I never in a million years would have been able to articulate the connection between these real world anxieties and the story I was telling to be honest. Similarly, Nights Burn Like Incense was so emblematic of a very very specific moment in my life in my early twenties. I was dealing with a lot related to death and mortality, navigating relationship anxieties, and a lot of other things pertaining to this kind of slightly more introspective “young adulthood” compared to W&F’s more transitional narrative—For both of these stories I don’t want to get into how every single detail pertains to my real life because I think it demystifies it in an unfun way, but you get the idea.

2019 draft (left) vs 2026 rewrite (right).

One of my current projects (Head-Trip Ephemeris) is actually partially a rewrite of a draft I started ages ago. I’m not sure if these are the best example (it’s more a sum of its parts kinda thing I think) but I think my writing is just objectively stronger now than it was back then. Better tone and characterization.