I’ve written a lot of words in my life that nobody has read, which makes it all the stranger that I have a book out in the world. Rapscallion is the culmination of years of work, but the actual writing of the thing isn’t the only part of what I do. Every story starts somewhere, and in the case of most every author I encounter, several somewheres. Over these next posts, I intend to shine a light on some of those somewheres.

The first thing you should know is that this book wouldn’t exist if not for my high school band. Our band had been selected to perform at the 2009 Midwest Clinic in Chicago, a pretty significant honor for a high school band even though we got the early Saturday morning slot. This changed my life in two equally profound ways: it gave me my first taste of Chicago deep dish pizza, and it made me intimately familiar with “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks,” the tone poem by Richard Strauss.

(As a French horn player, you might understand why I became a little obsessed.)

For a piece this musically dense, we deconstructed it, slowing down the tempt to a crawl until we got every note and inflection as right as a group of 16-year-olds could, and the more I looked at the piece, the more I heard it, the more I could tease out the framework of a story. Not of the Till Eulenspiegel of German folklore, who’s more of a prankster than anything, but of a Robin Hood type, a swashbuckler who loves to use disguises and slip right under the noses of his marks. As I described him to people who asked me about the book while I was writing it, Lucas Mollifer is Errol Flynn meets Harold Hill from The Music Man.

And that’s when setpieces emerged: the climax and denouement first, and then the balls, the opening carriage chase, the dungeon break sequence. The nature of the Strauss piece meant the book would always owe a debt to Germany (though obviously it’s not 1:1). My ideas had formed the nebulous shape of a novel, but for a decade, that’s how the book stayed: nebulous.

Most authors have no shortage of ideas. Ideas are cheap. I’ve got more book ideas than I’ll ever be able to write. Which means I needed something to light the spark that would make Rapscallion happen, otherwise, it would remain an idea forever.

And then I went to Heidelberg.