Today is the day!
The Musical Awakening paperback is officially out in the world, and I have been sitting here trying to figure out how to write this post — the one I have been imagining for longer than I care to admit — and I keep coming back to the same feeling.
I can't believe this is real! But ten years later...here we are.
I have been running this blog since 2009. Seventeen years of writing about Comic Con, my life, bands I loved, moments I wanted to hold onto forever.
But somewhere in the middle of all of it, a story started forming. Not a review. Not a recap. A real story, with real characters, that grew directly out of the most formative years of my life as a blogger and photographer.
June Snow is me. Kinda — she's a fictional version of a real feeling, a character built from the truest parts of who I was during that era. The same feeling of standing in a small venue watching a band you love and thinking: this is it. This is the thing that makes life make sense.
I know that feeling because I lived it. I also know what comes after — the harder chapters that shape you just as much as the music does. The divorce. The cross-country move. The heartbreak that floors you and the rebuilding that follows. Buying a house on your own. Finding your person. Finding yourself!
June's story ends where mine was just beginning. But everything she reaches for — the courage to let music in, to let people in, to stop standing at the edge of her own life — I understand that reaching. I've done it too, in my own way, in my own time.
Richmond Adams came from that same time. From years of following musicians whose words felt like they were made specifically for me. From knowing what it feels like when an artist changes the way you see the world.
I started writing Musical Awakening in 2013 — which is not a coincidence, given that's exactly when the book begins. I wrote drafts that didn't work. I put it down for years at a time. I picked it back up. I rewrote it more times than I can count. I spent years coming back to it, loving it, not quite knowing how to finish it.
And then one day I did.
So I published it.
Musical Awakening is a coming-of-age romance about a concert photographer and music blogger named June Snow whose world becomes unexpectedly intertwined with rising British musician Richmond Adams across years, cities, and a music scene that keeps pulling them back together. Told through a blend of intimate prose and social-media-style chapter intros — blog posts, tweets, texts — spanning 2013 to 2017, it's a slow-burn love story about two creative people drawn together by music and separated by everything else.
It's set in places I've been and loved. It's soundtracked by music that changed my life. It's about the slow burn of wanting something you're not sure you're allowed to have, and the courage it takes to finally reach for it.
It's for anyone who has ever let one song change everything.
What Today Means 💖
I launched the ebook on June 2nd, 2026 and the response genuinely made me cry. Real people, people I have never met, read this thing that lived in my head for a decade and felt something. That will never stop being extraordinary to me.
But today — today is the paperback. The hold-it-in-your-hands, put-it-on-your-shelf, lend-it-to-your-friend version. The one I can bring to San Diego Comic Con later this month and hand to a stranger who might fall in love with June and Richmond the same way I did.
I have been a blogger for seventeen years. I have photographed concerts and written about music and documented my whole messy, beautiful life online since 2009. And now I am also an author. A real one, with a real book, with a spine and pages and my name on the cover.
I still can't believe it!
If you've been reading this blog for years — thank you! Genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, thank you! You are part of why this book exists. The community this blog built, the music we talked about, the comic cons we nerded out about together — all of it lives in these pages.
If you've been on the fence about reading Musical Awakening — today is your day. The paperback is available now on Amazon, and I would be so honored to have it on your shelf.
If you've already read it and loved it — please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. It takes two minutes and means the world to a debut author trying to find her readers!
And if you just stumbled onto this blog for the first time today — HI. Welcome! I think you're going to like it here. 🎶
📖 Buy Musical Awakening on Amazon
Have you read Musical Awakening? I'd love to hear what you thought — drop a comment below or find me on Instagram and TikTok at @meganelvrum.
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