I Started Writing Musical Awakening in 2015: This Is Then 📖 🎶 💖

I started writing Musical Awakening in 2015. And I tried to, but I couldn't finish it.

For a long time, I wasn't even sure I was supposed to. And I didn't want to force it.

That feels strange to say now because Musical Awakening is finally a real book. There are paperbacks sitting on my desk. People have read it. People have reviewed it. It's on Amazon!

But in 2015? It was just a document on my computer. And I was a very different person.

I was starting over 📆

In 2015, I was going through a divorce. My life didn't look anything like the life I thought I was going to have.

There are certain moments when you realize the version of adulthood you carefully constructed isn't actually the life you want. And that was one of them.

I didn't have some perfectly mapped-out five-year plan. I just knew I wanted something different. I wanted to figure out who I was when I wasn't trying to fit into someone else's version of my life. And I was spending a lot of time thinking about what it meant to actually choose yourself.

That question became the beginning of Musical Awakening.

June Snow showed up ❄️

June Snow is a concert photographer and music blogger.

She travels to photographs bands. She writes about music. She builds a life around the things that make her feel most like herself.

And then she meets Richmond Adams.

He's a rising British musician, and their lives become unexpectedly intertwined across years, cities, concerts, social media, and a whole lot of terrible timing.

At first, I didn't know exactly where the story was going. I just knew June had to be someone who was willing to go after the life she wanted. That mattered to me. Because I was trying to figure out how to do the same thing.

My life was full of music 🎶

This is the part of the story that makes the book especially personal.

I wasn't inventing June's world from scratch. I was already living in it.

I had been blogging for years. I was photographing concerts. I was traveling to see bands.

I was discovering artists who would become incredibly important to me.

I was documenting all of it on the internet — blog posts, photos, social media. That world became the setting for June's life. Not because the book is my autobiography.

It absolutely isn't.

But because when you write about something you know intimately, your details sneak in. The venues. The backstage feeling. The confusing intimacy of following musicians online. The excitement of discovering a band. The way one song can completely rearrange your mood. The feeling of being in a crowd with your camera in your hand and realizing that, you are exactly where you're supposed to be.

The funny thing about writing a love story 💖

At the time, I thought I was writing about love.

And I was.

But I was also writing about identity.

About what happens when you stop waiting for your life to become something and start making decisions that actually move it forward. June isn't looking for a relationship. She's building a life. That's what mattered to me. Because I was doing the same thing. I was figuring out where I wanted to live.

What I wanted to do.

Who I wanted to be.

What kind of work made me happy. What kind of people I wanted around me. What kind of love actually fit into the life I was building.

I didn't have answers to all of those questions. I just had an open document. So I kept writing.

And then I got stuck 🤔

Here's the less romantic part.

I wrote a lot of Musical Awakening.

Then I stopped.

I had the story. I had the characters. I had scenes I loved. I had edited it. I had even pitched it. But I didn't have an ending.

So I let it sit.

For years.

Five years, actually.

In 2020, I pulled it back out and pitched it again. Still no ending. But I still believed there was something there.

So I saved it. And kept living.

Ten years is a long time 🕰️

A lot happened between 2015 and 2026.

I changed. My life changed. The world changed. The internet changed. My relationship with writing changed. And eventually, I opened that manuscript again.

This time, I knew how it ended.

And I finished the book.

My husband helped me edit it. I read and tweaked the manuscript three more times.

And then I sent it into the world on June 2, 2026.

After more than a decade, the story that began as a document during one of the messiest periods of my life became my self published novel.

Which is why holding this book feels 🥹

Because when I look at Musical Awakening, I don't just see a novel.

I see 2015 Megan.

The woman who didn't know exactly what was next. The woman who knew something had to change. The woman who was sitting down at her computer and trying to imagine a different life. I wish I could go back and tell her:

• You don't have to know exactly how this ends
• Just keep going
• You don't have to have the whole life figured out
• Build the next piece
• Write the next page
• Take the next road trip
• Go to the concert
• Say yes to the thing that scares you
• Make the decision that feels like yours

Because sometimes you don't understand what you're building until years later.

Sometimes the thing you create while you're trying to survive one chapter becomes the thing you're most proud of in the next.

That's what Musical Awakening is for me.

A story about music. A story about love. But maybe most of all, a story about becoming the person who gets to choose what happens next.

And somehow, after all these years, June finally made it to the end.

So did I. But this next chapter is going to be even better.

📖 Musical Awakening is available now.

If you're somewhere in the middle of your own "what now?" chapter, I hope you find something in it that reminds you:

You don't have to know how the story ends to start writing it! #ListenForYourself