The main character of my debut novel, Have Mercy, was born in one of the dirtiest bars I’ve ever seen.

I don’t mean dirty in the sense that it hasn’t been cleaned– although it certainly could have stood a deep clean, especially the bathrooms– I mean deeply dirty, rolled in life’s mud and disappointments, openly acknowledging, even celebrating, its hurts and sins and pain-tinged joys.

It was March, and I was there for a friend’s birthday party. This particular friend is a blues guitar player himself who once played regularly at this bar. That night I had arrived early, still dressed for work. Sitting alone in a bar that would have been opaque with smoke in an era before smoking bans, sipping bourbon, with nothing but my pen and a notebook for company, I watched a blues singer who had just returned from a tour in Europe get onstage and just own the music, own the crowd, own her life as she sang it. Every wrong thing she’d ever done, every scrap of happiness she’d ever earned or deserved, belonged to her.

I wondered what it would be like to be that kind of woman. I wondered if she was that kind of woman offstage as well as on. I wondered what kind of man would fall in love with that kind of woman, and what kind of man could make that woman happy, and how they would meet.

And so Emme was born. I started writing, letting the music wash over me. I made her a Kentuckian, like me, stuck somewhere between urban and rural, Southern and Midwestern. Maybe it was the influence of the bourbon that did it. I made her from Louisville, a river town where the blues have traveled up the Mississippi and stopped along the way, where they’ve been influenced by and influenced country music and rock and gospel and good ol’ Baptist church hymns.

By the time my friends arrived, I’ll admit that I wasn’t very social. I’d been pulled under by the music and the story that had woven itself around me. One scene in particular stuck with me, and was the first scene I wrote (I’ll tell you which one closer to release day). By the time my friend got up to sit in with the band, the air was opaque for me, not with smoke, but with characters and plots and themes and all the magic of the good, clean dirt of life that I wanted to roll around in.