The Sound Beneath Forbidden Sanctuary

After my last post, about how surroundings affect the writing process, someone told me they could feel the sound underneath the prose.

So this is me opening the door wider.

When I wrote Forbidden Sanctuary, the music was not the background. It was architecture. Each track carried a different function. Some hollowed me out. Some made the scenes crueler. Some stripped romance of its safety and left only hunger behind.

I did not choose these songs because they were pretty. I chose them because they were dangerous.

There is a specific kind of grief in All I Want and Holocene. Not dramatic grief. Quiet devastation. The kind that teaches you how to leave space in a sentence and trust the reader to fall into it. Those songs taught me how to let Sera and Kael exist beside one another without resolution. Love suspended. Words withheld. Silence does more damage than confession ever could.

Radiohead lived in the marrow of this book. Exit Music (For a Film) and Meeting in the Aisle taught me how inevitability should sound. Not loud. Not theatrical. I wanted the doom to feel procedural. Calm. Unavoidable. Heaven in Forbidden Sanctuary carries that same tone. Clean lines. Polite voices. Absolute certainty. No mercy required.

Hozier shaped devotion in this story. Not romance. Devotion. Take Me To Church and Work Song reminded me that worship and obsession share the same bones. That faith, stripped of tenderness, becomes hunger with a halo. Those songs fed directly into the way power works in my world. Angels are not benevolent because they believe they are right. That belief makes them dangerous.

Then the sound turned industrial.

Nine Inch Nails cracked the book open. The Becoming and Hurt flattened sentiment into something raw and mechanical. That music carved Kael’s internal world. Not his longing. His damage. His refusal to be whole. Every moment where the prose hardens and beauty is treated as a liability, that influence is there, grinding underneath.

There are songs on the playlist that made love feel like a threat.

Iris. I Can’t Go On Without You. The Night We Met. These tracks taught me that longing does not soften a character. It destabilizes them. Sera’s hunger sharpened in those moments. Desire became something that could erase her. I did not want love to save her. I wanted to test how much she could lose without disappearing.

And when the story needed scale, when it needed momentum without hope, the music widened.

Woodkid. M83. The kind of sound that moves forward even when collapse would be easier. Those tracks taught me how to write inevitability as motion. Fate not as prophecy, but as pressure.

This is why Forbidden Sanctuary reads the way it does.

It was written inside a soundscape that refused comfort. Music that lingered in grief. Music that treated devotion as a wound and love as a destabilizing force.

I did not escape into these songs.

I let them bleed into the pages and teach the book how to ache.

And once that sound got into the bones of the story, there was no writing it any other way.

Layla