A lot of writers come up with playlists for their fiction. Sometimes these are the songs they listen to while writing or world-building. Sometimes they’re the songs that the main character listens to.

Me, I’ve never been able to write to music. I like silence when I’m writing. Well, or background noise, but the key is, nothing that will draw my attention.

But music absolutely plays a role in my writing.

A couple of examples spring readily to mind for me. In The Telepath Trilogy, I often talk about Rick’s favorite band – Three Coyotes – and his best friend’s favorite band, the Cold Skankin’ Boys. I even wrote some lyrics for their songs (and the melody line for one of them comes back to me often.)

In Twice Against the Dragon, the main characters have some pretty damning songs written about them, and I know I included at least one of them in the text in its entirety.

While coming up with the character of Heath Cyr – protagonist of the Spells for Hire series – the music he listens to, and the music he doesn’t listen to, were instrumental in understanding who he is as a person.

If you’ll pardon the pun.

But sometimes I go further, as I did in Hunting Monsters.

If you’ve read many of my blog posts, you probably have come to realize that I love the music of Blue Öyster Cult. And while I was writing Hunting Monsters, a song from Blue Öyster Cult’s first album kept coming back to my head.

The song is “Transmaniacon MC.” I’m not sure I can legally post the lyrics here, so I won’t, but you can find them with a quick Google search, if you’re curious. For now, here’s the official YouTube of the song.

For me, though, the interest started with the title. Transmaniacon MC. The Transmaniacon Motor Club. Bikers. But what does “transmaniacon” mean?

Well, break it down into its component parts. Without getting too deep into a discussion of etymology, trans- as a prefix, means “across” or “through.” “Mania” is, as you probably expect, derives from the Greek word for “madness.” And “-con” as a suffix, comes from the Old English “to know.”

Looked at that way, “transmaniacon” means “the knowledge across madness.” Or, as I prefer, “the knowledge beyond madness.”

Yeah. I like that. Has a real Lovecraftian vibe. A whole motorcycle club dedicated to the knowledge that lies beyond madness.

This. This was something I had to put in a story. I went back over the song until I knew it backwards and forwards, and I let the lyrics affect my interpretation of the club. Who they were, what they’d done, and most importantly, what they do.

Best of all, I had a story going to put it in. The tale of a guy and his crew of reality show ghost hunters who cross paths with a vampire in the worst possible way.

That poor guy survives the attack, more or less. But to survive the events of the novel, he’d need a little of the knowledge that lies beyond madness.

He’d need a little help from the Transmaniacon MC.

Oh, they’ll be back in other books and stories. I just know it. I like what I came up with too much. But for right now, if you’d like to read my interpretation of the Transmaniacon MC, you’ll have to pick up Hunting Monsters.

Fortunately, for about another eight hours or so, you can pick it up along with the Dark Fantasy Storybundle for a single, good price. And you can even help a worthy cause while you do it.