In January 2025, I attended a writers’ retreat in Ottawa, Canada—cold, isolated, and quietly magical. While snow sealed us off from the world, warmth came from shared meals, open writing time, and inspired conversations with fellow writers and our hosts.
We were also guided by two extraordinary mentors: marketing coach Kimberly Grabas and writing coach Kevin Johns. After the retreat, I asked Kevin to review a sci-fi novella drawn from my fantasy series, The Reincarnation Chronicles. His insights were sharp, generous, and deeply attuned to artistic intention.
Talking Craft on The Writing Coach Podcast
I enjoyed my work and conversations with Kevin so much that I asked if I could do an interview with him for his podcast, The Writing Coach.
Although I’ve never formally worn the title “writing coach,” I joked with Kevin during the interview that I’ve been one in disguise for years. I’ve coached writers collaborating with composers during my musical theater teaching career, and I’ve coached young choreographers in shaping narrative clarity in their dances.
“I’m kind of a secret writing coach,” I told him. “And I’ve always believed critique should begin with the artist’s intention.”
Kevin structured the episode around the intersections of my career as a composer, dance musician, educator, and fantasy novelist, touching on:
✦ my favorite books and literary influences
✦ how writing and coaching appeared in every aspect of my career
✦ the ways music and improvisation informed my novels
✦ my work at the Fame School and its famous alums
✦ and finally, the inspirations behind The Reincarnation Chronicles
Origin and Evolution of the 1001 Series
One of Kevin’s key questions was how The Thousand and One Nights shaped the structure of my series. Once I conceived of The Qaraq—a group of souls reincarnating together across lifetimes—I needed a container large enough to hold hundreds of past-life stories. I explained:
“I was driving on the New Jersey Garden State Parkway down to Princeton and the 1001 Nights popped into my head, which has this frame story of Scheherazade telling bits of stories every night. What an interesting container for that past life story idea: in every chapter there is a story that’s compelling but incomplete in describing the qaraq’s history, in the way a déjà vu is an incomplete past life vision.”
Following up on my work process of how to manage 1001 past life stories, Kevin asked:
“Kevin Johns: You told me where you wrote down 1001 stories and ideas and put them in post-it notes on your wall. I can only imagine how satisfying it must have been to look at that wall and say, Okay, I have the content, the vision of it there.
SW: I never finished that wall. But the scope of the project was so big, I needed something metaphorical or visual to help see it. I was going to fill out each post for the stories, but at some point I thought, just get the damn computer out and do it that way. Take each post down and write a story. But there was a satisfaction. The only thing that wasn’t satisfying was that I never took a picture of it, which I regret.”
A Diverse, Hybrid Fantasy Epic
We also talked about genre. While The Reincarnation Chronicles blends speculative fiction, historical fantasy, and mythic storytelling, its home is firmly in fantasy—I’ve written about this idea on another blog. But here I’ll share what I said about the series’ galactic scope and diverse cast of characters:
“The present-day main characters [in the qaraq] are very diverse and come from different backgrounds. And because of the hybrid nature of the past life stories, there’s a lot of diversity, a lot of different cultures represented, first and foremost from the Arabian Nights. That’s why it was very nice to get a Multi-Cultural Fiction award.”
Musical Theater Meets Reincarnation Fiction
One of my favorite moments in the interview came when Kevin asked how my background in musical theater influenced my writing.
“I realized that in every chapter, I’ve got a scene in the present day between the characters, and then one of them goes into a trance and gets hurled into this past life memory, and you’re in that world, and then you come out of it back in the present day. And one of my challenges has been to make the past life story affect something in the present, something changes, some turning point happens.
“About a year into working on this, I thought, oh my god, this is the scene to song form [from the American musical]! Instead of going from speaking to singing to speaking [in a musical theater scene], it’s present time to past time to present time. And if I’m doing this 1001 times [in the series], I gotta vary the hell out of it. So that 10 years in musical theater really helped me write these books.”
Each chapter mirrors a classic scene-to-song-to-scene structure:
Present-day action → past-life immersion → return to the present, changed.
Listen to the Full Podcast
Kevin Johns is a perceptive writing coach and an energetic, generous interviewer. Our conversation ranged across writing craft, creative process, fantasy world-building, and the strange ways different art forms speak to each other.
You can listen to the full episode of The Writing Coach Podcast right here.
You can also explore my website for specific information about The Reincarnation Chronicles. And you might enjoy more devilish chatter about the series with my blog posts about:
✦ writing fiction with a custom music playlist
✦ The relaunch of The Reincarnation Chronicles in a new edition
Thanks for reading—and listening.