Bestselling author M.L. Rio will come to The Raven Bookstore on Oct. 15 at 6:30 p.m. as a part of her book tour for the paperback edition of her rock n’ roll road trip novel “Hot Wax.” The Raven Bookstore stop will feature Rio’s new paperback edition of “Hot Wax” available for sale, as well as an author panel, audience Q&A, and a book signing. Tour merchandise will also be available at the stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I sat down with Rio to discuss her newest novel “Hot Wax,” her journey in writing, and her advice for aspiring novelists. Read until the end for a playlist by Rio inspired by the novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Could you give me just a brief description as to who you are and what you do? You seem to do a lot of things, so I’m interested.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yeah, I have worn a lot of different hats. So I am a novelist. I’m also an academic, and I was an actor for a long time. When I say I’m a music writer, what I mean is I write about music, like I’m a music critic more so than a person who actually writes music itself. So I worked for a long time for a magazine called The Vinyl District, which has a focus on vinyl. But, mostly what I was doing there was reviews and artists and interviews, sometimes new releases, that kind of thing. Covering record fares, that sort of event, and occasionally going on the road with bands that are traveling. So that definitely informs some of my novel \u201cHot Wax.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What would you say “Hot Wax” is about? If you were to be pitching this, what is this book about?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n So I originally pitched this book to my agent as \u201cThis Is Spinal Tap\u201d meets \u201cThelma & Louise.\u201d It is, at its core, a novel about a disastrous concert tour in the summer of 1989, and it takes place in two timelines. In the first one, the A-side timeline, it’s 1989. The main character is 10 years old, and she is on the road with her dad’s rock band for this very ill-fated summer concert tour, and then the B-side timeline, because the narrative kind of jumps back and forth. In the B-side timeline, it’s 2018, and the same character, Suzanne, about 30 years later, is going through a bit of a midlife crisis. She is on the run from a lot of stuff in her personal life and finds herself kind of retracing the steps of that concert tour 30 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At its core, I think, apart from being a book about music, performance, pop culture, road trips, and all of those things, it’s really actually a book about trauma. That is kind of the organizing principle of the whole novel is, “How does a person reckon with something terrible that happened in their life that has kind of determined the course of their life for the next, you know, 30 years?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n What was your inspiration behind “Hot Wax,” and what made you decide to write it in that vinyl-flipping (style)? That A-side, B-side sort of perspective?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I always wanted to write a novel about live music just because I was a voracious listener from a very young age, and live rock shows were like the only place I ever wanted to be. There’s this axiom in writing, you know, “Write the book you want to read.\u201d I had read a lot of novels about music, and they all felt like they weren’t quite getting it right (about) what it’s like to be a fan and (what it\u2019s) like to be a young fan in particular. I also really wanted it to dovetail with a road trip, because road trips and concert tours go together, and I’ve been a road tripper kind of my whole life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I thought, \u201cYeah, I might be the right person to write this book,\u201d and when I was revising this in a big way in 2023, I actually sold my house and all of my stuff and lived out of my car for 18 months to get this written, which was a real adventure. But I loved it. I loved that life of being on the road, you know, 200 days a year, which is hard to capture if you haven’t actually gone out and done that. So that’s really where the book came from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My own obsession with what I fondly call “dad rock” does come from my dad, who is not a rock star, which is probably fortunate considering the stuff that goes on in this book. But he was a concert bouncer in the late ’70s, early ’80s, in Southern California, which was very much ground zero for the golden age of rock and roll. So I kind of grew up on all of his tall tales of the music industry at that time and got a very good musical education from a young age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I saw that you have done traveling for theater and stuff before, and you’re also currently embarking on this book tour. With traveling, are there any specifics that have impacted your writing for “Hot Wax,” especially since you originally started this (novel) in 2016 and then published it in 2025?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Travel has just always been a big part of my life. We moved a lot when I was a kid, and we spent a lot of summers driving around the desert Southwest, which is partly why a lot of this book takes place there. That was really actually kind of how I learned to write. (It) was like, in the back of my parents’ car in these long drives, because that was a place that \u2026 was very tied up closely with music because I would sit in the back of the car with my headphones on and just kind of daydream while I was looking at the window at these kinds of crazy Martian landscapes that you get in places like Southern California and Arizona, New Mexico. So music, writing, and travel have all been kind of enmeshed my whole life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think I’m very lucky that I’ve been able to travel a lot. I moved abroad for graduate school when I was about, oh, I don’t know, like 24 or something like that. When I first started writing this book back in 2016, I had already well, I hadn’t already published, but my first novel was on its way to publication, which is called \u201cIf We Were Villains\u201d and is about another chapter of my life when I was a Shakespearean actor for like 10 years. I always wanted “Hot Wax” to be the thing that came next, but just because publishing is a tough business and \u201cVillains,\u201d which has since become an international bestseller, surprises me every day, really didn’t do well when it first came out. It kind of fell off a cliff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nobody bought it, nobody read it, and my own publisher didn’t even want to hear from me, and it wasn’t anybody’s fault. It’s just, you know, that kind of stuff happens in publishing all the time. But if you have a book with a bad sales track, it’s really, really hard to get published again, which is basically what happened to me in the wake of publishing \u201cVillains\u201d at the ripe old age of 25. So we tried to sell “Hot Wax,” like, 10 years ago, and it died on sub, I think, four times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I kind of gave up on it and said, “All right, it looks like that career path is not panning out for me,” which is when I turned around and went and did my master’s degree and then eventually my PhD. And then \u201cVillains\u201d made this very unlikely comeback from the backlist, and suddenly the industry was like, “Oh, we actually maybe would like another novel from you,” and my agent said, “Okay, what do you want to go out with?” and I said, “You’re gonna hate me for this, but I still really want to make the rock and roll novel happen.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n But at that point, I was much older. You know, there’s a lot of daylight between 25 and 32, and I wanted to rewrite the novel pretty much from the top down. A lot of my ideas about it had changed, partly because I had traveled more as an adult, and I’d spent a lot of time with working artists. So that was when, at the end of my PhD, I was kind of at a transitional point in my life anyway, and I really did not like living in one place for that long. That was kind of the first time I’d really lived in one place for as long as six years, and I got a little stir crazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So at the end of my doctorate, I just did the math and said, “Okay, I could pay a bunch of rent money for an apartment that I’m never in, or I could sell all my stuff and live out of my car and couch surf and, you know, stay in terrifying little desert motels, and it would shake out about the same,” and that felt like the right way to write the book. So that was what I did, and it was great. I loved it, and the whole time I was writing that book, a lot of the scenes that you see that have kind of like incidental dialogue or a lot of the settings that you see pretty much every scene of this book take place in a different city, and they’re all places that I went to. I did something like seven or eight post-to-coast road trips, which is a lot of driving, and I saw a lot of the country. But, yeah, it\u2019s just, the joy and the hardship of travel is very much at the core of this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Did you originally have that dual perspective in the initial writing of “Hot Wax?<\/strong>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n I did. It always had two perspectives, but in the original version, it’s changed completely. Like the characters are all different, the storyline is different (and it) takes place in a different year. But it did always have this kind of back-and-forth aspect, because I was thinking about that physical object of a vinyl record. I’m a serious record collector, and I’m a big fan of analog media. I am so happy to see this kind of backlash to technology where people are kind of going back to physical media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, yeah, the way that I put stories together, as I often think about, (is) a kind of structural organizing principle like that. So, the record is about the music, of course, but it’s also very much about that mechanism of trauma, because that’s how trauma works. You witness or you experience something so disturbing that your brain can’t make sense of it in the moment that it’s happening. So you’re forced to kind of repeatedly return to you and relive that moment over and over again until hopefully, at some point, you can sort of assimilate it into your lived experience, and records kind of do the same thing. You put a needle in a groove, and it goes around and around and around and around in smaller and smaller circles until you finally arrive at a point, and that’s kind of exactly how I wanted the novels to feel. So it does have a kind of circular structure to it. And then eventually the two timelines kind of converge at a point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You mentioned earlier that you were like traveling to cities, and all these cities in this book are ones you went to. (In the book) there was a scene in Omaha described as the linchpin of the book (in a setting similar to our) original station that was called The Shack. Could you describe that scene, like your inspiration behind it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yeah, there is \u2026 There is a scene pretty much smack in the middle of the book where shit really hits the fan. The first half of the book is actually quite a slow burn, and then once you get to that scene, everything just goes completely off the rails. So that scene is sort of a composite of a lot of different things. It was the setting of the scene in this, like a warehouse concert venue that used to be an airplane hangar. People make little punk venues in the weirdest locations that you can possibly imagine, ’cause that’s just kind of the whole DIY ethos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And not just punk venues, like, you know, people will put music on wherever they can. That was loosely based on the setting of my dad actually telling me a story about a time that he bounced a concert in a converted Safeway grocery store. which, if you can just imagine, is like, it’s cavernous; it’s concrete everywhere. He was like, the acoustics were fucking horrendous, but what a fun time. No ventilation. Like, there’s no air conditioning, and there was a very similar venue near to where I lived when I was a teenager, and I first started going to gigs. And it’s funny; people who have read this book will often say things like, “This is so unrealistic; this could never happen.” Absolutely everything that happens in this book is based on real things that have happened in music history. And sometimes in shows that I went to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I went to a gig when I was about 14. I don’t want to do too many spoilers, because I don’t want to ruin the same for people. But suffice to say, that place was never up to fire code, and something very frightening happened at a concert when I was 14 that was very similar to what happens in that scene. So in that way pretty much everything that goes on in this book is drawn from either things I’ve seen firsthand, stories I’ve heard from friends, or just documented scenes from popular music history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How would you describe your creative process, not just with your book writing, but with your theater work and your editorial work? How do those like intersect but also differentiate from one another?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The thing about \u201cVillains\u201d is everybody’s first reaction is, “Oh, the girl who wrote the Shakespeare book also wrote the dad rock novel; like, make that make sense.” To me, those things are really actually not very far apart. At the end of the day, I am a performance studies scholar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My graduate work and my dissertation, all of my academic research, are about the history of performance of all kinds. Yes, I do focus on the early modern theater in my academic work, but I also write about film, and I write a lot about music and performance also as a journalist, because that’s a really delicious challenge for a writer to take something audiovisual and multisensory and kind of make it come to life in black and white prose, and that was my favorite thing. (It was) always about reviewing live music, was, okay, how do I explain the feeling of being at this gig to a person who can’t actually hear the music and can’t actually smell the smells in the room, and that sort of thing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other part of it is, I’m what I like to call an ensemble writer. I never write a story that has just one main character, because I get bored really quickly. For me, the group dynamic is very much the main character, and you run into that all the time in art, and especially performing arts, because it’s collaborative. You need more than one person to do that most of the time, and artists are people with big, loud, interesting personalities, and there’s a lot of personality clashing in creative spaces, as much as there is collaboration, which is just really, really great fuel for a writer to craft interesting narratives. One person against a big abstract concept is so much less interesting than a bunch of different people with a bunch of different motivations and desires, all kind of clashing with each other. So, in that sense, writing about the theater and writing about rock and roll, to me, that’s just kind of two sides of the same coin. So I think there’s a lot that will be familiar to the people who love “Villains\u201d and \u201cHot Wax.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, at the same time, there is this thing happening with the publishing industry right now, where there is this very aggressive overemphasis on genre, and what you can do within a certain genre and readers really not liking it when authors write more than one genre, which is not the way it’s ever really been in the past. Writers have moved all over the place for just the stories that interest them, and (it) has been much more about the voice and your capability as a storyteller, but in the age of, you know, BookTok and the social media hashtagification of everything, we’re putting narrower and narrower boundaries around what fiction can and can’t do. I never wanted to write one genre for my entire life. You know, I think variety is the spice of life, and I always want my books to feel like me, but other than that, I like to be able to bounce around in the world to all the different things that interest me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When did you initially start writing novels, you would say?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I wrote my first novel; I’m going to put this in air quotes. I “novel” when I was 12. I got started really early. I was in Catholic school. I was devastatingly unhappy. I had no friends except imaginary ones, and that was just sort of a safe place that I could disappear into. I could build a world of my own that I could just kind of live in when the real world was a little unbearable, which I think people can probably relate to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You know, I’m thinking of how many people went back to reading during the pandemic in a big way. So it took me two years to write that book, and I finished it when I was 14 and mercifully realized that it was garbage and I shouldn’t show it to anyone. But I kind of had the bug by that, and I was like, oh, I can do this. This is the thing that I can do. ‘Cause I’d always been a voracious reader, and at a certain point, I was just like, “Well, the book that I want to read doesn’t exist, so I’m gonna write it.” Which is, I think, how a lot of writers get started, if maybe not always quite that young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so after that, I really just wrote a novel a year for a bunch of years. And when I was a senior in college, I wrote \u201cVillains,\u201d and that was the first book that I wrote after doing, you know, like five or six novels that I thought, oh, this might actually be worth the reader’s time. Like, I’ve gotten good enough at this that I feel like I could maybe show this to an agent. So it’s been a long time. I’ve been doing this for well more than half my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With that in mind, how would you say your perspective on “Hot Wax” as a book changed from when you initially started writing at 12, but also then when you initially started writing in 2016 to now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s changed a lot. Publishing’s a real tough business, and I got into it when I was probably a little too young. Most people don’t publish books in their 20s. Most people get published, you know, in their 30s or 40s ’cause it’s not like Hollywood, where, you know, you have an expiration date at 35, and then you start playing people’s moms, and you can write forever. So people tend to get started a little bit later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So when I wrote the first version of “Hot Wax,” it had a different title back in 2016; it was one kind of story, and then the older I got, the less interested I got in that kind of story, because originally, it was about this band that had made it big, and this sort of crash out that happened after that. And the older I got, the longer I worked in the arts, and the more time I spent around artists and musicians in particular, I got less and less interested in that narrative, ’cause everybody’s heard that narrative of, like, you know, the scrappy little band that makes it big. And it was much more compelling to me to look at this band that should have made it and didn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking at these artists who are not making it big but are fighting tooth and nail every single day, just make enough money to make the next album, to get to the next gig. because that’s what it’s like for so many more people, and that was what it was like for me as a writer. It was just desperately trying to get enough people interested in my work that I could keep making it. And as soon as I kind of rewrote the story with that sort of a narrative in mind, it was just that much better and that much more compelling in characters that I was so much more interested in, and it also just felt truer to the thing I was writing about. So that was really the biggest change that I went through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You said you have been writing for about half your life, and with the industry changing, I’m sure it can be kind of difficult for aspiring writers to get into that. \u2029Is there anything you would say to them or advice or your thought process on getting involved in that industry and that publishing industry<\/strong>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yeah, I get this question every day and I have a two-part answer to it. The first part and the most important part is don’t rush. \u2029Publishing is a very slow business by design, and writing is a very slow craft by design, and a novel is a huge, capacious thing. It should take time to write. \u2029And it should also take time to learn to write a good novel, because the only way to learn to write a novel is to write a novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like, writing a bunch of short stories is not going to teach you how to write a novel, and that’s not to make a value judgment. I actually find short stories really impossibly difficult, which is why I don’t write them. \u2029I’m in awe of people who can. But it’s a different form. It’s a different animal, and in order to learn how to do that, you have to just do it. \u2029And so in that sense, it’s good to keep in mind that most writers do not publish their first novel. Most writers get five or six novels under their belt before they have one that is readable, and that’s just part of the process. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. You got to learn in the same way that an Olympic athlete practices for years before they can go to the Olympics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But we’re living in this age of, like, this hyper fixation on youth and high achieving at a really young age, you know, 30 under 30. Everybody’s getting Botox and their 20s now, and that is just so antithetical to good writing, good literature, good fiction, and good publishing. \u2029So that’s my biggest piece of advice for young writers: like, slow down. Don’t rush yourself this time; where you’re learning to write is really important, and you should absolutely value the time you have to learn when you don’t have deadlines and contracts hanging over your head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other thing is, you outgrow your own work, and, you know, take it from somebody who did publish in her 20s, especially that you publish in your 20s might embarrass you 10 years later, when you’re 35, and the first thing you publish is gonna determine a lot of things about your future career. \u2029So it’s much, much better to wait and start from a place of strength than to just rush into it as fast as possible, because you’re so desperate to get published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other thing is, and this is part of not rushing, is (to) learn about the industry before you try to break into it. It’s a really difficult business, and far too many writers have this notion of, I’m just going to be an artist of an ivory tower thinking about words and beautiful things, and my publisher will take care of the business aspect. \u2029No, baby, no, it does not work that way at all. It’s a really hard business, and you don’t do yourself any favors by going in with a bunch of illusions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So part of the not rushing is taking the time to actually educate yourself from good sources. Go to a publishing institute, talk to people who work in the business, go to conferences for the love of God, get off Threads. \u2029Which is just a cesspool of misinformation, but especially about publishing. I see takes about publishing on Threads every single day that I’m like, “Am I hallucinating? What is happening here?” So vet your sources, learn about the industry, (and) take your damn time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n