From Writing Music to Writing Novels

Zaida Alfaro is a Florida-based author and singer-songwriter who tells stories through both pages and songs. She is the author of the Miami Music Mystery series and writes psychological and supernatural thrillers. As an independent pop-rock artist, Zaida has released original albums, EPs, and singles. Whether she’s writing mysteries or melodies, storytelling is always at the heart of what she does.

I’m Zaida Alfaro, a singer-songwriter and mystery/thriller author. Storytelling has always been a part of my life, first through writing and recording my own music and eventually through writing novels. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about being creative, though, it’s that the journey rarely looks the way you imagined it would. Mine certainly hasn’t.

I began my publishing journey as a cozy mystery author with my Miami Music Mystery series. I was fortunate enough to publish three books, The Last Note, In the Key of Dead, and The Hidden Track, with a small press. For someone who had dreamed about becoming an author, those moments were surreal. There was something incredible about holding my own book for the first time, meeting readers, attending signings, and seeing my books sitting on bookstore shelves. Every once in a while, I would see one of my novels there among all those other books and think, I actually did this. I’m a published author.

Then my publisher closed. Suddenly, the path I thought I was on disappeared, and I found myself asking a question I hadn’t expected to be asking again: What now? At the same time, something else was changing. My writing. I still loved my cozy mysteries and the characters I had created, but the stories I wanted to tell were becoming darker. I wanted to explore memory, trauma, secrets, and what happens when you can no longer trust your own mind.

That idea eventually became The Ghost of Me, my psychological thriller. Writing it pushed me creatively in ways I hadn’t expected. It was very different from anything I had written before, and when I finished it, I knew I wanted to try traditional publishing again. Of course, that meant heading back into the query trenches.

I knew rejection was part of publishing. Every writer knows that. We hear the stories about famous authors who were rejected dozens of times before someone finally said yes. We tell ourselves not to take it personally. We remind ourselves that publishing is subjective and that one person’s “not for me” could be another person’s “I love this.” All of that is true, but it doesn’t make opening another rejection email any easier.

I had honestly forgotten how discouraging querying could be. You spend months, sometimes years, writing a book. Then you revise it, edit it, obsess over your query letter, rewrite your synopsis for what feels like the hundredth time, and wonder whether your first chapter is strong enough. Finally, you hit send and wait. Sometimes the answer comes quickly. Sometimes you wait weeks or months. And sometimes the answer never comes at all.

When the rejections started arriving for The Ghost of Me, I kept submitting. Another query. Another agent. Another possibility. Then another no. There were days when I wondered if maybe I should stop. Maybe the book wasn’t good enough. Maybe I had chosen the wrong story. Maybe I should just be grateful for what I had already accomplished and stop putting myself through the emotional roller coaster of querying.

Then I received a publishing offer. After hearing no so many times, suddenly there it was: a yes. You would think I would have immediately grabbed it, but I didn’t. After giving it a lot of thought, I ultimately turned the offer down because I knew it wasn’t the right fit for me or for the book. That decision taught me something I hadn’t expected to learn during this process: not every yes is the right yes. Sometimes believing in your work also means being willing to wait for the opportunity that feels right, even when you have no idea when or if it will come.

So, I went back to querying.

But somewhere in the middle of all those rejections and all that waiting, something unexpected happened. I became inspired again. Instead of allowing the waiting to consume me, I started writing another story. This time, I ventured into a genre I had never written before: YA supernatural thriller.

That story became Cursed Premonitions, about a teenage girl who can see death before it happens and discovers that knowing what is coming doesn’t necessarily mean she can stop it. Writing it felt different. It gave me somewhere to put all that creative energy instead of constantly refreshing my inbox and wondering if someone was going to respond to a query. I was creating again, and that reminded me why I started doing this in the first place.

Recently, I typed those two magical words every writer waits for: The End. I sent Cursed Premonitions to my trusted editor, designed the cover, and shared the manuscript with a few beta readers. And somewhere in that process, I realized something. While I had been waiting for someone else to decide whether The Ghost of Me deserved a yes, I had written another book.

That realization changed the way I looked at my publishing journey. Maybe success as a writer isn’t one giant moment when the perfect agent, editor, or publisher finally says, “Yes, we want your book.” Maybe it’s all the smaller moments that happen along the way. It’s finishing the chapter you were convinced wasn’t working. It’s opening another rejection email and eventually finding the courage to send another query. It’s being willing to walk away from an opportunity that doesn’t feel right. It’s trying a genre you’ve never written before. It’s seeing your book on a shelf or hearing from a reader who connected with something you wrote.

And sometimes, success is simply sitting down at your computer and starting another story when the publishing world hasn’t given you the answer you were hoping for yet.

I think this industry can sometimes make writers feel as though we’re constantly waiting for permission. Permission to call ourselves authors. Permission to believe our books are good enough. Permission to celebrate what we’ve accomplished. Permission to keep going. But creating doesn’t require permission.

I’ve learned that through music too. Before I was writing novels, I was writing songs, and in many ways, a song begins the same way a novel does. It starts with an idea that exists nowhere except inside your head. You don’t know if anyone will ever hear it. You certainly don’t know whether anyone will love it. You create it anyway because there is something inside you telling you that this story needs to exist.

That is the part of this journey I can control. I can’t control whether an agent falls in love with The Ghost of Me. I can’t control the next rejection that may be sitting somewhere in my future inbox. I can’t control what happens with every manuscript I write. But I can control whether I keep creating, and whether it’s a novel or a song, I’m always going to find another story to tell.

My publishing journey has taught me that being an author isn’t one big moment when someone finally says yes. It’s continuing to believe in your stories through the yeses, the nos, the unexpected endings, and the new beginnings.

I still don’t know how this chapter ends, and maybe that’s the point. I’m still somewhere in the middle of mine. And I’m still writing.