When I heard that my online friend and force of nature Deborah Grabien was starting on another series of novels(her previous books being the "Haunted Ballad" series,among others, which is good, creepy stuff but not as related to disability culture as the new one.) I figured that one day I might end up writing about it, but it was fortunate for me that the release of the first book coincided with my desire to produce more challenging material for the Disability Nation site.

I interviewed Deb by e-mail from her home in San Francisco.

Describe your new series.

The J.P. Kinkaid Chronicles detail the coming-of-age of a pampered, passive-aggressive, massively enabled rock star. John Peter Kinkaid, known to everyone but his longtime lover and his lead singer as J. P.,was a child prodigy, one of rock and blues most in-demand guitarists on the London scene in the 1970s. He has been a member of Blacklight, a band on a par with the Rolling Stones, since 1979.

As the series opens, he's still legally married to the wife he's seen three times in the last quarter-century, and been an expatriate from London for almost as long. A murder in the dressing room at Madison Square puts his long-time girlfriend in the hot seat of a murder charge. The crisis kicks him in the arse and forces him to look at his life, and, as Kirkus Reviews puts it, he doesn't like what he sees In his fifties, it's time to grow up and J.P. recognizes and accepts that. He's not the detective though. That's NYPD detective Patrick Ormand. J.P. is the catalyst, as well as the narrator and observer.

There's kind of a disability twist in this one, as both you and your narrator have M.S. How does that affect the way you write? Why do you think there is so much disability in mystery stories, i.e. the blind murder witness?

There's definitely a disability twist, and I'm not pulling it out of thin air. I've done time in a wheelchair and I'm probably heading that way again. When the series opens, J.P. is eight years into a diagnosis of relapsing-and-remitting multiple sclerosis and has a very strong memory of a friend and fellow musician, a session bassist named Jack Featherstone , dying slowly and painfully of the progressive form of the disease. As to how it affects the way I write, the man I based J.P. on didn't have M.S., but he did become chronically ill and died at fifty. When I wanted to write these books, I gave his avatar the disease I have, because I get it. I can write about it because I live with it.

Writing a musician with MS is really wrenching sometimes. The disease can affect your hands, which is devastating for a musician, and I should know, because I'm a musician myself, and I can feel my own hands slowly getting too signal-confused to play the way I've always played. J. P. is a musician to the core, and he's living, every minute of every day, with a disease that can rob him of that with no warning. There's a bit from the prologue of "Rock and Roll Never Forgets" that sums that up:

I looked over at Luke Hedley, our lead guitar player. We'd worked out a nearly-invisible series of signals, me and Luke, for nights when the illness wasn't letting me do some of the fancier stuff I used to do. He'd learned every guitar part of mine he might ever need to cover, visiting San Francisco for a full month, and we had it worked out. It had been tricky for Luke, getting my parts down;I'm a blues player to the core; less rock and folk than where Luke's musical thing comes from. Besides, he's used to doing it all his way since he writes damned near all the music for the band, but he'd done it.

So far tonight, it looked like things would be doable. I was tired, yeah, but at least I could feel my fingers. That wasn't always the case; some nights I'd end up with my fingers doing what they did from memory, and not much else.

On the up side, J.P. and his sweetie, Bree, have a sex life that verges on torrid. Neither of them are stupid about J. P's condition, but Bree is his caregiver and she's willing to do what's needed to look after J. P.'s health. They have an armed detente with the M.S.; that's how they cope. I write it that way, because that's how I cope.

As to why there's so much disability in mystery, there are probably a few answers to that one. Partly--and I know this sounds cynical- because disability is a "gimmick" and difference translates to sales for publishers. I also suspect, for non-disabled authors writing disability, that some atavistic superstition may be at work; "If I give this to my character and write it down, they can be my surrogate, and it won't happen to me." I don't even believe they're aware of it, but I'd bet folding money it's a factor.

Do you have the whole series planned out or do you still expect to be surprised?

Within a week of starting this first book, I had seven books planned out, and I'm nearly done with the sixth book, Uncle John's Band, but these characters are always evolving, and they surprise me with every book.

Blacklight's lead singer, Malcolm "Mac" Sharpe is a perfect example. When I did the first book, I(and J.P) saw Mac as a flamboyant, charismatic, horndog, with a lot of talent. No one was more surprised than I, when halfway through the second book, it was as if Mac told me "Look, I've got amazing depths. I'm a fierce humanist and a non-stop activist, and, yeah, I'm insanely oversexed but I like women as people. I'm not a sexist and I'm not using anyone." So my readers get him evolving because J. P. sees the change and we see through J.P's eyes.

I've had this series surprise me at every turn, and I expect it to keep doing just that.

Much like concerts sometimes end with thrilling visuals, I thought this interview couldn't end without the Nation getting a look at this inventive promotional video for Rock and Roll Never Forgets.

Erika J