# the first thirty seconds

#the first thirty seconds

There’s an ache sitting at the base of my skull tonight, pulsing right where my head meets my spine. I can’t tell anymore if it’s from a long day of staring into a pixelated screen — data, drafts, deadlines — or if it’s just what hope feels like after it’s been clenched too long in one position, waiting on an inbox. Like a Thursday in the work week — stretched out enough to feel slack, but not quite complete.

Years ago, I worked at a radio station. Back when music still lived on the air, the old way — spinning straight off vinyl or a CD, no algorithm, no safety net. There was a DJ there who went by Steele. “With an E,” he would say. He had a gift that I’ve never been able to shake loose from my memory. He could hear the first thirty seconds of a song and tell you, flat out, whether it lived or died.

“I don’t need the chorus,” he told me once, not even looking up from the board. “Tempo tells me everything. Does it come in hot, or does it slow-burn and make you wait for it? Does the beat grab you by the collar? What’s left of the singer’s voice by the time the track bleeds out?” He’d shrug as it cost him nothing. “You can stack every pretty piece together and still build something nobody feels. If it doesn’t catch a person by the throat — if it doesn’t make their breath catch or their pulse spike — it’s dead. Straight to the B-side.”

He kept three bins. Hit. Miss. Nights.

Hit meant daytime rotation — clean, polished, built to go down easy for the widest crowd possible. Miss meant the tape never left the shelf. Full stop. But Nights was its own animal. Anything that landed there got played for the people working while the rest of the world slept — on warehouse floors, on flight lines, by overnight haulers running on gas-station coffee and spite. Those songs didn’t get to be safe. They had to be hard enough, raw enough, true enough to stand alone in the dark for someone who had nothing else keeping them company at 3 a.m.

I think about him every time a rejection lands in my inbox.

Because that’s what agents are doing, isn’t it? Sifting through hundreds, maybe thousands of queries — every one of them a hopeful artist betting their thirty seconds is enough to make someone’s breath catch. The emotional whiplash of it doesn’t get easier. You hit send, and you’re sixteen again, handing over the tape, waiting to find out which bin you’re getting thrown in.

This round of rejections, I’ve been trying to use the feedback as fuel instead of letting it just sit in me like static. But underneath that, there was a harder question I hadn’t let myself ask straight: am I revising Three Steps Away to be a Hit — safe, daytime, built for the widest possible rotation — or am I revising it to earn its place in Nights rotations?

I pulled out my sketchbook to expel nervous energy, not expecting an answer yet. As I flipped through and sat with my characters, I realized they’d already made the call without asking me. They were never daytime material. They’re gritty. They’re a little dangerous. They’re built to resonate with the ones still awake at 3 a.m. who need something honest enough to carry them through to the end.

So, if this round doesn’t land everywhere — fine, not every track is built for every bin. Some of us were always going to end up on the night shift.

— H.K.P.