Researching my debut novel, The Maidenheads , which is set in the DC music scene from the late 1990s until 2012, sent me down some curious rabbit holes. I toured backstage at venues in DC, read all I could about the DC punk scene of the 1980s and 1990s, and listened to so much music from the years when my book takes place. The ’00s were a period when guitar-heavy bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes existed alongside more electronic, Brit Pop-inspired groups like Interpol and MGMT; what held it all together was that you could dance to it. The bands I created for my novel—the Maidenheads, a raw but promising art-punk duo, and Les Somnambules, a more introspective and polished indie-folk group—are less pop-inflected, but they have some of the same influences.  As I immersed myself in this period of music, I also read books that felt in conversation with my own, which tells the story of two queer musicians falling in and out of love, repeatedly, over the course of about a decade.…