Oh, take me back to the good old days

During Covid’s lockdowns, I started digging through old boxes. Notebooks dating back to elementary school. Most of it was cringey and best left buried - the kind of prose that seemed like genius at the time. But I also found gems. Tales and tunes I hadn’t thought about in years, their source and impact rushing back the moment I saw them.

Those are the ones I chose to share with you.

I wrote my first story in 1987, right after reading Huckleberry Finn. My nine-year-old brain produced a nearly identical Tom Sawyer character who had an older friend. Original, I know.

At fifteen, I discovered that girls liked boys who played guitar. So I picked one up and wrote a song to impress one. It worked. She became my girlfriend. From then on, songwriting was my thing.

The habit stuck.

Somewhere along the way, writing stopped being something I did and became the way I think. I never owned a TV. Never had social media. Writing was how I entertained myself and how I figured things out.

Stories, songs - I never learned to tell them apart. A story starts as a melody, or finds one later. When I write prose, I hear rhythm. I want sentences that breathe.

I write stories like songs and songs like stories, because the moment you stop hearing the difference, you’re onto something.

By day, I work as a psychotherapist - which is just another way of listening for what people aren’t saying. The subtext. The hesitation. The careful selection of words.

It leaks into the fiction. I’m less interested in what my characters do than in why they can’t help doing it.

My stories are thrillers, really about the psychology of our inner conflicts. My music is emotional, really about the mood of a scene that hasn’t been filmed yet.

I like tight, propulsive narratives with no place to hide. Minimal furniture. No secret codes or shadowy cabals. Just ordinary people in extraordinary corners, making choices you’ll second-guess long after the last page.

I chose the pen name S. Ulliel - my mother’s maiden name.

Every book I finish leaves behind three I haven’t started. Every song I record makes me hear two more. I’m not sure if that’s a gift or a condition - but I stopped trying to cure it a long time ago.

If you’re completely new to my work, here’s a curated (and free) list for reading and listening before I would ever dare to ask you to spend a dime on my published work.

Thank you for taking the time to enter my world.