Rope Burn follows the operations manager for a wrestling operation juggling a less-than-promising IT career, his own loneliness, and the non-stop chaos of the wrestling ring. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I spent over twenty years behind the curtain, watching all kinds of people come and go through the weird, bizarre world of pro wrestling. What got me was the found-family part — how a bunch of oddballs who couldn’t be more different end up with a camaraderie that’s hard to match. Honestly, you find a version of it in any world like that: theatre, retail, food service — anywhere people share experiences that “normal” folks don’t quite understand. I could have written a memoir about my time in the business, but the truth is, if I told the real stories I saw, nobody would believe them.

Why did you choose Luke Anderson—a behind-the-scenes operations manager—rather than a wrestler as the primary narrator?

At first, this was going to be a book about two trainees — one with natural gifts and unlimited potential, the other hardworking and earnest. Some of that stayed. But as I started writing, the most interesting character that emerged wasn’t a wrestler at all. I understand why wrestlers do it: the glory, the applause, the recognition. But why does Luke do it? That’s less obvious — and a lot more interesting to explore.

And what pulled me toward Luke specifically was that his role is singular — no one else does what he does, and that makes him the loneliest man in the building (or close to it). That ache is what I wanted to write about.

The novel asks difficult questions about who gets protected in entertainment industries. Was that theme intentional from the beginning?

I think of myself primarily as a storyteller, so no — I didn’t set out to write about who gets protected. And honestly, that word stopped me when I first heard the question, because in wrestling, “protecting” someone is a good thing. You protect your opponent in the ring so nobody gets hurt. You protect a guy’s booking so he stays believable. It’s a form of care. It’s how you keep people safe.

So it took me a second to realize the question meant the other kind — where the people with money and charisma get shielded from the consequences of who they are, and the people they hurt get managed and dismissed. Same word, opposite meaning. I didn’t plan to put that in the book. But if you tell the truth about this world, it’s already there. The contradiction was living inside the vocabulary the whole time.

When readers finish the novel, what feeling do you hope lingers longest: nostalgia, hope, heartbreak, or something else entirely? 

I hope people feel seen. Especially if you’ve ever loved something so much you can’t explain why you keep at it — even when family, friends, and plain common sense are telling you to quit. Wrestling is one of those things: once it’s in your blood, it’s hard to stop. People seldom fully retire from it. It has a hold on you that’s hard to explain — and I don’t think the book even tries to. Instead, I hope it just lets you feel it, alongside Luke and the rest of them.

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