“The boy who loved music”: The story behind the story

My latest publication is a piece that began life as a CNF essay but turned into fiction because real life is too complicated to convey truth as well as fiction. Like the titular character of the story, I am losing my hearing to otosclerosis, but unlike that character, I’m nowhere near as good of a musician (not to mention that while my first instrument was piano, my primary instrument is the bass and I also play another half-dozen or so other instruments). I really enjoyed creating the form of this story, mixing the biography of the titular boy with a rather clinical account of hearing loss.