Author’s Note

Trigger Warning: This note is safe but the novel is rated R for pretty much all the things that’ll get you rated R, which appear liberally but I hope not gratuitously throughout the text.

I was gratified today to learn that a celebrated debut novel of semi-recent vintage took its author over a decade to publish, which is still more time than I’ve spent on this book, by a little. I should not begin on a note of relief from anxiety, but that’s the dominant feeling of finishing a manuscript draft.

If you’re reading this, you almost certainly know me, so first of all thank you. I won’t say much about the novel—Pretty Sure Nothing is its working title, if that wasn’t clear—except to describe my ambitions for it, the better to explain what you can do to help me with it. I have the luxury of a good job in a comfortable career, so I don’t need this book to sell, though of course getting rich from writing a story everyone loves would be fantastic. Since I don’t need it to sell, and since it would be insane to spend the truly stupid amount of time I have on this book unless I could be proud of it, and since I have a lot of finicky opinions about the art I admire, I have striven above all to write a really good book.

What does that mean? I want someone with taste, even one, someone who knows and cares about great fiction, to read it and say, “Wow, that was really good.” To have it enter their internal life, however briefly. And how do I expect it to do that? It’s a mystery, in the noir style, so I want it to put you through everything that genre entails: horror, suspense, humor, relief, excitement, disgust, etc. But also I wrote the shit out of it, to the extent that I am able: I want it to touch you with beauty, and break your heart. So if in the end you feel that it does so, thank you. That’s all I could hope for.

If you don’t feel that way, though, I do have something more to hope for. Namely: your honest feedback. I will not ask you to make it brutal, but if you find that you need to in the name of honesty, please do so. I am prepared for things not to work. I am prepared for you to find it tedious, or full of holes, or dramatically inert, or not funny, though I’ve done everything in my power so far to avoid and repair such flaws, and feel enough pride in the result to risk being wrong. I have written four drafts, the most recent taking two years and replacing the middle 60-70% of the book1. I’m prepared to do more, because my ambition is to publish this thing for real. You can help by telling me about anything, large or small, that you find less than fully satisfactory. I mean fully satisfactory: tell me your niggles and your great disappointments, please, so that I can make this as good and successful as I want it to be.

One other thing you can do to help is to share this Substack with literally anyone you think might have any interest. That includes agents or publishers or otherwise connected people who can help the success of something they admire, but also just regular people who might like it. Word of mouth is the best kind of success of all. I expect to work to get this thing out there, and would appreciate any avenues that open up through my many wonderful friends and colleagues and family members.

Also: I am not actually trying to make money from this Substack; please reach out for a free subscription if you know me or someone close to me and it’s yours. The paywall is just to keep the whole thing from the vulgar before proper publication, but the first three chapters are free to the public, so someone can give it a spin without bothering about the subscription gate. After that, as I said, if you have any connection to me at all I must insist that you not pay. I’ll let you in.

That’s it. Please enjoy. And thank you again.