ANYONE IS OUT TODAY!! - 12/3/2019

Well, I clearly haven’t been posting these much recently - I’ve been letting my monthly newsletter carry the weight of delivering the Latest News for what I’ve been up to. (If you aren’t subscribed, you can do that right here.) Today is a special day, though - the publication date for my second novel, ANYONE. Seems like it deserves some reflection.

I have always wanted to be a novelist. It’s always seemed like the perfect career to me. You get paid to sit and think up a story, type it out, work on it for a long time until you think it’s good, and then it goes out into the world and other people read and (hopefully) enjoy it. If you pull it off, you aren’t beholden to anything other than your own sense of what makes an engaging tale, and your focus and dedication to getting that tale down on paper. The more you do it, the longer you do it, the more you have a backlist of titles readers can find and (hopefully) enjoy, and it’s always there. It’s your legacy, right there in black and white. It always felt right to me. I love making music and many other creative endeavors, but it was writing fiction for me from the start. I wrote my first “book” in 4th grade - a children’s picture book (considering I was, in fact, a child) about a unicorn named Uni, with illustrations by my friends Brad and Greg Mohr.

From there to here - pub day for my second novel. I’m almost ready to believe that I am a novelist now - owning that identity - though, well, maybe I’ll wait until I’ve got three or four out. Or a hundred. It takes a while to be sure it won’t all go away - I felt this way when I was moving out of law to become a full-time writer (of comics and graphic novels.) Is writing a novel something I’ve done a few times, or is it who I am? Ah, the ways creative people tie themselves up over their identity and achievements or perceived lack thereof. Never gets old.

My first book, The Oracle Year (buy it here) came out in April 2018, which feels like a long time ago. Not so much in publishing terms, though. The day roll on by pretty damn quickly when you’re marching toward a deadline. The book did very well - it didn’t “list,” (make the NY Times bestseller list), but that’s about the only thing I could even come close to complaining about. It sold a bunch, was optioned to Hollywood and the option was exercised and a very-cool seeming TV show is in development, and most importantly, people liked it. All great - except when it comes time to write your second book.

I sold ANYONE to Harper Perennial (the same imprint of HarperCollins that published The Oracle Year) just before TOY came out, after giving them the first thirteen chapters and a detailed outline. That version wasn’t as good as what hit shelves today, but it had the seeds of everything I eventually decided to do. That was pretty great - just knowing that I could keep being a novelist for at least another year and a half. What was different was that I needed to deliver this new manuscript on a much tighter timeline - basically a year from selling it. TOY, on the other hand, was created over several years. So, I was coming off a successful first novel, working on a faster deadline, with a number of other writing obligations, and no idea if I could actually write a good novel twice. But, you do what you do, and buckle down and type, and you get it done, and you let people read it, and you go from there.

From there, you get to here. Now, we’ll see how ANYONE measures up. So far, all good - Amazon picked it as a Top Ten Book for December, it’s an Indie Next pick, USA Today and Polygon.com featured it in a big way, and it’s been all over Bookstagram (thanks at least in part to the beautiful, Insta-worthy cover design, I have to say.) The novel was acquired by Carnival Studios (a British production company responsible for Downton Abbey, among other great shows) for TV, and I’ll be writing that pilot. Most importantly… people seem to be enjoying it, and I’m proud of it.

ANYONE is the book I set out to write, and now my time to control how it’s received is over. It’s all yours, and I hope it lands for you in some way you think is intriguing. I’m already thinking about my next novel - the first little chunk is written, and I’ll find out this week or next if I’m get to keep being a novelist for the next eighteen months or so. (I think I will - I’m proud of the new material and think it’s very solid - but I will not count chickens until those eggs are well and truly hatched.)

If you read the book, or anything I write, let me know what you think - I always love hearing from you.

And mostly, thank you. If you’re reading this, you’re interested in my work, and that’s a huge thing. You’re amazing.