“The organization I work for has a job opening,” I said. “I think you’d be perfect for it.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I started 2020 with the plan to write a novel beginning in March, after I returned from a vacation with friends. This novel, the one you’re reading now, was written in February and March of 2021.
So what happened to that novel I was going to write in March 2020?
Well, perhaps not surprisingly, 2020 happened to it.
I probably don’t have to remind you how 2020 was, but in case you’ve blocked it entirely: pandemic and protests and fires and elections and venality and isolation and awfulness all the way through. Plus in November and December, I was sick with something that I was sure was COVID but all the tests told me it wasn’t. Whatever it was, it turned my brain into pudding, and I literally couldn’t think a thought more complex than “I like cheese” for about a month.
Through all of this I was supposed to be writing that novel, a novel which was meant to be dark, heavy, complex, and broodingly ambitious—in other words, not the perfect novel to be writing when the world is falling apart around you.
I did write in that novel, nevertheless: tens of thousands of words that made sense on the sentence and paragraph level, but didn’t do particularly well as chapters and certainly not as an overarching story. It was a novel that demanded focus, and focus, it turns out, was hard for me in 2020.
But then 2021 happened! New year! New start! Fresh ambition! After my illness at the end of the year my head finally felt clear enough to connect things together again. I started writing again on January 4, did a few hundred words to rev up, did a few more on January 5, and then January 6 happened, and, well. Insurrections really are focus pullers. I didn’t know that before! I didn’t have to know that before. But I know it now. That was January done, in terms of being able to write.
Finally, two weeks after the inauguration of a new president, and with the old one safely shoved into Florida to yell at clouds, I tried again. I wrote thirty-four hundred words in a day, good words, words that actually made sense as sentences and part of a larger, overarching novel structure. It felt good. I felt good. I was on my way with this book. I closed up my work and was eager to start again the next day.
The next day, I came back to my computer and couldn’t find the pages I’d written the day before.
For the first time in years, my computer ate my work. In a world of autosaving word processors and documents automatically sent to the cloud, I thought it was basically impossible to lose a file, especially one that I manually saved, fucking twice, before I closed out the document.
But here I was, and three thousand four hundred words—good words, words I liked—were just gone.
And it was at that moment that I had what you might call an epiphany: I was done writing that novel.
It wasn’t those three thousand four hundred words, per se. I could replace those words in a day and move on. It was everything else about this particular novel, and my struggle to write it in what was, on a global scale, the worst year I’d ever encountered in my life. It was the wrong novel in the wrong year, and at that point I hated it, and also I hated how it had been making me feel for a better part of a year, as I tried to piece it together in a world where everything was flying apart, and I felt I had to be witness to all of it.
I needed to stop writing that novel.
Which was a problem because that novel was under contract and was due, uuuhhhhh, like, right now. And also a problem because over the years I had developed a reputation for being pretty reliable—if you gave me a deadline, I would hit it. I might turn the manuscript in at seven a.m. on the last possible morning it could get in in order for production to get it out in time, but it would still be there.
This time, I wasn’t just missing the deadline, I was blowing it up entirely. The book I was writing was on the schedule. Cover art was already being mocked up. Marketing was already making a plan for it. And here I was saying, “Nope, done, bye.”
This was, shall we say, a moment of professional existential crisis. Who was I as an author, if I was not reliable?
At that point, I had two thoughts. The first was the concept of the sunk cost fallacy, in which people keep doing things, even when they should stop, because they’ve already invested so much time and effort in it and they don’t want that time and effort “to go to waste.” The second was a quote by video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, in reference to games, but applicable in many fields, including writing: “A delayed game is eventually good. A bad game is bad forever.” Meaning, to me, that sometimes it’s better to stop and reassess and correct, than it is to just keep plugging ahead out of fear （and deadlines）。 “Reliable” is not an excuse for “bad.”