A New Direction

The high point of any book launch comes at the beginning

I got to announce a new book this past week.

This is always a fun day, when it happens. It’s both a culmination and a kickoff—the culmination of a grueling and sometimes years-long process that began with writing a book and getting an agent and submitting to publishers and getting an offer; the kickoff of a process that will eventually involve cover designs and trade reviews and lot and lots of begging for preorders.

It’s no surprise, given the above description, that the day you finally get to share your Publishers’ Marketplace screenshot is, in some ways, the high point. It’s the day when everything is good and nothing hurts, the day when the world opens its arms to be happy for you, from your biggest and most dedicated fans to the fellow writers in the trenches to the people you barely know who think, probably, “Hey, that guy I went to middle school with is still doing that thing, good for him.”

For me, it also tends to be an occasion to think about reinventions, pivots, or perhaps more accurately evolutions—the subject of my friend

Sara Zarr

’s recent podcasting and online writing. A new book is, above all, new, it is in the future, it is hope.

Apropos of this newness, I’m embracing a slightly different direction for this newsletter (new-sletter?), which I’ve been thinking about for a while, something a little more free-ranging. Because it’s coming from me, it’ll continue to be about the stuff I care about: stories mostly, books and TV and movies, my writing, culture, faith, etc.

To get back to the new book itself, it does represent a pivot, of sorts. The Temps was a difficult-to-classify thing: part sci-fi, part literary, a bit of satire, a bit of corporate thriller, put them all in a blender and see what comes out. The Long Con is pretty solidly a thriller, and a domestic thriller at that, one about marriage and parenting and money problems: the concerns and stresses of hearth and home. It’s a book that I believe will fit very squarely on a specific shelf in the bookstore, and appeal to those who enjoy visiting that shelf. I’m happy to be moving in this direction, and my next book after this one will be very similar (though top-secret, for now). I always knew I’d end up here, somehow. The crime genre is one that has been calling to me for a while.

Still, the word pivot feels a little extreme to me. It implies a full about-face, a 180 degree turnaround, when this feels a bit more like a slight change in course, a curve in the road. Either way, I’m happy to be here, happy to see what comes next.