In May 2004, I was living in Los Angeles after having graduated from college the year before. I had a job and an apartment and not a whole hell of a lot else.
I worked as an assistant in an entertainment management agency. One of the agents there represented a writer about the same age as myself. This writer had written a film script the agent was quite excited about. He asked me to read it, because Hollywood agents don't actually read things (this is not me being mean - they genuinely do not read anything). It was a script for a horror film.
It was deeply, offensively stupid.
I immediately set myself to writing my own horror script. The rationale being, Fuck it. Why not?
Of course, there were many reasons why not, not the least of which was my tremendous dislike of horror movies. More importantly, however, was the fact that I was not a screenwriter. I had a diploma that suggested otherwise, but really, down at my core, I was simply not a screenwriter. And it was only then, after four years of college and one year of sleeping in assorted guest rooms, living rooms, and parked cars, that I realized I'd guessed wrong about my career.
I'm supposed to write books.
In that moment of strange lucidity, I began to jotting down ideas for two series of books. I'd always loved series and I still do to this day. Good series. I like spending time with good characters. Seeing them change. Seeing them struggle and flourish. The Lord of the Rings rung me out the first time I made it through. The original Earthsea trilogy gave me a naive hero, turned him into a cunning adult, and then presented him finally as an aging wizard, pouring the last of himself into a dangerous journey. I wanted to grab a little slice of that depth of emotion for myself.
So I had these two ideas.
The first was loosely titled Damp & Champ, and it was about a pair of orphans and friends living in a Depression-era St. Louis stand-in called Gateway City. They were boy detectives, making enemies of the mafia, and moving ever closer to the terrible, intertwined truth about what really happened to their respective parents.
Over the past dozen years, I've taken multiple cracks at Damp & Champ to no avail. Last year, I started and eventually abandoned my seventh attempt at the series. For whatever reason, I can't give it up. I am completely obsessed with the idea of the series, but more, I'm convinced I can make it work (despite what all my failures would have me believe). A few months ago I had yet another idea for how I can make it work. So I'll be back - eventually. And someday, Batman willing, I'll get the damn thing done.
But I also had another idea. And on May 9, 2004, I opened a Word document and typed the following opening line:
The boy was approximately 6 million years old (give or take).
And so began the next five years of my writing life.
The novel was written under the working name Space Boy Lands. It was, by all accounts, a fairly putrid name, but I could never figure out what to actually call it, so it hung around for a very long time. Years later, I thought to name the adjoining series The Red Island Chronicles, but that's honestly not much better.
The heart of the story is a boy who is found in a strange pod in a frozen land. He has no memory of who he is or where he came from. There's adventure. There's travel. There's war. There's about a hundred supporting characters. It was kind of a thing, you know?
One version of the complete manuscript (I think it's the final version, but don't hold me to that...there've been a lot) is over 256,000 words long. For comparison sake, that's almost exactly the same length as the longest Harry Potter book (The Order of the Phoenix...Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone - the most reasonable book in the series - is less than 80,000 words long). In other words, it was an enormous fucking book. AND it was only the first in a planned series of four or five books.
And this had been essentially all I'd worked on for five years. Five years with these (many, many) characters. Five years with this winding, layered plot. But I had a book. A book I knew no sane person (besides my mother) would ever bother reading. (The Egg Catcher is only 87,000 words, for God's sake, and I can't give that thing away).
To this day, I have no idea what I'm going to do with this (presently nameless) book. As I said, there's more yet to come, and even if no one else wants to know what happens next, I do. So eventually I'll go back. I may split the book into two or even three parts, to make something a bit more palatable for audiences, but when this all happens is entirely up in the air.
All of which is to say, when people ask me if I've written any books, I usually say, "One" when the correct answer is, "Yes, a couple." I don't mean to disown my first book, it's just...Christ, that name is garbage...