Behind the Book: Through the Looking Glass
The first Behind the Book essay: how my first novel grew from a Facebook message, fourteen hours of Skype interviews under a no-lying rule, a pen name I later retired, and an ending that refused a rescue.
Series: Behind the Book
Every book in my library has a story behind it: why I wrote it, where the material came from, and what it cost to get it onto the page. The Behind the Book series tells those stories one book at a time, from the interviews and research through the publishing decisions, in my own words. Some of the stories are gentle. Some are not.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Eternal War
The Eternal War started with one question: what happens when an AI goes to Hell? Not a person with a soul, but a machine that cannot find the pattern in eternal punishment.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Dungeon
In 1981 I fell in love with a text game called Dungeon, the predecessor of Zork. Forty years later I turned it into a novel. Here is why, and the decision that saved the book.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Woman Who Walked Through Walls
I started at the execution scene and wrote backward. Here is the story behind three women, a device that removes consequences, and what people do when they cannot be caught.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Dead Don’t Need Stuff
My father died with a one-bedroom apartment filled floor to ceiling and two full storage units, while being broke. I was three thousand miles away, so I told the apartment manager to donate all of it. Nobody objected, and nobody…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Forty Worlds
This collection is reconnaissance. I intend to write a novel in every genre, and forty short stories across forty genres was a way of dipping a toe in each one before committing a year to any of them.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Jake and the Bullies
A realistic novel about a kid harassed online has been written a thousand times and no seven-year-old finishes one. So Jake goes inside the internet, where trolls have caves and algorithms have addresses, and the villain is a machine that…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: My Boss is Insane
Across thirty-three years I had no boss I would call excellent, two I would call decent, and the rest were various shades of insanity. One kept a certificate declaring him legally insane framed on his office wall, obtained deliberately because…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: My Job Sucks
The book does not claim frightened employees are more productive. It claims companies believe that, and they are wrong. I did not see any of it clearly until after I left, and the transaction was never eight hours a day.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Itty Bitty Titty Committee
I wrote this alongside Gettin Laid, one from each side, to see what the difference looked like on the page instead of in an argument. The distinction turned out sharper than expected: the women learn about each other, and the…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For
I wrote this for specific friends who could not work out why relationships kept going wrong. The credential behind it is not on the sales page: eight years photographing performers meant thousands of hours of unguarded conversation with women backstage,…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Mysterious Island
Gideon Spilett kept two sets of records on Lincoln Island, one for the New York Herald and one for himself. What he left out of the published account was the whole of Neb, and the reason was that an equal…