I have a confession to make.

I don’t care what you had for breakfast. I don’t care where you went on vacation. I don’t care what car you drive or what your grocery list looks like. That doesn’t mean your breakfast was bad, your vacation wasn’t wonderful, your car isn’t impressive, or your grocery list doesn’t reveal hidden depths of character. It simply means I’ve never understood why I would want—or need—to know any of those things.

Maybe that says something about me.

If it does, I can live with it.

What surprises me is that we’ve somehow reached the point where authors are expected to tell readers these things about themselves. Every few weeks I come across another article explaining that writers need to become more personal. Share photographs. Talk about their families. Reveal their hobbies. Invite readers into their daily lives. Build a relationship.

I don’t buy it.

When I pick up a novel, I’m not looking for a new friend. I’m looking for a good story. If I want to know what somebody had for breakfast, I’ll ask them. And probably regret it.

Now, if an author wants to talk about themselves, I’ll be embarrassed on their behalf. But if they want to make fools of themselves, it’s no skin off my back.

That doesn’t mean I object when another author wants to do it.

But when a publicist or a publisher or a social media expert tells me this, my first reaction is to tell them to go to hell.

The irony, of course, is that I do some of these things myself. I make videos. I post on social media. I write essays like this one. And yes, I’m trying to build a brand, because that’s the name of the game, and I’m not allowed to change the rules. That doesn’t mean I have to like them.

There are intimate details of my life I’ve shared with friends. That’s why they’re called friends. If they’ve also read my books, that makes them good friends. (That’s a joke, son.) But if they hear what’s in my heart as well as what’s in my mind, it’s because they’re friends, not because they’re readers. Those are not the same relationships, and I’ve never understood why we’re suddenly expected to pretend they are.

Ask me why I chose a particular ending, and I’ll happily spend half an hour talking about it. Ask me why one character fascinates me more than another, and you may regret having asked. Ask me about literature, history, television, philosophy, baseball, or why one novel succeeds where another falls apart, and you’ve probably found a conversation I’ll enjoy.

Ask me what I did Saturday afternoon, and the conversation is likely to be considerably shorter.

It’s not that I have anything particularly scandalous to hide. It’s that I’ve never understood why my private life is supposed to become part of the product. Nor do I understand why readers should be encouraged to think it belongs to them.

It’s none of your damn business.

It’s not that other people’s lives are boring. I’m the last person who’d accuse someone else of being boring. But when did being an author turn into True Confessions?

Can you imagine J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon in the era of social media? Can you imagine either of them being told to post photographs of breakfast, share amusing stories about the family, and give readers a glimpse behind the curtain? Can you imagine some social media consultant telling Salinger that what he really needed was a stronger personal brand?

It makes me wonder how many really, really terrific authors we’ve lost along the way either because they can’t play the game, or refuse to do so.

And now we’re not being funny anymore.

Because the question isn’t whether authors should be allowed to talk about themselves. Of course they should. The question is what happens when the willingness to expose yourself becomes one of the qualifications for being heard.

What happens when the industry begins selecting not merely for writers, but for personalities?

Writing and self-promotion require entirely different gifts. A person may be capable of writing a brilliant novel and entirely incapable of turning himself into a charming, accessible, endlessly available public figure. He may be shy. He may be awkward. He may value solitude. He may simply believe that the book is the thing he has chosen to give the public, and that the rest of him remains his own. None of that has anything to do with whether he can write.

Yet independent authors are increasingly told that writing the book is only the beginning. We must become marketers, entertainers, video personalities, salesmen, influencers, and brands. We must make ourselves available. We must remain visible. We must produce a constant stream of content to remind people that we exist. And beneath all of that is the suggestion that our work cannot stand on its own.

That we cannot simply offer readers a book.

We must offer them ourselves.

For independent authors especially, it sometimes feels as though the industry expects us to prostitute ourselves on street corners just to sell books.

I use that line because that’s exactly how I feel.

The exposure may be voluntary in the narrowest sense. Nobody literally forces an author to post a photograph, make a video, reveal a personal story, or turn private experience into public material. The author is always free to refuse.

He is also free to remain invisible.

That is how the coercion works. The rules are presented as optional, provided you’re willing to accept that nobody may ever hear of you or read what you’ve written.

Perhaps some writers can do all of this without losing anything. Perhaps they enjoy the performance as much as the writing. Good for them.

But I keep thinking about the ones who don’t. The writer who could create something extraordinary but cannot sell himself. The writer who has something worth saying but refuses to make his private life part of the transaction. The writer who looks at what is now required, quietly closes the manuscript, and walks away.

Maybe he would have been another Salinger.

Maybe she would have been another Pynchon.

Maybe they would have been unlike anyone we’ve ever read.

And maybe we’ll never know.

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Sometimes the most compelling conflict isn’t a car chase or a gunfight. It’s a person wrestling with conscience, memory, identity, or truth. Those are the stories that have always fascinated me as both a reader and a writer.

I always look at pictures of authors posing with their newly published books, or unboxing cartons that have just arrived from the printer, and they seem genuinely excited. If social media expected me to do the same, I would.

I’d just be doing it through gritted teeth.

It’s not that I’m ungrateful. It’s not that I don’t care about the work. I’ve simply never understood that sense of triumph—that “I did it!” feeling.

By the time the book arrives, I’ve already paid for it.

The physical book doesn’t mean very much to me. It’s merchandise. A delivery system. The only place it has any real value is in someone else’s hands. Until then, it’s just another object taking up space in my house.

What matters to me isn’t the book.

It’s what it cost to write it.

People often say writers should write what they love.

I don’t.

I’m fascinated by the moments when people cross moral lines. Not simply because of what they do, but because I want to understand what it felt like to get there. What temptation felt like before they surrendered to it. What finally tipped the balance. Whether they recognized, even as it was happening, that they had just changed their lives forever. What they told themselves afterward. How they lived with it. I can spend hours turning those questions over in my mind.

But that’s only half the story.

I’m a firm believer that actions have consequences. Once that moment has passed, I’m interested in everything that follows. The trust that’s destroyed. The lives that are altered. The identities that have to be rebuilt. The innocent people caught in the blast radius. The moral transgression may be what draws me into the story, but its consequences are what compel me to keep writing.

And then I want to know what happens afterward.

Because no action exists in isolation. Every choice changes the person who makes it. It changes the people around them. It changes relationships, families, identities, sometimes entire lives. I’m a firm believer that actions have consequences, and that’s where my real stories begin.

To write honestly about those consequences, I can’t stand outside them and simply describe them. I have to go inside. I have to understand not only what people did, but why they did it, how they lived with it afterward, and what it cost them. I have to spend months, sometimes years, inhabiting people whose decisions I often find morally repellent, living in a world I’d never want to occupy in real life.

That’s where the price comes in.

The worlds I create disturb me. One of my upcoming stories revolves around a single decision that changes several lives forever. Another explores a relationship that grows into something neither of the people involved intended. Both of them disturb me profoundly. Not because they're fictional, but because they represent things real people really do. They force me to spend months living in a moral landscape I find deeply unsettling. They remind me not only of the fallen nature of the world, but of how susceptible every one of us is to temptation, myself included.

By the time I finish these stories, I’m desperate to leave.

But that’s the cruel part.

Typing “The End” doesn’t mean I get to walk away.

The characters stay with me. Their choices stay with me. Their world stays with me. For weeks afterward, sometimes longer, I have to fight my way back to my own life.

People sometimes assume writing must be therapeutic.

For me, it isn’t.

If anything, it prolongs the experience.

So why keep doing it?

Because I believe these stories matter.

I don’t write about betrayal because I enjoy betrayal. I don’t write about moral failure because I revel in darkness. I write about them because they happen. Because they wound people. Because I believe fiction has the ability—perhaps even the responsibility—to take those wounds seriously, to examine them honestly, and to remind us that actions have consequences.

In that sense, my novels are almost commentaries as much as stories.

There has really only been one exception.

In The Book of Revelations, I adored Nan from the moment I created her. I created Danny to be the kind of man who deserved her, because she deserved nothing less. Spending time with them wasn’t an ordeal. It was a privilege.

Every other novel has required me to spend years in the company of people I either struggle to respect or intensely despise.

That’s why I don’t really enjoy writing. I endure writing.

And perhaps that’s why, when the finished book finally arrives, I don’t feel much like celebrating.

By then, the real work has already been done.

Or perhaps more accurately...

The real price has already been paid.

For most of my life, believing the stories mattered was enough to justify the price. Lately I've begun asking a harder question: if those stories never reach anyone, was the price worth paying? I don't yet know the answer. That's the question I'm living with.

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Earlier this week, subscribers to Mitchell After Hours received my latest short story, “Father.”

Rather than tell you about it, I thought I’d read the opening page.

If you’d like to continue beyond that first page, you can subscribe to Mitchell After Hours, where each month I publish an exclusive short story or literary essay that doesn’t appear anywhere else.

I hope you enjoy it.

MITCHELL AFTER HOURS is my monthly literary newsletter.

Every issue contains an original short story or essay written exclusively for subscribers. None of it appears anywhere else.

Subscribe now

Now, if you know anything at all about writers, you know that there’s nothing we love more than complaining about marketing.

More than setting down arbitrary rules about writing, more than accusing other people of using A.I.

Oh, we enjoy complaining about them, too, but nothing beats bitching about how we have to get out there and prostitute ourselves in the quest to make one more sale. I’ve done more than my share of it; I once said that I’d rather have my appendix removed without anesthesia than have to come up with a plan for marketing my books.

And I wasn’t exaggerating, either. I’ve had my appendix removed. It wasn’t that bad.

The downside of this is that, being that we’re writers and we compain about these things publicly, we become easy prey for scammers, looking to cash in on our hatred of the sales process by offering us easy solutions to our every marketing need.

Some of them are pretty easy to spot. The ones who misspell our names, or rave about books that haven’t even been published yet, or, if they have, weren’t written by us. Those aren’t even a challenge. Delete. Click. That’s all there is to it.

The best ones are those who are more sophisticaed about it. They go so far as to create fake websites (again, not that hard; I redid mine in a couple of days), and even make up fictitious references to testify to the quality of their work. I enjoy these the most, because not only are they creative (and what writer doesn’t appreciate that?), you can have a little fun with them.

Which brings us to today’s story.

I got a message through my website from someone offering to improve my social media presence and increase sales for my book. Now, oddly enough, this is something that was very much on my mind, given that I had, again very publicly, been complaining about just such a thing.

But she was good. Very good. Her reasoning was sound, the rationale was strong, and the plan that she laid out was actually a pretty solid one. Solid enough that I sent out my standard email, designed to filter out the scammers by asking for detailed information, including evidence of past performance and a list of references who could testify to the success of her plan in marketing their own books.

And this is where it gets even more interesting.

The reference was real. The author was real. She had a successful career, a substantial online presence, and several published books. At first glance, everything checked out.

What made me raise an eyebrow was that the email address was very odd.

A gmail address (no big deal; I’ve got one myself), with the author’s name, preceded by “author” (again, no biggie), and then a series of numbers. Now, again, if you know anything about bot-driven email addresses, you’ll recognizes these numbers as a sign you might just be dealing with a scammer. Again, going to the author’s website, we see that she had no email address listed herself. What better way, if you were going to scam someone, than to pick out an author without a public email address?

And if that was all there had been to it, our story might have ended here.

But, unfortunately, the bot responsible for setting up this scam didn’t look quite hard enough.

You see, this author also has a store, where you can purchase her books and have them personally signed. You can also contact her personal assistant, her publisher, and…

You guessed it, the author herself. With an email address that was quite different from the one I’d been given.

So I did the sensible thing. I reached out to the author by this somewhat backdoor process, explained that her name had been given to me by this marketer as a reference for work that she’d done for her, and could she vouch that she knew this marketer and was pleased with the work she’d done.

It didn’t take long before I got a very nice email back from the author.

No, she didn’t know the woman, had never even heard of her, and certainly had not had any work done by here. “I’d stay far away from her,” she concluded.

I sent the marketer a brief message saying that I’d confirmed her reference using independent resources, and that as a result, we would not be proceeding further and that she was not to contact me again.

In the interests of due dilligence, I checked my email this morning to make sure I didn’t have a new message from her. You see, she’d been very punctual about responding to me in the past.

Not a word.

You might think that I wasted my time on her, that I could have accomplished more productive things by simply sending something like this to the spam trap and going on my merry way.

You’d be right about that.

On the other hand, it was a pleasant little time-waster. It didn’t cost me anything, and it put a smile on my face before I went to bed.

And, in case you hadn’t noticed, I got an essay out of it.

Not a bad deal at that, was it?

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I'm Mitchell Hadley, and I write stories that are unconventional, thought-provoking, and most of all, unapologetically challenging.

In Other Words is where I share my thoughts on books, writing, publishing, and life as an author.

At the center of it all is MITCHELL AFTER HOURS, my free monthly literary newsletter, available exclusively to subscribers.

Every issue contains original work that appears nowhere else. Some months it’s a short story. Other months it’s an essay. Either way, it’s written exclusively for MITCHELL AFTER HOURS.

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So welcome, and stick around for awhile.

Because even after the book is finished, I don't stop writing.

Why should you stop reading?

There’s a joke writers like to tell when they get together. (And you’d better believe that we’re a barrel of laughs when that happens.) The details change, but the essence remains the same. The most recent version went something like this:

Writer A: “I had the most embarrassing thing happen to me at work the other day. I was in the breakroom, and someone didn’t notice I was there, and they had a very intimate conversation on their phone with their partner. They were even on speaker! I was mortified.”

Writer B: “What did you do?”

Writer A: “What else could I do? I wrote it all down as quickly as I could!”

(And if there were 30 writers in the room listening to that joke, I can promise you that by next Tuesday, 20 of them will have written some variation of this. As I say, we’re a barrel of laughs. We also steal from each other like crazy.)

(Not really. I just made that last part up.)

Anyway, the point here is that it brings up a question that a lot of people do ask.

Where do you writers get your ideas?

And the truth is: we sit around and evesdrop on other people’s conversations.

Sometimes.

Now, I hope that doesn’t make you paranoid, because personally, I hardly ever do that myself. Once in a while perhaps, but it’s not like it happens all the time or anything.

But if you’ve asked that question of a writer, then you deserve a serious answer. And I’ll give you one.

One of the things a good writer has to do is keep his eyes and ears open. Not because we’re about to expose your secret life, but because one word, one phrase, even a raised eyebrow, can send our imagination off in a direction that we could never have anticipated until that moment.

It won’t have anything to do with the conversation we heard or saw. It’s just a starting point for something that will, by the time it’s done, be so far removed from the original source that not only will the innocent be protected, the guilty will be as well. So if you recognize a writer standing around, don’t get nervous. Automatically.

Here’s another example. You see an old man sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons, and before long you’ve composed an entire life’s story abou him. His wife, his family, where he grew up, where he went to school, the job he worked at, the whole thing. This happens sometimes in a matter of seconds.

And then, nine times out of ten, you forget all about him.

Nine times out of ten, writers don’t. We go home and write down everything we can possibly remember from that moment, and then stick it in a file for later use. And trust me, it will be used.

I bring all this up because a couple of weeks ago I achieved a personal milestone, one that finally convinced me that, after all these years, I really am a writer.

But first a little background. At these writer’s gatherings that I talked about, another story we tell is about the great idea that came to us while we were in bed, or in the shower, or doing something that prevented us from writing it down at the time. But by the time we do get to that pad and paper, it’s gone. Whoosh. Completely vanished. It’s only happened to me a thousand times. Maybe more. I forget.

Anyway, on this particular night about two weeks ago, the idea came to me. (I’m not going to tell you what it was; you’ll have to wait and read my next book.) But instead of trusting myself to remember it in the morning (always a mistake), I got up and grabbed my phone from the living room, went to my notes page, and typed it in.

And there it remained, until the next day, when I was able to incorporate it in the file I keep on my laptop. Where it safely resides, backed up and waiting to be popped into place.

That night, I brought my phone into the bedroom. We had to get up early, and so instead of fiddling with the alarm clock, I just set the phone alarm. I tried to go to sleep, but it was slow in coming. Because I was thinking. And then…

Boom!

It happened again. An idea. And this time I was able to just roll over and type it in. No fuss, no muss, fifteen minutes later I was asleep.

Now, do you think I can remember what that idea was? No. Because I don’t have to. I wrote it down, I know where it is, and I can afford to forget about it until the time comes to use it. And I will, believe me.

I had never done this before, make notes like this while I was in bed. Instead, I’d relied on a faulty memory, and who knows how many best sellers have disappeared into the ether because of that.

No more. Not when I bring my trusty phone to bed with me.

I should note that this hasn’t happened again, at least not in bed. But I find myself, at odd times of the day, opening up the app and jotting down something I just thought of, an idea that came to me, or something that I noticed wherever we might happen to be.

They may not all be good ideas, but ideas they are, and that’s what keeps a writer in business.

And you know what was a great idea I had just a few mintutes ago?

The idea to write about where a writer gets his ideas.

Well, I did get an essay out of it, didn’t I?

And I’ll be sharing that the next time we all get together to compare notes.

MITCHELL AFTER HOURS is my free monthly literary newsletter.

Every issue contains an original short story or essay written exclusively for subscribers. None of it appears anywhere else.

Subscription is free.

Today, The Book of Revelations is officially published.

People often imagine publication as a finish line. In some ways, it is. Years of work, revisions, false starts, second thoughts, and moments of unexpected inspiration have led to this point. The manuscript is finished. The cover is complete. The decisions have all been made.

But publication is also the moment when a book stops belonging entirely to its author.

For a long time, Nan Jaffe existed only in my imagination. I knew her fears, her regrets, her hopes, and the things she carried with her through life. I knew where she had been and, eventually, where she was going. But beginning today, readers will bring their own experiences to her story. They will see things I never saw. They will respond to moments that surprised me, overlook moments I thought were important, and discover meanings that never consciously occurred to me while writing.

That is one of the great mysteries of storytelling.

A novel begins as something intensely personal. It is shaped by one person’s imagination, experiences, questions, and obsessions. Yet if it succeeds, even in a small way, it becomes something shared.

The Book of Revelations is a story about memory, identity, loss, forgiveness, and the possibility of redemption. It asks whether the things that happen to us must define us forever, and whether it is ever too late to become someone new.

I don’t know how readers will answer those questions.

Today, they get to decide for themselves.

And that, I think, is both the frightening and wonderful part of publication.

Thank you for being part of the journey.

— Mitchell Hadley

This is a story about how a magazine cover from 1962, an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and an iconic green dress all became an integral part of writing The Book of Revelations. And how the best parts of your book don’t always evolve the way you planned.

I make no bones, and no apologies, for the fact that I absolutely adore Nan Jaffe, the lead character in The Book of Revelations. Everything that has anything to do with her was thought out with the utmost care, from the people and events she encounters along the way, to the clothes she wears and the way she styles her hair. And this is where I either lost control of the story or found it.

Let me explain. For the last two sections of the book, when Nan is living in San Francisco, I had a distinct impression of her as someone radiating a certain glamour. A thrift-store glamour, perhaps, but in the 1980s, the era of gaudy clothes and frizzy, teased and sprayed hair, I wanted something about her to stand out, to make her different from other people. I decided on a look that would be a throwback to the early 1960s: the time, incidentelly, when the traumatic event occurs that changes her life and drives the course of the story.

Originally, I thought of Jackie Kennedy. Not because I was a particular fan of hers, but after all, who epitomized style and glamour in the early 1960s more than Mrs. JFK? Pink suit, pillbox hat, red lipstick. It was a perfect image. But I didn’t want it to be too perfect, or people would see right through it. I talked it over with a friend, and we bounced some ideas around. One of them stuck.

“What about Tippi Hedren? You know, in The Birds.”

Well, I knew who Tippi Hedren was, certainly. Anyone of a particular age remembered her dodging the dive-bombing feathered assassins in Hitchcock’s memorable horror story. But as a model for Nan? I had, for some reason, envisioned her as dark haired, and Tippi was a blonde. (You’ll notice I’m using the old-fashioned spelling that was used for females. I justify that by pointing out that the book, and its language, is of its time. If you don’t like that, my apologies.)

“Think about it,” my friend urged. “You say this part of the book is set in San Francisco? Perfect. So is The Birds.”

Point one in Tippi’s favor.

“And you want a classic, timeless look? It doesn’t get much more timeless than the green suitdress she wears throught the movie. You put Nan in that outfit, have her wear her hair in a chignon like Tippi did, and you’ve got yourself a girl everyone’s going to notice.”

Of course, until that moment, I didn’t even know what a chignon was. It could have been a French sports car, for all that. But I did my research, to the point where I now consider myself one of the world’s foremost experts on the chignon, and how it differs from the French twist, the upswept Marge Simpson, and other styles of the era. Very well. We now knew what Nan looked like. She was not a brunette or a redhead. She was blonde.

From there, one thing after another fell into place.

I would create an event—a trip by Nan’s mother, Nancy, to the beauty parlor—that would become a pivotal moment in Chapter 1. The scene takes place just days before Christmas, and Nan begs her mother to take her along, so they can look at the Christmas windows in the department stores afterward. Her mom agrees, and as they sit in the parlor waiting for the stylist, Nancy picks up a copy of Look magazine from a couple of years ago. Tippi Hedren’s on the cover, promoting The Birds, with more pictures from the set on the inside.

Nan comments on how beautiful Tippi is, “just like you.” With that, Nancy asks the stylist to cut her hair and arrange it just like Tippi. They then go to a store, where Nancy purchases a green suitdress just like the one in the movie. It’s a critical scene, and it came all because of the decision to model Nan after Tippi Hedren.

But I then had another challenge: how to tie this scene from 1965 into 1980s San Francisco. I mean, it’s not like vintage suitdresses from the 60s were flying off the racks at J.C. Penney. Once again, enter The Birds. A friend of Nan’s drags her to a 20th anniversary showing of the movie at a revival house in the city as part of a retrospective on Hitchcock movies based in the Bay Area. (A number of them were, you know.) Almost as soon as the movie begins, Nan is struck by the appearenace of Tippi, and the submerged memory from the past enters her subconscious, although she is not aware of the connection.

While her friend was ogling Rod Taylor all the way through, Nan couldn’t take her eyes off Tippi. The hair. The dress. The whole look seemed oddly familiar, though she couldn’t have said why. There was something about it that tugged at her in a way she didn’t understand. The feeling was strong enough to leave her unsettled afterward, and by the next day she found herself hunting through thrift stores for a green suitdress of her own. Once she swept her blonde hair up into a chignon and added a touch of red lipstick, the transformation was complete.

What Nan doesn’t realize—and what I can’t fully explain without spoiling the book—is that this moment is doing far more psychological work than either she or the reader initially understands. The connection isn’t really about Tippi Hedren at all. Tippi merely becomes the vessel through which a long-buried memory begins to reassert itself. And it connects the dots in a way that nothing else would have done.

So this one suggestion, meant originally to solve a minor detail in one chapter of the book, went on to indirectly influence everything, beginning with chapter 1, and carrying all the way through to the end. And as for that spoiler; you’ll just have to trust me on this, or buy the book. Preferably, both.

My point to this is that the entire book was changed by this one detail. Not in an earth-shattering way, but in a way that materially gave the book a different vibe, a different motivation, a different (and better) story arc that would not have existed otherwise.

The coda to this is particularly satisfying to me on a personal level. Tippi Hedren doesn’t do autographs anymore; she’s in her 90s now, and, I’ve heard, may be in some stage of dementia. However, if you go on ebay, you can find a lot of signed photos of her: some original (with a cost to back it up), others reproductions (but damn good ones, and more affordable as well). Since there wasn’t going to be any chance for a personalized autograph, it didn’t really matter so much to me if it was the real McCoy.

And so, to celebrate the completion of The Book of Revelations, I went out and purchased a signed photo of Tippi Hedren, wearing her green suitdress, standing on a pier in San Francisco during the shooting of The Birds. And it hangs on the wall of fame in the den.

I like to think it’s one of the few times a novelist actually has a photograph of one of his fictional characters.

And, as Paul Harvey used to say, you now know the rest of the story, another example of how so many of the best things about The Book of Revelations seemed to come almost by accident. It’s why, through all the frustrations that accompany the publishing and marketing of an indie book, I remained dedicated to getting this novel out. There are many parts of the book that have a deep meaning for me, but none of them are quite as pleasant as this.

That’s how the writing business works, folks.

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With the publication of The Book of Revelations only two weeks away, I thought it might be interesting to share a couple of stories about how the book came together.

People sometimes imagine that writing a novel means sitting down with a detailed plan and executing it from beginning to end. My experience has rarely worked that way. More often, a book reveals itself bit by bit. A line appears. A setting suggests itself. A casual comment sends the story in a direction that had never occurred to me before.

Two moments from the writing of The Book of Revelations illustrate what I mean.

The first involved something as simple—and as important—as the opening line.

The topic at the writer’s group was sharing the first lines of your work-in-progress. Many writers put a great deal of stock in the first line of a book, feeling that if you don’t hook the readers right away, you risk losing their attention. Now, this may or may not be true, but that’s not the point right now.

When things came around to me, I solemnly intoned the first line of The Book of Revelations: “Once upon a time…”

Everyone laughed. It’s about the corniest way to start a book other than “It was a dark and stormy night.”

“Wait,” I said. “I’m serious. That’s how it starts.”

“You’re kidding,” someone said.

“Nope,” I replied, raising my hand as if making a vow.

“How can you be serious?” another asked. “That’s one of the most old-fashioned tropes around.

They had to admit, though. It was intriguing.

In fact, I was lying. The first line of the book is actually not “Once upon a time.”

After a three-page prologue, the story proper starts, “They say it always begins, Once upon a time, and ends, They lived happily ever after. But it’s everything in between where the real story exists.”

A little different spin, don’t you think? Are you intrigued at all? Maybe not.

One of the trademarks of postmodernism—my kind of postmodernism, anyway—is that it’s presented to you in such a way that you never forget you’re reading it, not simply experiencing it.

My first book, The Collaborator, is a novel in the form of a drama. So after an epigraph from Shakespeare, the famous “All the world’s a stage,” it starts off,

If the playwright’s words are true, then it is appropriate that we adopt the convention of a play in order to tell our story, So imagine, if you will, a stage in a semi-lit theater. The theater could be anywhere; the time could be any time. Let us say that the time is now, and the pace is wherever you may happen to be as you read these words.

(Damn, that’s good, isn’t it? I’d kind of forgotten that.)

The point is that the postmodern introduction takes you completely out of the normal atmosphere, and immediately reminds you that “this is a book, and you are a reader, and the words you’re reading are mine.”

My second novel, The Car, had a similarly unconventional opening:

“It begins with the car,” is how it started. After a description of the car’s features; nothing remarkable, just “like any other car you might see parked on a city street,” it concludes, “And so this is where it begins. It begins now, it begins before the womb, before conception. This is where it begins.” It then immediately contradicts itself in the next paragraph by stating, “It begins with Winter [the main character].” And with that, we’re off to the races.

I dearly love that opening. I enjoyed writing that so much. But the point here is that this is how I write. I didn’t practice it or learn it; I just observed other writers and how they developed their own style. This happens to be mine, and I’d write like that whether it was a Substack, or the start of a novel. That’s my version of postmodernism for you.

Does it work in The Book of Revelations? Ultimately, that’s for you to decide. I think it does, or I wouldn’t have left it there. In any event, you can’t please everyone.

Another writer’s discussion, with an online friend. I’d described the work in progress to him, rough as it was at the time. I mentioned that although I was drawing from some of my own childhood memories, the book wasn’t set anywhere in particular, and it would probably wind up with some generic name like “Century City.”

“Have you thought about setting it in a real place?” he asked.

“Well, no, not really,” I replied.

“The people you’re describing to me—their personalities, the way they think and talk, the world that Nan grows up in—sounds very Midwestern to me. Why don’t you set it there? Indianapolis, say?”

Now, you have to keep in mind that our friendship was a casual one; he didn’t know that I lived in Indiana. And it would never have occurred to me to set the book here, especially in a city that’s in another part of the state.

I saw no reason to do otherwise, though, so from then on, not only would The Book of Revelations begin in a real location, it would be Indianapolis, Indiana.

Last month I wrote about the pleasure of revisiting my past the way an adult would have done, and the research I conducted to make sure that the details of 1965 Indianapolis, a city I have visited exactly once in my life, and not in 1965, were accurate.

I loved doing that research, and if nothing else it confirmed to me the joy that writing brings, and which it should bring. We get so tied up in the “rules” of writing that we lose sight, I think, of that fact. When we do, it ceases to be a labor of love, and instead becomes work. And I had enough of that before I retired, thank you very much.

The Book of Revelations is an Indiana story in many ways; two of the chapters prominently feature Indianapolis, and the characters display that sensibility. But that’s not the only real-life location in the book; the last three chapters, for example, take place in San Francisco, a city I’ve visited twice, once being a time very close to that portraye in the book. The research here wasn’t as intense or as important to the story, but it was still just as enjoyable, and just as important to get right.

Why did I choose San Francisco? Well, Nan is a young woman on the move, in a hurry to escape from herself, and as she says at one point in the book, the old saying “Go West, young man” probably applied to women as well, so here she is. And it is here that The Book of Revelations reaches its climax, an ending that I hope you’ll appreciate.

I don’t pretend that this little vignette is representative of the way all writers work, and I don’t make any bones about it being the right way to work. But, with the publication date two weeks from today, I did hope you’d enjoy hearing a little about how The Book of Revelations came to be revealed to me, piece by piece.

I think you ought to buy it. I don’t know if that’s a postmodern thing to say or not, but I’ll say it anyway, and I’ll even put that in writing.

Did you know I have a free monthly newsletter, with exclusive benefits including

• A sequel short story to The Book of Revelations (available only to subscribers)

• Companion short stories connected to my next novel

• Early access and behind-the-scenes updates

This is separate from my Substack, so be sure to sign up today.

Hey everyone, summer’s here!

Memorial Day has always been the unofficial start to summer. Back in my pre-retirement days, if the company I worked at had “Summer Hours,” they would always start on Memorial Day weekend. It was supposed to be a nice perk, I guess, but trust me: when you’re retired, you can have summer hours every day, and that’s a whole lot better!

Not much new to report here, so I’m going to leave you with an bonus excerpt from The Book of Revelations. It comes out three weeks from today, so if you haven’t purchased your copy yet, you still have time to take advantage of the pre-order price at mitchellhadley.neocities.org, so don’t miss the opportunity.

As I mentioned, this is a bonus excerpt, available only to subscribers to this newsletter. You probably remember a similar excerpt a few weeks ago that was available on Substack, but this one is just for you, and I hope you enjoy it. It takes place in the penultimate chapter, when our heroine, Nan Jaffee, now going by the name Ellen, looks back on that one year of childhood happiness, when everything seemed possible and the only shadows were the ones cast by the rising sun as a new day dawned.

I hope you enjoy it, and I’m looking forward to seeing you at Substack next week, and for the newsletter next month! And happy summer!

Back then, the air always smelled faintly of cut grass and hot tar in summer, of burning leaves and cold metal in fall. Sidewalks were warm under bare feet in the afternoon, then suddenly cool as the shadows fell over them. Screen doors slammed like gunshots; mothers yelled first, middle, and last names across backyards, and you knew it was time to come home. Everything metal tasted like blood when you licked it: the garden hose, the swing-set chain, the penny for luck. Knees were always scabbed, hair always in her eyes, shoes always untied because you were running. The sky was right there, close enough for you to reach out and touch when you lay on your back in the grass. Thunderstorms rolled in fast; the world turned green for five minutes before the rain hit. Everything scary was huge and quiet: the siren test at noon on Saturdays, the way the TV went silent when the president was shot, the pictures of children in wheelchairs in the Muscular Dystrophy booklet at school, the Duck and Cover drills every month. Night came with lightning bugs, the hum of window air conditioners, and parents’ voices drifting from open windows, talking about money, the Russians, or some cousin who got mumps. You knew the exact second the streetlights flickered on; that was the real end of the day. Everything good was cold and sweet against your lips: the first lick of a popsicle, the rim of a Coke bottle, the spoon from the frosting bowl. You could ride your bike to the edge of the world—the dead-end where the sidewalk stopped—and still be home before dark. The whole neighborhood was one big house with a hundred doors you could run through if you were fast enough and polite enough to say “thank you, ma’am” on the way out the back door. There were always kids around—schoolmates, backyard friends, and one more special than the others—and time felt endless and safe, slightly electric, like the moment before a roller coaster crests the first hill.

Saturday mornings were sacred. Curley Myers, Blinky the Clown, Captain Jack, Sheriff Bill—she could see them all in her mind’s eye, their voices loud and scratchy from the black-and-white screen, the slapstick routines and silly gags that made her laugh until her stomach hurt. She and the neighborhood kids would crowd around the TV, sitting cross-legged on the floor, pressing their faces to the screen, trying to imitate the routines, the voices, the joy. For a few hours, the world shrank to that small living room, the warmth of sunlight spilling across the carpet, the scent of breakfast lingering in the air, and the laughter of friends echoing in her ears. For a few hours, she could believe she was part of it all, something bigger than the house, the street, the rules she’d already begun to notice around her.

And then, one day, it wasn’t normal, and never would be again.

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of my new novel, The Book of Revelations, available for pre-order ahead of its publication on June 16.

She’d already had the one cigarette she allowed herself each day as an indulgence, Nancy had, but now she was considering treating herself to another, and even that would make Sid angry, which was why she was always careful to stub out the butt and take it with her when she finished, burying it deep inside the coffee grounds where it wouldn’t be seen. And Nan was always scolding her about it, how they told her in school that it was bad for you and would kill you. I don’t want anything to happen to you, she would say. Which is why she always waited until Nan was at school.

So Nancy lit up, tucking the pack back in her purse (Sid hadn’t started searching that yet), while the radio chatted away in the background. It’s twenty-three minutes past nine on this fine Tuesday morning, December 14, 1965, here on thirteen-ten, WIFE—the home of the Good Guys! Lee Masters, keeping you company this morning. Remember, only eleven shopping days until Christmas, folks, so if you haven’t started yet, better get moving! And to put you in the holiday spirit, here’s a little sparkle from Bobby Helms and his “Jingle Bell Rock.” The jolliness didn’t reach her. She thought of the station’s billboard she’d seen the other day: While you’re away, we’ll be here with your WIFE.

Well, there was always that.

A rap at the back door; Trudy, from down the street. Now that they’d gotten their girls off to school and their husbands off to work, she’d come over for some serious business. Nancy waved her in, turning at the same time to grab another coffee cup from the cabinet. Trudy wasn’t a close friend—the kind you’d trust with your innermost secrets (a fact Trudy was about to demon-strate)—but Jill and Nan went to school together, and occasionally Trudy and her husband Jerry would come over, and the four of them would play bridge on the card table in the living room.

They sat down at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking coffee while catching up on the latest gossip. There was an extra excitement in Trudy’s voice, and it soon became obvious why.

—You’ll never guess what I heard, she said.

—What? Trudy looked both ways, as if she’d stopped at a railroad crossing, and when she spoke it was in a voice too low for anyone to overhear, even though there was nobody else on the street and you’d have had to plant a bug, like those Red spies, to catch her.

—Debbie... she began, then stopped, teasing.

—Yes?

—You know that good-looking young man who’s been working on the yard over at Mrs. Callahan’s? The one who works in his T-shirt when it really gets hot?

Nancy nodded, and when Trudy held the note for a beat, she exclaimed—No!, suddenly figuring out where it was going.

—Yes! Trudy said.

—Where did you hear that?

—Dorothy said she saw him over there.

—Maybe he’s just doing some work for her. Her husband’s awfully busy, you know.

—Not that kind of work, Trudy said. —She said she saw him going in the side door, the one that leads to the kitchen. Said he kept looking around, like he was making sure nobody saw him. Now why would he be doing that if it was something all that innocent, if there wasn’t…

Nancy listened with growing excitement. This was real news, not like the stories she heard on TV about blackouts and rockets and the war in Vietnam. She didn’t mean to be rude to those families who’d lost someone in the war, but she didn’t know any of them personally, not like the people in her own neighborhood. And besides, the death of a marriage was just as much a tragedy, in its own way, as the death of a soldier somewhere nobody’d ever heard of until a few years ago. Later on, as she was cleaning up after Trudy had gone to her next stop, she would think about it some more. Pretty soon everyone on the block would know that Debbie was getting some afternoon delight from Mrs. Callahan’s gardener. Everyone but Tom, her husband, that is. Oh, he’d find out about it eventually, when someone slipped up and made a mistake. But for now…

—and he’s at least ten years younger than she is, Trudy was concluding.

—I suppose she’s entitled to her fun, Nancy said.

—Aren’t we all?

True enough.

The talk stayed pleasant for a while—about the Ayres windows downtown, the grocer’s new stock of ribbon candy, how hard it was to find wrapping paper that didn’t look cheap this year. Then somehow Sid’s name came up. His long nights at the office, mentioned in that tone that could be either admiration or something else, depending on how you heard it. Someone had said business wasn’t as good as it used to be. Trudy smiled, drawing it out. —You’re too wild, Nancy. Always rushing here and there.

Said half in jest, half in reproof. Then, with that small satisfied look of hers: —I saw you got that new washing machine. Sid must be doing all right.

—Oh, that. The old one was about to fall apart.

—Still. You’re lucky.

Nancy smiled and let it go. After Trudy left, the kitchen felt heavier—or maybe it was just the cigarette smoke hanging around—and she cracked the window to let the outside air in. Too bad it couldn’t clear out the doubts that weighed on her mind. There had been no choice about the washing machine, even though she’d had to fight to convince Sid about it. She wasn’t about to lug three baskets of dirty clothes to the laundromat every week. So it was nice, but exciting?

It would be nice, she thought, to have something to look forward to. Not like a reward exactly, just something she could get excited about, knowing it was out there somewhere, waiting for her. In a way, it would be more about the anticipation than the event itself, and she wondered if she even needed the event, or if the anticipation alone would suffice—if there were some way to keep pushing it just far enough into the future.

Probably not, she decided; eventually, anticipation would eat her alive unless there was some way to let it out, like steam from a pressure cooker. Looking at the tree in the living room, sparkling in the morning sun, she remembered how she’d looked forward to Christmas as a girl—and how Nan did now.

And that was the point: sooner or later, there had to be a payoff. Unless you could keep fooling yourself into believing it was just around the corner. Her thoughts turned to Debbie, cheating on her husband with that to-die-for handyman, wondering if she’d felt the same way until she decided to act on it, leaving Tom holding the bag. Tom, that poor fool, who from all appearances didn’t deserve to be played like a sap. Maybe it was the lure of the forbidden, the secretiveness (or so Debbie might have thought, though who knew how many people knew by now), that made it exciting. The thought of it sent a shiver through her, though she couldn’t tell if it came from fear or excitement—or both. So many things could go wrong. Against that, how do you measure any possible good that might come of it? Then again, how do you weigh the anticipation against the event itself? The event might not be worth it, but what about the preview of coming attractions?

She awoke with a start.

Her daydream had carried her off for a few minutes—more than a few; it was just past noon, time to start the laundry. Have a quick bite, get that going, then start on dinner. Then walk over to school to meet Nan at three, and walk her back home. Odd, considering what she’d just been thinking—about not having anything to look forward to—that she didn’t look forward to her daily walk. Not that she resented Nan, or disliked their reunion—God no, she adored her. It was the event itself, she thought, not the consequence of it. It came as an unwelcome interruption to the day, even though it didn’t really interrupt anything. Was she projecting, she wondered, imagining it interrupted not the day itself but the potential of the day—the chance it might become something else? Even if she had somewhere to go, something to do, someone to see, the school walk would prevent it. At least for a couple of years, until Nan was old enough to walk by herself or take the bus.

There was no question that would be something to look forward to. The question was whether she could wait that long for satisfaction.

My new novel, The Book of Revelations, will be published June 16. You can preorder it now at this link and get a special discount; you can read more about it, and my other books, here.

When we hear someone talk about a “period piece,” we usually think of something set in the Old West, the Victorian era, Medieval times, or even further back. We don't often think of it as something taking place within our own lifetimes. And yet, that’s precisely the situation I found myself in while writing The Book of Revelations.

The novel takes place over a twenty-year period from 1965 to 1985. Setting the story in this time period was not a sentimental gesture on my part, but a strategic decision, the logic behind which will make sense when you read it. Its protagonist, Nan Jaffe, is eight years old when the novel begins, three years older than I was that same year. Now, three years may not sound like much to you, but in a child’s pre-teen years, that cognitive difference is huge; an eight-year-old will notice and process things in a completely different way than a five-year-old would. Therefore, even though I was writing about a period I lived through myself, I had to approach it as if it were just another piece of historical research.

For the next five months, I found myself immersed in the culture of the Sixties—the music, the politics, the broader atmosphere of the decade. Even though most of this doesn’t appear in the finished novel, it was essential to understanding what the period would have felt like for Nan, her parents, and her grandparents, and what it would have looked like in Indianapolis, where the early part of the story is set.

Even though my story is fictional, it was extremely important for me to get those historical details right, and it included everything from listening to the Sixties channel on SiriusXM to studying a map of the Washington Park Children’s Zoo, to reading the small print in the 1965 Polk’s Directory, to checking the weather forecast in the city for December 26. I loved every minute of it, even when it became tedious and frustrating to make sure the t’s were crossed and the i’s dotted. (As with all authors, I may have taken certain liberties with the historical record, but I tried to keep them to a minimum, and any remaining inaccuracies are unintentional.)

What was fascinating about the whole experience was that, although I’d lived through this time, I wasn’t able to call on my own experiences as much as one might have thought. I didn’t listen to rock music when I was five; didn’t know anything about Vietnam; wouldn’t have seen the magazine cover that plays a small but pivotal role in Chapter 1. I watched the space flights, I followed the hometown teams in football and baseball, and enjoyed my last year of freedom before beginning the arduous seventeen-year sentence of going to school.

So when it came time to do the research, I experienced the Sixties in a way that was far different from how I had lived through them myself. Songs were viewed in their historical context and not taken just as music. News headlines, fashions, trends in medicine: all of them took on a different character when placed in their lived context, not just artifacts from the past. In short, I began to live in the decade, not just see it.

My relationship to the Sixties has always been a love-hate one; The more one comes to understand the decade, the harder it becomes to ignore what it was. I believe it to have one of the most destructive times we’ve ever known. The disintegration of the social fabric; the collapse of political, educational, and religious institutions; the violence, racial and antiwar; the hedonism that took root and never really let go—none of this speaks very well of the Sixties. All you have to do is look at what it wrought, the lives it changed, the course of history it set in motion.

And yet it really was my decade. It’s when I grew up, and when so many of my most formative memories were created. The shows I watched, the comic books I read, the games I played; the magic of Christmas past, the glory of the gridiron greats and the World Series heroes, the historical events that keep drawing me in: they’re all from the Sixties. And while I may have been three years younger than Nan, some things don’t change: playing hide-and-seek in alleyways, kickball in the streets, being chased by dogs, keeping secrets with your best friend. The world, for all its problems, was still simpler than it is now. Those things don’t go away.

So what do you do with that? How do you look at a decade that includes assassinations, Vietnam, race riots, and everything else that came with it—and still feel any affection for it at all?

You can still love it—or, if you can’t love it, you can’t hate it either.

I said earlier that having this story start in the Sixties was done for practical, rather than sentimental, reasons. And yet, in drawing on my own experiences as a kid, it did become, as one of the characters in The Book of Revelations remarks, something of a “sentimental journey.” Even though the story was set in Indiana and not Minnesota, even though I didn’t experience 1965 the way Nan does, I felt like I could have grown up just down the street from her. And maybe, in fact, I did.

As the novel progresses through the 1970s and to its conclusion in 1985, it became easier for me to draw on lived experience and history, and my research was mostly confined to historical accuracy. There’s no question, though, that there’s something strange about the experience of treating the decade in which you grew up as a time from another era. It’s a little like seeing a portion of your life flashing before you, but with someone else playing you. That’s why, although The Book of Revelations is in no way an autobiographical story, those early chapters still feel like a part of my story, set in my decade. It was one of my favorite parts to write.

My new novel, The Book of Revelations, will be published June 16. You can preorder it now at this link and get a special discount; you can read more about it, and my other books, here.

In case you haven’t heard, I’ve written a book. It’s called The Book of Revelations, and while I may be biased, I think it’s a really good book. It comes out in June, but you can preorder it today at the link in the footnote. It’s the kind of book that I’d like to read myself, and if an author won’t read his own writing, why should anyone else?

Which brings me to this week’s topic. I think that if you want to know what kind of books a writer writes, find out what kind of books he reads. And if you want to know what kind of read The Book of Revelations is, let’s start with the book that taught me how I wanted to write.

If you’ve been reading along with this series, you’ve met some of the authors who maed the biggest impact on me early on: Stephen Vincent Benet, John Hawkes, Don DeLillo. But now we come to the one book that changed my writing life more than any other: a slim volume from 1985: City of Glass, by Paul Auster.

I’d never heard of Auster, and I don’t even remember how I heard of City of Glass. I think I read about it in a flyer from a bookseller (you remember flyers, don’t you?), or perhaps I heard about it in a magazine. It was the first volume of a trilogy, but I don’t know if I was aware of that when I bought it. At any rate, whatever it was that I read intrigued me enough that I bought the paperback. Forty-eight hours later, I asked my wife if she’d read the book. “I need you to look at this and tell me if I just read what I think I read.” I seem to say this with some regularity, which I suppose is a good thing, but I absolutely was not prepared for that book.

For one thing, there was the opening line. “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.” Now, if that doesn’t hook you, I don’t know what will. But it was that phrase the voice asking for someone he was not. There are so many more efficient ways to say that, and I’m pretty sure AI, had it existed back then, would have tried to flatten it out right away. But this introduced me to the idea that you could craft a sentence, that you could somehow design it like an architect drawing up plans for a building. It moved the story, sure, but in doing so, Auster was refusing to take the straightest line from one point of the narrative to the other.

He continues.

Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happ[ened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.

With this, Auster has turned the narrative completely on its head; it is now not about the story itself, but about how the story is told. We know that this has all happened in the past, because he tells the story with the advantage of hindsight. There’s a strong sense of foreboding, the idea that this story is not going to turn out well. More than anything, though, there’s the wonder of that first paragraph, the storyline winding until it turns itself inside out. And we don’t even know who answered the damn phone yet. I tell you, my breath was taken away. I couldn’t have stopped there if I’d wanted to, and I didn’t want to.

He goes on from there, and if I go on much further, I’ll wind up reprinting the whole book. We learn that the protagonist is named Quinn (no first name, apparently), but we’re also told that “there is little [about him] that need detain us. Who he was, where he came from, and what he did are no great imporance.” Talk about withholding the facts!

Auster does, in fact, tell us more about Quinn, just enough for us to become invested in him. And then he drops the real bomb, and this is what I’d probably read about that interested me in the book. When Quinn finally answers the phone, a mysterious voice at the other end asks him: “Is this Paul Auster? I would like to speak to Mr. Paul Auster. Of the Auster Detective Agency.” So wait a minute: is Auster the author of this book, or one of the characters, or both? And is the Auster of the book the same as the Auster writing the book? Yes, the more I think about this, the more convinced I am that this is what attracted me to the book.

From here, the story winds its way, literally, through the streets of New York; Quinn often takes long walks through the city, and as he becomes more invested in this case (for he has decided to impersonate Auster, given that Quinn makes his living as a writer of detective novels), he learns that a key clue rests in the pattern formed by the path the main suspectd takes during his walks. In this sense, City of Glass operates as a conventional detective mystery, albeit one that might have been written by Kafka.

Throughout City of Glass, we get clues that someone is telling us this story; the narrator will occasionally take the reader into his confidence (“there is little that need detain us”), but just who is the narrator? And then, unsurprisingly, Auster himself appears in the book. No, he’s not a private detective, and never was. (So what was that phone call all about?) Auster has a wife and child, who bear a striking resemblance to the real-life Auster’s family. But don’t think that this Paul Auster is about to become the hero; in fact, the narrator remarks at one point that “I am convinced that he behaved quite badly.”

That’s about as far as I’m going to go with this, because City of Glass is really a book you ought to read. It won’t take long, and it’s the one book, more than any other, that for me falls into the category of “I couldn’t put it down.” As for the ending? Well, that’s why I wanted my wife to read it, to make sure that she understood it the same way I did. It’s that kind of book, and if I haven’t told you already, I’ll tell you now that it blew me away. It wasn’t just a mystery story; that would be far too simple. It showed me that writing itself was the mystery, one that could never really be solved.

If there is any single book that confirmed in my mind that I would be a writer, City of Glass was it. From there on, I read the other two volumes of “The New York Trilogy,” which answered some of the questions from City of Glass but managed to raise even more. After that, I read everything that Auster had published up to that time, and everything that he would go on to publish until his death. I had the great privilege of seeing him twice when we lived in Minneapolis (his wife was from Minnesota), doing readings at a local bookstore. He was as tightly wound as his writing, and yet accessible at the same time. My wife, shrewdly, asked him a question about baseball (his passion), and you got the impression that, given the choice, he’d much rather talk about the New York Mets than about his books.

I read City of Glass not long after Libra, so you can understand the double-barreled assault these two books had on my senses. But if you want to know how and why I decided to become a writer, and what kind of writer I wanted to be, here is where you can start and finish. I can unapologetically admit that my second novel, The Car, was heavily influenced by Auster’s style, both in terms of writing and storytelling. Not a copy, of course, because it would have been a pale imitation. But if you want to know what The Book of Revelations is like, if you’ve never read one of my books and want to know what you might expect, you can do far worse than to read City of Glass. As I think I will myself, shortly.

My new novel, The Book of Revelations, will be published June 16. You can preorder it now at this link and get a special discount; you can read more about it, and my other books, here.

It must seem to you as if I’ve been talking about this for a long time. (And if so, imagine how long it must seem to me!) But I come to you with some big news: The Book of Revelations is now available for preorder!

And yes—there’s a reason to do it now instead of waiting. So here’s the deal.

From now through June 23, both editions are available at a reduced preorder price:

• The print edition drops from $14.99 to $11.99.

• The ebook goes from $5.99 to $4.99.

If you’re planning to buy it anyway, no reason to wait—you can’t beat a deal like this!

Here’s a preview of what to expect:

The Book of Revelations is a meditation on memory, guilt, and the limits of protection. It asks what remains when everything familiar is taken away, and whether some absences can ever be filled—or whether they’re simply carried forward, until the moment the last story is finally revealed.

If you want the details—and the preorder links—they’re here:
mitchellhadley.neocities.org. (And while you’re at it, sign up for my free monthly newsletter!)

Go grab it while the preorder price is still good—you’ll be glad you did.

My last few essays here—well, let’s be honest about it: all of my essays here—have been discussing authors I’ve been influenced by during my life, in hopes that by talking about those influences, you might find yourself interested in my own books. I started out discussing the authors who impacted me when I was young; authors like Stephen Vincent Benét and John Hawkes, who changed the way I viewed writing. In a way, you might say that they introduced me to the art of writing. Because of them, I knew that I wanted my writing to be different—unorthodox, blending some of their surrealism, allegory, and stream-of-consciousness techniques into something that was truly my own style.

However, when I got serious about writing—when I decided to become a writer, rather than simply talk about it—there were books that simply blew me away. They were so distinctive, so astounding to my previous way of thinking, that I was drawn into them immediately, and I told myself that if I could ever write anything like this, I would be accomplishing something. This is the story of one of those books.

“Libra” is an astrological sign (September 23-Ocober 22), but it also points toward the word “Library,” and so it’s appropriate that the novel Libra would play such an important role in my writing life. When Don DeLillo published Libra in 1988, it was a certain buy for me. I wasn’t familiar with DeLillo—I had rarely heard of him and had never read anything by him—but I was immensely interested in the JFK assassination (a topic that continues to fascinate me to this day). And, once again, whatever I thought I was getting, I wasn’t prepared for the experience of reading Libra. DeLillo’s style immediately captivated me; it was challenging, unorthodox, and frequently seemed to move from tangent to tangent. His characters talked in bizarre, often unconnected sentences, with a style of speech that was both formal and vernacular.

From the first, I loved it—especially certain phrases that stuck in my mind, which he would seem to throw in almost randomly: walking on “rain-slicked streets.” Another phrase became an inside joke between my wife and me; whenever I was about to make a grand pronouncement of some kind, I would announce, “This is what I am saying.” I’m pulling these out of context, and memory may be doing some of the work here, but if you’ve read DeLillo, you probably know the effect I’m talking about. In terms of writing about one of the most iconic moments in American history, it was so distinctive, so utterly unlike anything I might have expected, that it captivated me. (Norman Mailer had a similar effect in his book Of a Fire on the Moon, and maybe we’ll talk about that some day.)

Anyway, I don’t want to sound like a gushing fanboy here, but when you’re in your 20s and 30s and hungering for the kind of writing that can fill you with the desire to create—not simply to put words on the page—this was exactly what I needed. From then on, I went back and read his other books, and made sure to get his new books as soon as they came out. I read most of them, from White Noise and End Zone to Mao II and Underworld. I enjoyed all of them, to one degree or another: the way they challenged me, how they forced me to read between every line, how he was willing to write stories that lacked traditional endings and sometimes didn’t end at all, and most of all how he used words. He could create sentences that were so striking I didn’t even care how, or if, they advanced the story. I was just taken by how they were constructed.

I still read DeLillo today; I think the last one I read was The Silence. None of them, however, have ever had the impact on me that Libra did. When I saw JFK in the theater not long after, I was struck by two things: how many of the characters in the movie I recognized from Libra, and how much more interesting the movie might have been if it had drawn directly from DeLillo rather than Jim Garrison’s conspiracy theory.

So Don DeLillo came along at exactly the right time in my life. If you read my fiction, you might see some of his influence in how I write. Maybe not; I might just be flattering myself there. But it’s there.

Which, conveniently, leads me to the next author I’ll be talking about.

Postscript:
I’m putting together a small ARC team for The Book of Revelations, which will be published on June 16. These are advance review copies of the finished book, and the goal is simple: to have honest Amazon reviews ready as close to launch as possible.

If you’re willing to read the book and post a review when it goes live, feel free to reach out or reply here, and I’ll send over an e-copy

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Happy spring! At least the calendar says it’s spring; last week we had temperatures in the 70s, followed by snow less than 48 hours later, followed by fierce winds, and then sun and sub-freezing temperatures. And now it’s warm again, but only for a couple of days, then it’s back down again. Ah yes, spring…

The Book of Revelations: The Cover Reveal

Well, here it is: after teasing you long enough, you can see that there is, in fact, a book called The Book of Revelations, written by yours truly. What do you think of the imagery? It’s drawn directly from the story, and I won’t say any more than that. Does it capture what you imagined?

I’ll be putting together a small number of advance reader copies in electronic form over the next few weeks. Most of the writing is done, though I might still fine-tune a few parts before publication. If you’d like to take part in that process, feel free to get in touch.

Preorders will open shortly after that, and subscribers will have early access before the general release. The ebook will be available at a reduced preorder price during that period, and both print and ebook editions will be ready at launch.

I’ll also be sharing a sample excerpt in a future issue—and, for those of you who want to see the story in motion, a first look at the book’s trailer. The publication date is set for June 16.

What’s Now

In the meantime, my work on classic TV history at It’s About TV continues. Last week, I recorded two new episodes of American TV History with Mitchell Hadley with my partner-in-crime, Dan Schneider. This month, we’re looking at two forgotten stars of television—celebrities who were major personalities in their day but are mostly overlooked now: Danny Thomas and Lance Kerwin. Just follow the links to watch! And for more classic TV content, check out my It’s About TV website.

What’s Next

In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing a subscriber-only excerpt from The Book of Revelations, along with the first look at the book’s trailer. Preorders will open soon, with early access for subscribers before the general release. The book itself is scheduled for publication on June 16, and I’ll have a few more exclusive updates along the way.

In the meantime, for more about me and my work, including The Book of Revelations and my other titles, visit mitchellhadley.neocities.org. And if you enjoy my work, you can support my broader creative projects on my Ko-fi page. Happy spring!

As you may recall, in my last post I began talking about my earliest influences as a writer, and I hope you’ve taken the opportunity to check out “By the Waters of Babylon” if you hadn’t already read it.

I mentioned at the end of that essay another book that had a profound influence on me: John Hawkes’s Second Skin. It was through this book that I was first exposed to nonlinear, stream-of-consciousness storytelling, and I’ll tell you this: it was a confusing introduction. It may just be me, but Hawkes is not for the faint of heart; he will, in a phrase I’ve come to adopt as my own, make you work for your reading pleasure.

Now, I can’t say that I enjoyed reading Second Skin, or that I even fully understand it today. I’m not even going to try to explain it here; there are perfectly good synopses online if you’re curious. But I still have my copy, nearly fifty years after I bought it for a college literature class, and the reason I’ve never given it away is that I keep it as a reminder of what an author can accomplish when he approaches fiction as something constructed rather than simply written. I’ve come to believe that only someone who thinks like an architect can successfully build a nonlinear, stream-of-consciousness narrative.

That may sound strange, given that architects work with precision and structure, while stream-of-consciousness writing can appear, at first glance, to have none at all. But that’s not really the case. Beneath the surface, there is structure — often very deliberate, very logical structure. It simply requires the reader to pay closer attention.

That brings me to a discussion I saw recently in one of my online writers’ groups. Someone expressed frustration that writers are often expected to simplify their work in order to make it more accessible to readers. (Those are my words, not his; I don’t want him blamed for my bluntness.) It’s a frustration I share, based on some of the so-called “rules” one encounters online:

• Don’t use flashbacks.
• Stay away from prologues.
• Don’t write long chapters.
• Don’t use first person. Or second person. Or third person.
• Don’t use an omniscient narrator, or an unreliable one. Unless you do.
• Don’t use words your readers might not understand.
• Unless they mean exactly what you want to say.

I’m being a bit facetious here, but only slightly. When it comes to rules for writing, I’m inclined to fall back on something the great Duke Ellington once said about music: “Music is as good as it sounds. Music is an oral art. Until you hear it, it is not music, and if it sounds good, it is good.”

Apply that to writing. Until you actually read something, you have no idea whether it works. Just as music is experienced through listening, writing is experienced through reading. And if it works for the reader — if it resonates — then it works.

That’s a broad statement, of course. There are plenty of popular books that, in my opinion, don’t work at all. But they weren’t written for me. And like Second Skin, they still have something to teach, because clearly they connect with readers in a way that matters.

I don’t pretend that my own writing is always easy to follow. In my upcoming novel, The Book of Revelations, the chapters are long. Much of the story unfolds through flashbacks. It moves between first, second, and third person, and shifts between past and present tense. It won’t be for everyone. But if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance it might be for you.

And more importantly, it works. My editors responded to it. Early readers have responded to it. People who respond to the way I write tend to respond to the book.

That, ultimately, is the point. Second Skin had a lasting impact on how I think about fiction. I don’t write like John Hawkes, and I rarely attempt anything close to his style. But I learned from him — a hell of a lot more than I did by reading Balzac. He showed me that there are countless ways to tell a story, and just as many ways to construct one. You don’t have to follow every rule — or any of them — if what you’re doing works.

And if it sounds good, it is good.

Next time, I’ll be writing about some of the authors who shaped me most directly: Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and Joyce Carol Oates. Their influence runs deep; without them, I doubt I would be writing at all, and I certainly wouldn’t be writing the way I do. If that sounds interesting, stay tuned.

Have you ever learned something important from a book you didn’t particularly enjoy? If so, I’d be interested to hear about it.

I’ll have a limited number of early ARC copies of The Book of Revelations available next month. If you’re interested, feel free to get in touch in the comments or on X or Facebook.

When I look back at the books that mattered most to me, I don’t think first about subject matter or theme. I think about technique—about the moments when I realized that a story could be constructed in ways I hadn’t imagined. Those realizations would help shape the kind of fiction I would later try to write myself.

It’s from this perspective that questions about our influences become particularly interesting—because the books that most shape us often do so by showing us new ways to think about storytelling itself. And so we consider these questions: Who made us want to write? What books changed our lives? Who most shaped our style?

They’re all good questions, and sometimes we get so wound up in the process of writing and publishing our stuff, we don’t think back to the pleasure of writing, when we first discovered our love of consuming the written word and became motivated to try it ourselves. It’s a good question to ponder, especially if we ever find ourselves facing writers’ block (which frequently happens), suffering imposters’ syndrome (which happens even more often), or growing so weary of the constant need to promote ourselves (which feels relentless) that we’re tempted to chuck the whole enterprise and take up something more satisfying—like playing checkers.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t read, or a time when I didn’t want to be a writer. It may have taken me a long while to act on that desire, but it was always there. And while I can’t point to any single book that made me leap up and declare, “This is what I was born to do!” I can pinpoint the moment when I first experienced the wonder of writing—when I said to myself, “This is the kind of thing I want to write.”

It happened, as so many important events in our lives do, in high school. High school reading lists are often given a lot of grief, sometimes for good reason. One of the most tedious books I ever read was Silas Marner. I’m aware it’s considered a great work of literature, but it left me entirely unmoved. Père Goriot didn’t fare much better. To Kill a Mockingbird struck me as preachy, and Wuthering Heights failed to carry me to any great heights, wuthering or otherwise.

Then I encountered something that genuinely astonished me, and that is not a phrase I use lightly. It was a short story called “By the Waters of Babylon,” by Stephen Vincent Benét, and it marked my first experience with allegorical fiction.

“By the Waters of Babylon,” written in 1937, is set in a post-apocalyptic world; it may also have been my first encounter with that genre. It was, however, the first time I’d read something constructed almost entirely as allegory, told from the point of view of a young man named John who is trying to piece together the meaning of what he finds while searching the ruins of the forbidden “Place of the Gods,” a place called newyork.

Walking along “god-roads” (deserted highways), he confronts the remains of a major city: “mighty and ruined towers.” Rummaging through its shattered landmarks, he comes upon a statue whose base bears the surviving fragment “Ashing.” Only gradually does it dawn on the reader that this is all that remains of the name Washington, and that the statue is of George Washington. The dangers John encounters, including wild dogs, are frightening enough, but what captivated me was what Benét was asking the reader to do: assemble the clues scattered throughout the narrative and recognize that the ruined city is New York, that the “god-homes” are apartment buildings, and that we possess knowledge John does not. What he struggles to understand is obvious to us, yet by seeing it through his eyes we are forced to look at the familiar in an unfamiliar way. It was a remarkable experience to encounter that for the first time, and I remain slightly surprised that it was assigned to high school students, along with the typical coming-of-age novels.

Perhaps Planet of the Apes complicates the effect for later generations, especially the visual impact of the movie. After that indelible image of the half-buried Statue of Liberty at the film’s conclusion, the discovery of “Ashing” may not seem quite so startling. But “By the Waters of Babylon” predates Apes by decades; for readers encountering it in the years before that film, the Statue of Liberty’s appearance might well have felt like the lesser revelation.

Still, reading “By the Waters of Babylon” was a singular experience for me. Accustomed as I was to straightforward books on sports and history, to stories driven primarily by plot rather than by method, this was the first time I fully grasped the power a writer could exercise by withholding information, by obliging the reader to infer meaning from fragments. It prepared me for later discoveries, for writers who would similarly expand my sense of what fiction could do—John Hawkes’s Second Skin, for instance, which opened another door entirely and pushed me further toward developing a style of my own. I’ll return to that book, and to others that had a comparable impact, in my next essay.

In the meantime, what about you? Did you read “By the Waters of Babylon,” or something like it, in high school? If so, did it have the same effect on you? What works first revealed to you the range of possibilities that writing holds?

Hello, friends—
If you subscribed to my newsletter in the past, you’ll notice that In Other Words has moved to Substack. You’ve been automatically added, so there’s nothing you need to do.

Along with the newsletter, you’ll now get updates on my latest projects—including The Book of Revelations (coming June 16)—as well as occasional thoughts on writing, reading, and storytelling. Thank you for following along; I’m looking forward to keeping you updated in the months ahead.

What’s New

Controversies within the Catholic Church have been in the news lately, and even if you’re not Catholic—or religious at all—you’ve probably read something about it. That makes this a perfect time to recirculate the book that foresaw many of these issues when it was first published in 2015. My novel, The Collaborator, is back with a new cover, and its insight into the challenges faced by the church—and by humanity in general—is as pertinent now as it was eleven years ago.

Oh, and did I mention it also features conspiracies, murders, mysteries, and questions that aren’t answered until the very end? All told in the format of a stage drama. Think of it as an intellectual thriller. It’s available at Amazon. Buy it. Read it. See what you think.

What’s Now
All writing and major editing work on The Book of Revelations is complete. I’m focused on preparing for upcoming milestones, including the cover reveal and pre-orders, which I’ll announce as soon as they’re ready. I think I’ve mentioned in the past that the idea for this book existed in my mind for ten years before I started serious work on it last year; it might even have been twenty years. And now it’s about to become a reality.

What’s Next
I’ll be keeping you in the loop as pre-orders open, the cover is revealed, and other developments happen with The Book of Revelations. I hope you’ll share these updates with friends who might be interested, and if you haven’t already, encourage them to subscribe to my Substack so they can get future updates directly in their inbox.

Reminder
You can also continue exploring my work on television, reviews, and other writing at It’s About TV. And if you enjoy my work, you can support my broader creative projects on my Ko-fi page.