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Life finds a way

Hello, thank you for looking at this newsletter’s spreadsheets each week of this college football season, perhaps even bearing with my ramblings about way different stuff along the way. I’m now just about done posting about sports on here until next autumn, so/but thanks for sticking around.

First, look at all this:

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For the second time in five years, I’m now leaving myself a bunch of notes about my first solo book project and then leaving it to write a different book (ICYMI, I’m soon starting a non-fiction book about the intertwined history of college football and American religion).

Yep, Hell Is A World Without You wasn’t the first novel I started writing, just the first that I showed you.

Actually, it’d been a sober-pothead conversation with an old friend during the summer of 2019 that’d already begun my little fictional universe. At that Mexican restaurant, we’d thrown around a couple of galaxy-brained notions about the, well, universe.

And once I saw Star Wars 9 later that year (because if that garbage had gotten a $400 million budget, surely somebody would pay at least like $10 for some garbage of mine¹), I decided to start loading up documents with wildly disparate research notes about this Whole Other Novel.

This weekend, I unearthed all those documents from winter 2019-2020, just to refresh myself on what the hell I’d gotten up to at the time. It’s some odd shit! They thought the coming-of-age story about teenagers who play Street Fighter was “too niche”? They ain’t seen a goddamn thing lol. And though my understandings of me, of writing, and of the universe have changed a lot since I wrote these weird-ass docs, I still see the vision.

I also found something that made me laugh. For the last year, when asked about HIAWWY’s origin moment, I’ve been referring to the time when I first told Emily about guns being pulled on us at church in middle school, when her reaction made me realize I should write about church kids.

But yesterday, while re-discovering my 2019ish outline for this novel-in-stories that’d be set across a history of the multiverses, I realized my outline had included a square-one synopsis of a chapter to be set in our Y2K-era Earth. Here’s the very first kernel of HIAWWY, buried on page 865,200,460 of that impenetrable Word doc:

Lyddie’s childhood story:

• We’re all we got

• We’re all we need

Lyddie became Sophie, who became Kori, who became the protagonist of this whole overarching thing, but according to the mysterious Word-doc utterances of the past, she always has been. And until yesterday, I thought that was something that’d emerged for me in the past year, not something I’d put there since the very beginning.

Anyway, that’s wild to me and probably nobody else. Now to research a bunch of books by normal-haircutted white guys named things like Representative Tom Osborne.

1. I was right about that part, at least. At some point in 2025, maybe pretty early in the year, HIAWWY will cross $200,000 in sales while averaging 4.6/5 stars in online reviews. Now, I haven’t made nearly that much money from it, to be clear, though haha I’ve made more than I would’ve if I’d given it to a publishing company lmao, so thank all of you for that!! (The first $50,000 that went to me instead of to those companies was then forwarded to the LGBTQ charity called the Trevor Project, ICYMI.)

Also, I forgot to link this last week, but the best post I’ve read this year was by the pro wrestler Big E.