My thanks to everyone who read the book over the past fifteen months

It’s interesting how many lives a book can get. Like House of Leaves it can exist on the internet for years before being printed and bound, yet still continue to sell all these decades later. Or like Fifty Shades of Grey, it can begin as on-line fan-fiction—in this case, based on Twilight—and still become a massive publishing success.

That shows how the laboratory of on-line drafts and comments doesn’t kill a book. It can build it. It’s a model similar to how big books of the past—Dickens—were serialized in magazines, then published as volumes.

In the spring of 2024 Simon & Schuster will publish Greener Pastures as a trade paperback. Althought I liked the book a year ago, now I see that the narrator lacked a passion of his own. He was never really torn between his calling in life, and a guaranteed life of security and high status. That’s why the second act gets draggy.

It’s not enough to put everyone on a palatial island and have them talk. That’s the formula for Friends and novels by Jane Austen. Back in the day, social scientists credited the success of Friends to the Jane Austen model of attractive young adults largely at leisure, talking a lot. For Greener Pastures there has to be more.

The last big rewrite of my next book, Not Forever, But for Now, went back to the publisher yesterday. Now I start my taxes. These are the stations of the cross. In a couple weeks I’ll rip apart Pastures and save the bits worth saving, and brainstorm something to replace the rest.

I look forward to more Story Nights, more contests, more Gloves Off, and more of everything else in 2023.