The second book is finished.

The aspens have not turned yet, but the light has.

Friend,

It comes in lower now, across the desk instead of down onto it, and for about eleven minutes at six in the evening the whole room goes the color of a lamp. I have started arranging my afternoons around it, which is either discipline or the opposite.

This is the first of these letters. I have had a list for a while and never once written to it, which I am told is the most common mistake a writer makes and is certainly the most polite one.

So: five things, and one of them is a recipe.

The reckoning

The second book is finished.

Good Little Innkeeper is done. Twenty six chapters, nine interludes, about eighty thousand words, written before dawn across a year that asked more of me than I expected to have.

It opens with two cups on a counter at a quarter to six, and a lamp somewhere off to the left that nobody ever sees. That is the first image in the book and it is the last argument in it: two people who have shared a building for years, saying almost nothing, every morning, before anyone else is awake.

There is no cover to show you, and there should not be. A book gets its face from the people who publish it, and this one has not been published. I would rather show you nothing than show you something I made to look like an answer.

If Still, by Design. was the atmosphere, this one is the reckoning. Same mountain, harder light. It is a novel, narrated in the third person by the house the man works in, which is not a trick. It is the only angle I have ever been able to look at this material from.

Here is the part I want to be straight about, because you may have seen a date on my website earlier this year. There is no date any more, and I took it down on purpose. The book is not published and it is not scheduled. It is finished, it is looking for the right publisher, and I would rather tell you that plainly than let a countdown clock make a promise I cannot keep.

The spiral-bound copies came back from the shop in town this week, two hundred and forty two pages each, single sided so there is a clean back to every page for somebody to write on. It is the least glamorous thing that has happened to this book and by some distance the most real.

You will hear when there is a book. You will hear it here, before anywhere else. That is the whole reason this list exists.

The first book

Still, by Design. has a new face.

The cover is new. The book is not. Still, by Design. has been out a while, and every so often somebody writes to tell me where they read it, which is the only measurement of a book I have ever found useful. I know roughly what a book costs a person in evenings. I have never once taken it lightly that anybody spent them here.

This is the face it should have had from the start. Same lake, same mountain, same man standing at the edge of a place he has not yet decided to belong to.

And if you have already read it, one favor: would you leave it a review? I have put off asking for a year, because it feels like asking for applause. It is not that. A book with reviews gets shown to people and a book without them does not, and the count is one of the first things an agent looks at. Three sentences is plenty. An honest three is worth more than a kind five.

The work

Somebody is helping.

Everything I make has been made by one pair of hands. The books, the letters, the reading room, the small press that printed the first one. All of it in the hours a working day leaves over, which is a sentence I have said proudly and should probably have said tiredly.

As of this month I have counsel. Courtney DeWinter, of DeWinter Marketing and PR in Denver, is my marketing and PR counsel, and the first thing she did was hand me a plan that began not with a launch but with the question of how a writer pays for his own work. Nobody has ever started there with me.

She is also the reason the book is going to agents rather than straight to my own press. That is a longer road and a harder one, and it is the right one, and I would not have chosen it alone.

So this is the year it stops being only me. A strange feeling for someone who writes about not knowing how to be helped.

Before the writing

What I do with my hands first.

I cannot write first. I have tried it for years and it does not work; the sentences come out managerial, like something I am supervising. So there is an hour before the writing where my hands are busy and my head is empty, and it is dark out, and this is what they do.

People ask about these more than they ask about the books, which I have made my peace with. If you make them, make them early, and do not put music on.

From the notebooks

Coffee Time! Currently at Rumours, a bookstore and cafe. It is snowy out, and I am drinking an iced vanilla oatmilk latte. I also purchased a really cute sounding book: Run Away With Me, by Brian Selznick. The handwritten year · page 61

I kept four hundred and forty eight pages of these last year, in my own handwriting, and I transcribed every one of them by eye for the book. Most of them are exactly this: a latte, the weather, a book I bought and have still not read. I am told the ordinary ones are the good ones.

The Patron Circle

A seat by the fire.

Patrons keep this house lit. In return: a key to the reading room, the pages while they are still wet, and a name kept in the weave for as long as the house stands. From the price of a coffee.

Nothing here will ever be behind a wall. The seats are for the people who want to sit closer.

That is everything worth sending. Thank you for being the sort of person who reads a letter all the way to the bottom; there are fewer of us every year, and I notice.

Avery

Every book is a room in the same house. You do not have to be told which door to open.