Today has sneaked up, or dawdled, depending on the moment you ask me. I circled May 5 on the calendar months ago, as if choosing it gave me some control. It doesn’t. The day comes anyway, carrying its own mood, its own gravity, and a question I still can’t quite answer: Are you ready for this?
Because a publication date isn’t just a date. It’s a threshold. You stand on one side of it for a long time, imagining what’s on the other, and when you finally step across, the ground feels different under your feet. Familiar, maybe—but tilted in a way you didn’t expect.
Today, my 20th book, DEEP END, enters the world. Twenty. That number carries a certain gravitas, like a birthday you’re not sure whether to celebrate or circumnavigate. It feels like a milestone, which is another way of saying it feels like a reckoning, which is another way of saying it feels like standing under a storm that’s about to break … or not.
People sometimes assume a book launch is pure joy, a champagne moment. And sure, there’s a party. Sorta. Pride stumbles in early and pours itself a cup of coffee. Relief isn’t far behind, slumping into a chair like it’s just run a marathon.
But they don’t get the house to themselves.
Anticipation paces. It checks the phone too often. It listens for something—what exactly, it can’t say. A whisper, maybe: This mattered.
Dread doesn’t knock; it just appears, like it’s always had a key. What if nobody cares? What if they do—and they hate it?
Then there’s vulnerability, aimlessness, creative emptiness, fear of judgment, comparison-itis … fergawdsakes, it’s a damn party in the asylum!
When my Sourtoe Cocktail Club came out in 2011, I allowed myself a dangerous thought: this one might find its way.
Not because I needed it to, but because there were signs. Early attention that felt genuine. Praise from great authors I admired. It was a father-son story, and it felt like one—the kind of book you don’t just write, but carry.
And then—release day.
Not a crash. Not a public failure. Just … a thud that settled in. And stayed. The marketing never quite took root. The numbers came in soft. The book I believed in most slipped into the world with barely a ripple. Years passed, and Sourtoe remains, to this day, my least seller. Nobody cared.
Fifteen years later, that same book—the overlooked one—is moving through the slow, improbable machinery of film development. Further than anything else I’ve written. Script is written, actors pitched, studios reading it. I don’t pretend to understand that.
What I do understand is this: release day feels like a verdict. It isn’t. It’s a moment—a single, overlit moment—in the life of something that hasn’t even begun to measure time the way we do.
I thought I was listening for a splash. What I got was something that slipped under the surface and kept moving anyway.
And like most things you let go of, it didn’t go where—or when—I expected.
Writers are Olympic-level catastrophizers. We don’t just imagine the worst—we storyboard it. By mid-morning, I’ve already envisioned a world where the book sinks without a ripple and I’m forced to take up something honest, like roofing.
It would be funny if it didn’t feel so plausible.
And yet, beneath all that noise is something harder to name. Awe, maybe. Gratitude. Because a book doesn’t come from nowhere, even if it sometimes feels like it does.
It comes from accumulation: stories read under the covers with a flashlight; voices overheard in diners and courtrooms; landscapes that refuse to leave. It comes from failure, too—bad drafts, wrong turns, long stretches where nothing works.
You know where it came from. But where it will go? That’s the mystery you don’t get to solve.
Once a book is released, it stops belonging solely to the person who wrote it. It becomes a conversation. A gamble. A message in a bottle. It lands in the hands of strangers who bring their own histories, their own griefs, their own private hopes. Some will connect. Some won’t. Some might carry a single line longer than you ever expected.
You don’t control any of that. You only hope.
Publishing a book feels a little like bringing a child into the world. You work hard. You do what you can. You try to shape it into something sturdy and honest. And then, one day, you open the door and let the child step outside on its own.
Maybe that’s the hardest part: letting go. It’s no longer just mine. I spent months, years, decades learning how to write a book (or being a parent). And now I must spend this single day learning how to let it go. Never mind that I’ve done it 19 times before. It never feels fully under control.
So here we are. May 5. Coffee’s gone cold. The phone is still too close at hand. Pride and dread are sharing the same small room, trying not to make eye contact.
And somewhere out there, DEEP END has begun its own life.
I know where it came from.
Where it goes now—that’s the story I don’t get to write.
Available today, at last, DEEP END
In print, ebook, and audio wherever you buy books