So, huge news, I have a novel coming out March 4th. It’s called Two Truths and a Lie, and you can preorder it here.

I have been working with the good people at Pantheon Books to make this happen for the past TWO YEARS. It was going to come out last November but we decided we didn’t want current events to distract from the book release, so we moved the release to a time when current events would be totally normal and not distracting at all (lol, lmao). The good news is, now you can use my book to distract you from current events!

Nice people always ask me: “What is the best way for me to buy your book so it helps you the most?” The answer is, either preorder it (helps with stats), or have your local indie bookstore order it for you (they’ll sometimes order extra copies if they see there’s interest, plus indie bookstores are good). But honestly as long as you find some way to read it, I’m happy.

But read what, you might ask? How can I expect you to buy/read something when you don’t know anything about it? Well here’s the first paragraph of the book jacket summary:

“In a mostly underwater near-future Los Angeles, aging combat-drone veteran Orr Vue now lives a simple and small life, trading snippets of what’s become the most valuable currency: information. So when the cops show up at his door looking for data on a murder he’s not even aware has happened, things get interesting for the first time in 25 years.“

But you could read that pretty much anywhere on the internet. What you really need is a taste of what’s in the book. So the rest of this post is just going to be the first page and a half of the book. Check it out:

The L.A. sun squeezed in through my building’s cracked roof and poured itself onto the sheet-metal ceiling of my compartment, cooking me awake almost an hour before my kortiko would’ve zapped me conscious otherwise. Mornings are worthless. Nobody wants to buy a memory of bloodshot eyeballs and nostalgia for last night’s liquor, so my archives are loaded with identical copies of the same seven minutes of suffering, stretching all the way back to when I took the fact-checking gig at InfoDrip a decade and a half ago. Still better than your job, though.

I have some sympathy for you, since we’re in the same business. Difference for me was, I corrected a higher class of information than you kids on the municipal blockchain. More work to verify, but worth more. I’m sure most of the stuff you get on commission is nothing but conspiracy theories– “No, the mole men are not invading your teeth,” “Yes, gravity is a universal force, unaffected by how much raw beef you eat.” This, I assure you, is not that. Listen till the end, and I promise to make this submission worth your while. And, just for you, I’ve included plenty of irrelevant detail to line your pockets with. So where was I?

Right. A perfectly awful Wednesday morning in July. I peeled off sheets that would’ve been drier if I’d pissed in them and began the forty-five minute process of convincing my atrophied muscles to crawl out of bed and carry me to work. My commute was five steps long, bed to table. At my age, that’s five steps too long, but I find that if I stay in bed to work my spine’s a solid rod by the end of the day, and not the kind of solid rod I like. At the table, I poured myself a bowl of Grape-Nuts drowning in caffeinated milk and slapped a handful of knockoff Think tablets into my mouth. Gotta keep the brain slippery, as the kids say. I stuck a lunch pack to my arm, strapped the Frosty to my face, and — with nothing else to do — made the fateful decision to clock in forty-five minutes early.

The InfoDrip buffer slid over my brain from back to front, giving my eyeballs the feeling of being goosed from behind. It’s the worst feeling in the world. Well, okay, no, not technically the worst (I’m not giving you such an easy excuse to invalidate and collect this submission, checker), but I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a bad one. You sit there all day, in the back of your mind, fully aware that your brain is doing something, but unable to observe the smallest sliver of it. Can’t have us actually knowing any of the data we interact with, can they? That’d be financial suicide. Anyway, if you know how the buffer works — and I know you do — you’ll understand why I didn’t hear the cops come in. What you might not understand is why I screamed at them anyway.

And it only gets weirder and nastier from there. It’s been an incredible journey, taking this thing from first draft to actual published novel(!!!) and that path began, in many ways, with this here website. So thank you to everyone reading this, whether you’ve been here since the beginning, or are only just joining. Without you, I’d just be talking to myself.