It's not done, because Deb Layne (
mme_publisher) will find all the bits that I wrote badly, and the bits where I was stupid, and it will come back, and I will fix up what I missed. That's how it goes. But in the way that you speak about this stuff, the book is done, and it clocks in at thirty six thousand words. Once the index is added, and a few other bits and pieces, including the art, I hope, the thing will be a slim novel. Well, a slim autobiography. Which is pretty wild when you think that it began as a fucking meme in June, and has been totally subverted, kicked round, and beaten into the book that it is now.There's an energy in the book, I think. A natural burn of energy. Andy's (
andrewmacrae) cover captures that. When he first showed it, he said that he did it in a rush of energy and inspiration, and that, really, has been how this whole book has run. I'm trying to think of a way to sum the experience of writing Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth. Essentially, I've run out the final months of being twenty-nine writing this book, and it is an autobiography, which strikes me as just about the most surreal thing in the world to have written. But it's more than that. Right at the start Deb told me to go as far as I could with it, and I did. Publisher trust is a beautiful thing, even if I end up hanging myself with the rope. In the end, Twenty-Sixe Lies/One Truth is not just the autobiography of a man who has been nowhere, done nothing, and met nobody, but it is also about truth, and author hoaxes, and that grey morality of life. It is born out of this blog and it is about my life, about nothing I've done, and dozens of dead people I will never meet. It's the book I never saw writing.
It's cool, like that, and it'll surprise a lot of people.
