Foreword

September 3rd, 2020

In case you missed it: I surprise dropped a brand new book on Tuesday called Theia. You can get a digital copy for free on my website [dennisvogen.com] or $4.99 on Amazon.

You also have until September 14th to order one of a very limited number of paperback editions I will be printing later this month, also from my website. Fun fact: if you submit any kind of review over the next two weeks, your quote could be on the back of the book!

To tell you more about how this all happened, I wrote a short foreword which is included in the novella. I wanted to share it here, as well.

FOREWORD

This is wild.

It’s August 27th, 2020, and I’ve just finished the first draft of Theia, which I started on August 22nd, 2020.

It’s been a wild week. But it’s also been a wild year, so I’m just shooting par for the course (which will be the only sports reference in this entire book).

When I started this story, it was very small: I wanted to write about a silver Boston Terrier who just wanted to run away. It was, in no small part, my story – at least, a part of my story that I’m constantly at odds with.

What it ended up being was beyond anything I could imagine. It was all the feelings I’ve had in 2020 – the fear, anxiety, lack of control, unexpected moments of joy – lived out in detail by a bunch of animals living in a shelter. Without giving anything away, it also ended up giving my thoughts a place to live in a way that only fantasy and science-fiction can; a safe space where literal becomes metaphor, and big ideas get small but are just as important.

This is probably my favorite thing I have ever written, and that makes me crazy. It is as personal and universal as they come, and I can say with complete honesty I have never written something so quickly and clearly in my entire life. A week from now, I’ll come back and clean this up, and shortly thereafter you will be reading these words and we’ll go on this journey all over again, but this time together.

Stephen King describes story as already being there; as a writer, you’re an archeologist, digging the fossil out in your own unique style. I felt like that as I tunneled through this, finding gems everywhere along the way. I hope you find as much hope, joy and sorrow here as I felt discovering it.