November 17th, 2023
When my novella Flip came out, it got nice reviews and people generally liked it. So much so that, less than a year later, in 2014, I announced a sequel called Push.
Wait, 2014? Didn’t Push come out in 2021?
It sure did, people of the future.
The idea I had then was awesome: I was going to write the book in alternating chapters. One chapter would be told by Liam, then the next chapter by Alen, then Liam, then Alen, and so on.
This concept first inspired me, and then plagued me for years.
I still think it’s brilliant. But it took me a long time to realize that my taste and talent were not the same length. So I abandoned the story as it was, but not the feeling that Liam’s story wasn’t over.
In 2017, I found myself in the hospital after having severe withdrawal symptoms following an attempt to get sober on my own. (0/10, do not recommend.) When I was admitted, they asked me a scroll’s worth of questions.
One of them was whether I ever expressed suicidal thoughts.
I answered, very easily, that I had not. And another voice in the room said that simply wasn’t true.
This moment changed me profoundly.
It wasn’t just my apparent expression of suicidal thoughts that shocked and haunted me; it was that I didn’t even know I had been doing it.
And that’s when the real seed of Push started to grow.
What if the thing that Liam believed in, his dreams, turned into something else? What if he found himself only in nightmares and didn’t know why?
This was his story, and I knew I had to tell it, if only to keep both him and I alive.
I had to explore the reasons, extreme and subtle, that keep us here or question whether to leave.
Not the lightest of topics.
But hope — hope in Liam, hope in dreams, hope for myself, hope for life itself — is always worth the exploration of those dark, sometimes inexplicable places.
The Den 