The End of a Thing

One of the reasons I like Goodreads so much, even though I post on it so little, is because it's a place where I can get a lot of feedback on the things that I write: who likes it, who doesn't, and why. A recent comment about Lost Everything, though, really hit home for me:

Kelly wrote: Brian Francis Slattery, look, I love you, but your all sweeping description of looking out over the landscape of America like some kind of Kerouac-slash-Steinbeck all the time no real plot development to speak of oh wait what the fuck that was the ending shtick is going to get old eventually. EVENTUALLY.

Apart from being hilarious, I think it's also accurate and a sentiment that I totally agree with. In hindsight, I think of Spaceman Blues, Liberation, and Lost Everything as being a way to get at a series of questions that were sort of bugging me, and pretty much the minute I finished the first draft of Lost Everything, a couple years ago now, I knew that I was done--not in the sense of having completely answered the questions (which is ridiculous), but in having done the best I could with them. Moreover, the thing that I've written since finishing Lost Everything is quite different, chewing on a different set of questions. It hops to a different genre. There's no apocalypse, no sweeping vistas. There's not even that much of America. The writing style itself is different, to the point where, looking back on the three previous books, I don't think I could repeat them; apparently the old brain is in a different place now.

Hopefully those of you who have enjoyed the first three books (thank you!) will like what I've been up to recently. Even more hopefully, you'll get a chance to read it at all, as I'm in the throes of trying to sell it now (fingers crossed!).

Thanks again, everyone, for hanging in there this far.

B