Pinterest and "The Red Journal"

In the 1st edition of TBDNE, Mike finds a red journal lying on his old bed in his parents’ house that he cannot remember writing in. Yet, when he opens the book and looks inside he discovers that it contains his handwriting. As Mike reads the journal, a few entries are included in the text of the novel.

The red journal is in fact mine. I wrote in it during my first and second years of college at NYU. The entries that appear in TBDNE were written by teenage me. They are either completely unedited or edited for cosmetic purposes only. 

One of the changes I made while revising TBDNE for the paperback release was digitizing the red journal. As one of the novel’s primary themes has to do with the nature of what constitutes reality - specifically online where, for instance, your Facebook friends can make shit up, manipulate photos, and create events that never take place - I thought it was important for the red journal to reflect that theme. In the first edition, I betrayed this idea by making the journal a physical object. 

In the second edition of the novel, Mike finds a scrap of paper lying on his bed with a drawing of the Pinterest logo on it, as well as the words “theredjournal.” He then taps pinterest.com/theredjournal into the browser on his phone and begins to read the journal entries he can’t remember writing. This was my fix for getting the red journal digitized - and just like every other link in the novel it actually works in the real world. Go to pinterest.com/theredjournal if you want to read the rest of what I wrote when I was a freshman at NYU (minus a few pages I had to omit for the sake of the privacy of people who were mentioned).