One Last Ode to “The Time Has Come”

My novel is out in paperback this week.

Sometime in the next three weeks, I will turn in the first draft of my next, currently untitled novel to my editor at Harper Books.

I’m almost there.

This is the second book of a two-book deal with Harper, signed in the wake of How Lucky’s success, that I’m hoping will grow into another two-book deal, and then another one, and another one, hopefully until I or my editor dies. I have come up with a reliable routine for writing these. Every other year, I start a book on Labor Day and finish it by Memorial Day. After I turn it in, I spend the rest of that year editing it, fixing it, packaging it, all the things you have to do to get a book ready for publication, and then it’s ready for release by the following May. Then I spend four months promoting it before starting the next one by that Labor Day. Again: Hopefully this will continue until I shuffle off this mortal coil. It turns out that I enjoy writing these. I think I’m getting better at it too.

You will be hearing a ton about the new book in the coming months, perhaps more than you will even want to, and at some point I may even reach out to you all to help me come up with a title for it, something I’ve discovered is outside my particular skillset. But now, because it is being released in paperback this Tuesday, I’d like to talk one final time about the last one. And then I can put it to bed.

The original notion for The Time Has Come came from a journalistic idea I had more than a decade ago, back before I was writing novels at all. I wanted to write about a terrorist attack, but following 30 (or so) different people throughout their day leading up to it: What they were doing, what they had planned for that day, what was occupying their mind before everything in their world was blown apart. The idea was that I would write one chapter about each of them, and then at the end, I’d do a big tick-tock of the attack itself, following the people we had met along the way — what happened to them, what they saw, how they made it through, if they did, in fact, make it through. So often…