Some News on "Vigil"

Plus a peek at the unfolded, actual cover: a bonus (Monday!) post

Hi All,

I wanted to share some news with you. On Wednesday, December 10^th (also known as the Tenth of December, ha ha) at 1:30 PM EST, I’m going to go live here on Substack and read a short preview from the very beginning of the new novel, Vigil, which you can read about and pre-order here.

It’s my first time going live (!), but Substack has let me know that if you follow me, you’ll automatically get an email with a link to join as soon as the live starts. And if you’re on the app, you’ll get an alert with a link.

I’ll also, on that live event, be announcing the cast of the audiobook, which has been (under the brilliant direction of the great Kelly Gildea, who also directed the audiobook for Lincoln in the Bardo) a grand creative adventure.

Hope you’ll be able to join me on Wednesday….

This is the exciting but harrowing period in the publication of a book when, with the writing all done (as I think I mentioned, I sent the very last tweaks off just before our trip to New York for the National Book Awards), the waiting-to-see begins. Will people read it? Will they like it?

I’ve started to do interviews about the book and so am thinking and speaking about it in a different way - in a sense, I’m “learning” the book, as opposed to being deep inside it, altering it so as to make it more itself, by, mostly, feeling.

Now I have to articulate what it all means, as well as I can. While, at the same time, not being entirely sure myself. I often invoke the “roller-coaster-designer” metaphor and I am finding that I believe it more than ever: the writer’s job is to make a wild ride…and the meaning appears (or descends, or is revealed) after that’s been done.

I find myself also really seeing the wisdom in that Chekhov quote we talked about last week: “A work of art doesn’t have to solve a problem, it just has to formulate it correctly.”

So all of the revising I did on Vigil was a form of making the various oppositions in the book more stout, less easy to dismiss…which will, I hope, result in a wilder, more undeniable ride for the reader.

One significant moment this week, I got to see and hold the first example of the physical cover, which I love, and am happy to share with you:

In other news, I’m finishing up a round of calls with my students about our third round of workshop and we’re about to embark on a final, one-on-one round, in which I read their work and give them the frankest edits-and-advice session I can, as they prepare to go back into the real world in May…

Thanks, as always, for being here.

(And thanks to Kirkus Reviews, for this):