1. Originally, WAVES was going to be called WHY I AM NOT A POPSTAR and it was going to be a collection of short stories bookended by a couple of essays. I had it all planned out. The essays were going to be, ‘How I Became A Writer’ which I wrote last year and ‘Why I Am Not A Popstar’ which ended up becoming WAVES instead. Only, WAVES isn’t an essay. WAVES is probably best described as ‘a novelette.’ And I decided not to include anything else alongside it.

2. (I was trying to distract myself from another book about life and fear and terrorism that I started writing last year but got derailed from sometime around Christmas.)

3. Remember: when writing about your current terror starts to feel like too much, you can always dredge up some past traumas to distract yourself.

4. If something feels too painful to write about, you can simply wait 5 years and tell a fictionalized version of events through a character.

5. I told Sarah Jean that I wanted to do an ebook and she said that she had an idea for an ebook too and so we started working together, sending pages back and forth.

6. We work in very different ways. Sarah writes really fast and asked me to look at new parts of her book regularly. Every few hours sometimes. I would make a suggestion and she would change something and say, ‘What about now?’ And I would say, ‘Yeah!’

7. But I always feel like I need at least a completed outline of a draft before I can show anyone something I’m working on. I showed the WAVES manuscript to Sarah for the first time when the whole storyline was in place but the text was only 3000 words. Then again at 6000 words. And then again once  it was all complete. She left a lot of comments on my google doc.

8. She would ask me questions like, ‘Does your character still think about her friend who died?’ and ‘What was so great about this guy anyway?’ And then I would go back and fill in the blanks with more information.

9. We have been editing together for four years now. Our own writing and other people’s.

10. The day before the publication of LOUD IDIOTS and WAVES, she wrote in an email to me, ‘[writing this] with you has been more fun than anything i’ve worked on creatively in a long long time!’

11. And I said, SAME.

12. WAVES is a story that has taken me over five years to write.

13. Emotionally, I mean! I couldn’t have done it before.

14. There is this Gustave Flaubert quote that I kept thinking of, it goes: ‘Be regular and ordinary in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.’

15. I happily/temporarily/finally reached that point while I was writing this book. I went to bed early almost every night.

16. And then I woke up really early and continued writing.

17. WAVES was the working title of Kanye’s new album, The Life Of Pablo, for about a week.

18. The Waves is a book by Virginia Woolf, needless to say.

19. Both of those people are referenced in this story so that seemed kind of funny to me, to name it that.

20. Plus there’s a lot of water in it.

21. The cover is by Michael Inscoe. I asked him to make it because, when I thought about the story, I just thought, he will represent it best. I don’t know why.

22. I just love Michael!

23. I’m really happy about the way these two books fit together. LOUD IDIOTS by Sarah Jean Alexander and WAVES by me. I am so lucky to have Sarah Jean as a great friend and a great writer to write weird books with.

24. Anyway, if you’re interested, they are both available now at secondbook.club