I was this close to giving up on Your Best Apocalypse Now.

Once I hit the midway point, I started losing steam in a big way. The book just didn’t feel funny anymore, I felt like it was moving too slowly, and the whole project was so tonally different from everything I’d done recently that I couldn’t imagine it working out well. On top of all that, I’d started picking at the edges of a pretty cool idea for my next book.

I had a shiny new idea in front of me, but an old and tarnished one stood...