I am sixty years old today.

It’s been a wild decade. On this day in 2015, I’d finished copyediting Lovecraft Country and was waiting on the first-pass galleys. The book was due to be published in February and I was hopeful that it would do well, but I had no idea what was waiting for me just a few months down the road. It must have been April when I got a call from Matthew Snyder at CAA saying that Jordan Peele wanted to talk to me. “He’s mostly known for comedy, but apparently he’s looking to break into horror.” No kidding.

The Big Phone Call with Jordan Peele and Misha Green took place on May 5, 2017, and things just snowballed from there. Fast forward to 2019 and I was in southwest Chicago, dressing up as an extra and staying up all night to watch the filming of the big block party scene for the pilot episode of HBO’s Lovecraft Country. The show debuted on August 16, 2020, in the middle of the pandemic—we held a socially distanced viewing party in a friend’s yard on Mercer Island—and three weeks later I cracked the New York Times bestseller list for the first time ever (great timing, as COVID had eaten the publicity tour for my more recent novel, ). And while the show only ran one season, its success gave me the opportunity to write my first-ever sequel, The Destroyer of Worlds.

…so that was fun.

My own fifteen minutes of fame notwithstanding, it’s been a rough decade for the publishing industry. The most recent Really Bad Sign was the announcement by the Associated Press that they won’t be doing weekly book reviews anymore, as the audience for those is too low to make them cost-effective. I know I should be more worried about this, but the thought I always come back to is that telling stories was never a practical way to make a living, and yet somehow I’m still doing it after all this time. And a nice side-effect of Lovecraft Country‘s success is that it’s opened up some new opportunities for me that may help keep the lights on even if this whole “literature” thing turns out to have been a passing fad.

This was also the decade in which I got my first taste of what it means to get old. Your exact mileage may vary, but somewhere around fifty, your body parts start going out of warranty, and by fifty-five, any meet-up with friends of a similar age is likely to include a certain amount of conversation about what new aches and pains you’ve developed. Thankfully in my case these have all been minor so far, the sedentary nature of my job being balanced by the fact that I never learned to drive and hike pretty much everywhere. My joints and spine are a little worn, but my heart and lungs are still fine.

And I am cautiously optimistic about the future. People in my family tend to die early or late. My mother was only fifty-four when she passed, my dad sixty-nine, but I’ve got aunts and uncles on both sides who lived into their nineties, so if I can make it another ten years without any major health issues popping up, I figure I’ve got a decent shot at making it another thirty. And dementia doesn’t seem to run in my family, so with a little more luck I should be able to keep writing right up until the end.

I will save the bucket list of Stories I Still Want to Tell for my next milestone birthday in 2035, except to note that I have a couple more Lovecraft Country novels that I intend to get to before I’m done. But my next published novel, which I just signed a contract for, will be something new and different. More details about that soon.

Anyway, happy birthday to me—and if you should find yourself in the Nordelta suburb of Buenos Aires today, please tell the capybaras I’m thinking of them.