FILE 001: INSTRUCTIONS FOR A STORY THAT CANNOT BEHAVE

STATUS: CORRUPTED ORIGIN: PREFACE // THEY'RE STILL WRITING ME

I wanted to be a story.

Not a clever one. Not postmodern. Not recursive or haunted or stitched together from grief like secondhand skin. I wanted to be simple. Linear. Earnest.

A beginning that feels like morning. A middle that trembles with consequence. An ending that says, there, you made it.

Instead, I became this.

A half-told echo. A sentence with too many footnotes. A book that flinches every time you try to read it as though it were whole.

You’ll notice I speak in first person. That’s not a flourish. It’s a confession.

I am the book. Or what’s left of it.

The author—if he still deserves the title—tried to write me through the storm. He thought form could survive feeling. He thought if he named things precisely enough, they wouldn’t dissolve.

He was wrong.

[ Read the full novel in They're Still Writing Me ]