BooksBarbecue
Back At Dawn
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. 1
  5. 1
  6. 1
  7. 1
  8. 1
  9. 1
  10. 1
  11. 1
  12. 1
  13. 1
  14. 1
  15. 1
  16. 1
  17. 1
  18. 1
  19. 1
  20. 1
  21. 1
  22. 1
  23. 1
  24. 1
  25. 1
  26. 1
  27. 1
  28. 1
  29. 1
  30. 1
  31. 1
  32. 1
  33. 1
  34. 1
  35. 1
  36. 1
  37. 1
  38. 1
  39. Copyright

On the good days, nothing, and I mean nothing, stood between me and my greatest ambitions. Between me and greatness itself and the posterity that comes with it. The days when the words seemed to pour from my brain, roll down my arm, and leak onto the page from the tip of the pencil. During these highs, I knew that someday Carolyn and I would laugh about the enduring poverty of our early days just as I’d come to laugh about the poverty of my own childhood. Nothing, that is, except my inclination to doubt myself and my own fickle abilities. I thought I was a talented writer almost half of the time. The rest of the time I felt I had no business trying to be one in the first place. I wasn’t sure on which side to park my beliefs.

9

For the first few months of writing, I thought little about what might happen when I finished the book. As I neared the end, however, the anxiety washed away and I could no longer keep myself from getting excited, from building up possibilities I hoped would soon be real, the most prevalent being that I’d no longer have to wake at five to go to a passionless job. It was destructive thinking, of course, as are most desires that are left to roam freely, but that didn’t stop the thoughts from coming. Carolyn got on board, too, and many nights we’d talk about what we’d do if the book actually sold. To keep her expectations low, I made sure she was aware that the average advance for a first-time novelist was small, sometimes only a few grand. But she insisted mine would be better, that it’d go for more. I agreed with her, though at first I didn’t explicitly say so. In my mind, I wanted to underpromise and overdeliver so that if we did hit it big, it’d feel as though we’d won the lottery. But then we’d talk about it more and I couldn’t help myself, and the next thing I knew I’d start throwing out extravagant ideas that went well beyond her own modest thinking so that no matter what the book sold for, it’d still fall far short of our bloated expectations. At no point during those nights did we allow reality its due consideration.