While I was churning out my train-wreck novels, I was also writing short stories, and over those months (and years—yikes!) of writing, good things began to happen. A story about the friendship between a juvenile delinquent and an inflatable boy wound up in a well-regarded anthology of Jewish magical realism, even though I was a goy (the editor didn’t mind). A tale about a ghost haunting a small-town movie theater landed in the High Plains Literary Review. That doesn’t mean much to most people, but for me, getting into the High Plains Literary Review (distribution approximately a thousand copies) was like peeling open a chocolate bar and discovering a golden ticket. Some other good shorts followed. I wrote one about a lonely teenage boy who goes Kafka and turns into a giant locust—only to find he prefers it to being human. There was another about a disconnected antique phone that sometimes rang with calls from the dead. Another about the troubled sons of Abraham Van Helsing. And so on. I won a couple of minor literary prizes and landed in a best-of collection. A talent scout at Marvel Comics read one of my stories and gave me the chance to write my own eleven-page Spider-Man story.

It wasn’t much, but you know what they say: Enough is as good as a feast. At some point in 2004, not long after it became clear that The Fear Tree was going nowhere, I accepted that I didn’t have it in me to be a novelist. I had done my best, taken my shot, and washed out. It was okay. More than okay. I had written for Spider-Man, and if I never figured out how to write a good novel, I had at least learned I had it in me to compose a satisfying short story. I wasn’t ever going to measure up to my dad, but then I kind of figured that going in. And just because I didn’t have a novel in me, that didn’t mean I couldn’t find myself a job in the world of comic books. Some of my favorite stories were comic books.