And despite the thousand various words that rise to describe it, and the struggle to name it, she knows that by looking, now, beside her mother’s grave, with her father and her teens asleep and safe inside, she has bridged some gap, she is losing no more, nothing more is being taken. And something has been returned.

Dedication

Malorie is for Kristin Nelson.

AFTERWORD/ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’ve got a thing for rough drafts. Some might call it a fetish. In a slightly different reality I consider the rough draft/demo of a book or a song a finished thing. I’ve even gone so far as to consider outlines realized stories, albeit oddly told. Thing is, before getting my first book deal I had no real reason to rewrite at all. I’d wrapped a dozen rough drafts by then (in those days I only called them books), and, to me, they were as complete as any hardcovers on my shelves. I shared them with everyone; bands we, The High Strung, toured with, friends and family, strangers. In the ’90s, my songwriting partner, Mark Owen, and I had a list of names we’d send cassette dubs to, generation-loss copies of already lo-fi albums. Those twenty people were enough. They made the group of songs real. By virtue of mailing out Bid Me Off and A Lot of Old Reasons, Mark and I could move on to the next batch, as yet unwritten, relieved to have another album in our bag, enthused for the next one. It was in those days that I learned to love the initial go-round, the first try, the stab at it when nobody was watching. Do you like live music? The rough drafts and demos were and still are like that. A performance. Fluctuating speed, some miffed notes, a forgotten lyric here and there.

And I love them.

Hello, I’m Josh Malerman. And I’m a Prolific.