In this spirit, Bird Box was begun. She was finished within a storm of songs, tours, shows, and a thousand conversations that, had they been recorded, I might’ve slapped titles on them and described each as small works of their own. Following Bird Box, I simply wrote the next book, a complex 600-pager called Bring Me the Map. But while I was working on Map, and as The High Strung began that next tour, I started getting reactions from the friends and family to whom I’d sent Bird Box.

This is where the acknowledgments come in.

Can you imagine how many people there are to thank, those who encouraged and helped, over the fourteen years between the rough draft of Bird Box and releasing the final, official version of Malorie?

In a word (and, not so coincidentally the title of a High Strung song): legion.

I’ll start with Mom, Debbie Sullivan, who read Bird Box at a dog trial in Indiana and called to tell me there was something to the then 113,000 words that were not broken up into chapters, were not indented, and were written entirely in italics. She liked it. My stepdad, Dave, called me, too. My friend Matt Sekedat, too. My sister-in-law Alissa. I printed the book up for my friend/landlady June Huchingson, gave it to her at night, and found her finished by morning. Her reaction remains vivid with me today.

To these early readers, I scream thank you. For, if it weren’t for a handful reading Malorie’s story in its earliest incarnation, I might not have pointed to it when, later, I met Ryan Lewis and Candace Lake, a managing duo who had read Goblin but knew we ought to begin with something other than a collection of novellas. It was by way of Ryan and Candace, along with the help of the brilliant lawyer Wayne Alexander, that I rewrote Bird Box in a significant way in the year 2010. I chopped the story in half, gutted what felt like repetition, broke the story into chapters, indented the paragraphs, and removed the italics that had, until then, essentially laminated the story in what felt like a dreamlike hue. Ryan, Candace, and Wayne shopped the book to agent Kristin Nelson, whose website, at the time, said she wasn’t interested in horror. And suddenly, it seemed, the book, and myself, had a team. From there, Kristin shopped Bird Box, it was picked up in 2012, I rewrote the book once more entirely from scratch (one of the benefits of being a Prolific is the gumption to write the same book a second time), Universal Studios bought the film rights, and the book was published in 2014. And so began, for me, Malorie’s story occupying a larger place in my life than I could have ever predicted.