Thank you Candace, Ryan, Wayne, Kristin, and Lee Boudreaux, who edited Bird Box and who must’ve been able to tell I’d never worked in a professional landscape before but had the heart not to tell me so at the time.

Still, no self-respecting Prolific will slow down his or her pace just for having experienced some level of success with a single book or song. He or she is constantly looking for windows, a partially open door, feeling for the breeze of a hole in the wall where a story might get in.

But what happened in the case of Malorie was, one got out.

In chopping Bird Box up, I’d removed a thread of the novel that no longer fit. Or to put it better: The book would’ve remained twice as long upon publication had I not removed a certain idea that, after time, I started to consider as its own novel. But before deciding whether or not to do something about that, Netflix bought the film rights from Universal and, really, any plans I had, the list of what should be written next and what could be a book and what wasn’t, were blown apart, jumbled, and sunk, as if something like a tidal wave had come through the keyhole of my office door. Because, at the conclusion of watching the movie for the first time, I leaned over to my fiancée, Allison, and asked, “What happens to Malorie now?”

Thank you to the producers of the movie: Chris Morgan, Ainsley Davies, Scott Stuber, and Dylan Clark, for getting me to that place. And thank you Michael Clear for bringing the book to the producers to begin with. Thank you to Netflix and the movie’s crew and to the friends I made on set, especially, but not limited to, members of the cast: Happy Anderson, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Julian Edwards, Vivian Lyra Blair, and the amazing David Dastmalchian.

Thank you Susanne Bier and Eric Heisserer.

And thank you (with a bow) to Sandra Bullock, for showing me what Malorie might look like outside my head.

And so…from Malorie to Malorie, fourteen years after first writing her into a rough draft, finding myself infused with the same ardor I held then, renting out the same space I once called home, June’s place, the desk I’d written the rough draft of Bird Box at, the third floor of a gorgeous home in Detroit’s Boston-Edison district, letting myself in every morning, heading upstairs, writing Malorie, and writing about Malorie and Tom and Olympia with the experience of a Prolific who had traveled through dozens of stories (novels, songs, movies), only to bring it all back to her, back to the character who had meant so much to me long before she was introduced to the world.

Malorie.