A few weeks ago I told you I was editing this book.
I would like to report that I am no longer editing it.
I would also like to report that I did this in an organized and responsible way, but you’ve read this blog before, so you know better.
What actually happened is that I went through it chapter by chapter, slowly, sometimes painfully slowly, with a brain that occasionally looked at the task in front of it and said, Absolutely. We should do that.
And then wandered into the kitchen.
The coat on page 214, by the way, is staying. I want that on the record.
But the book is done. Edited, finished, and wearing a cover. Which means I can finally tell you more about it, because presumably that is why you are here and not because you wandered onto my blog by accident.
(That would still be on brand.)
Deliberately Lost is about Maxine Farrow, a library worker in a small Virginia town who hasn’t finished a manuscript in six years. She also hasn’t really started much of anything else. She writes a hugely popular blog about living a bigger life, and she has become extremely good at making a quiet existence sound like an adventure.
Then she finds an old journal.
Then her ex gets engaged.
Then she buys a one-way ticket to Paris.
And then she learns that her grandmother did something remarkably similar seventy-some years ago, and left behind a box of letters and a journal that stops mid-thought, every time, just before anything real is said. So Maxine decides to follow the trail and see where it ends.
Getting lost, it turns out, is considerably more complicated than not knowing where you’re going.
Along the way there is a bookshop in Paris that may or may not be findable twice. There is a painter with a very particular blue. There is a ghost in a Scottish library who will not turn around. There is a night train, and a red-haired stranger with green eyes who is very much not what she seems.
And there is a small town on the Slovenian coast, with a bookshop whose owner is extremely interested in how Maxine finishes things.
Also, there are books that bite.
Obviously.
It’s a story about almosts, and about the people who stay in the middle of their own lives because the middle is safe. It’s also, fair warning, the first of my books where the heat comes up. If you’ve been reading Harlo for the Halloween shorts, consider this the longer, hungrier version.
I don’t have a release date yet. I’ll tell you here first, along with the cover and a preorder link, so subscribe if you want to know the moment it’s real.
I wrote a book about a woman who spent years being very good at almost doing things.
I finished it.
There is a certain poetry to that.
Or irony.
Possibly both.
Anyway.
I’m out of the kitchen now.
Harlo
