A LINE WILL TAKE US HOURS MAYBE

THE FIRST THING people wanna know about your novel : “How long did it take?”

I always wonder : is this real curiosity, or is the person calculating the requisite time block on their mental calendar for the novel they’ve always wanted to write. . .

The answer, — which I give to every budding novelist, — : takes longer than U think it will.

Writing a novel is like bobbing for apples harriedly, desperately for four years; — just when U think U got a nice, juicy apple, U realize there’s worms in it; . . . by the end, U accept : every single apple gonna have worms; — finally, U must sell Ur wormy apple to a publishing house.

I turned in the copyedited draft for my second novel HUMPTY DUMPTY on January 13, 2026, — an auspicious day : on which both my grandpa & James Joyce died . . .

I eshbosed the first miserable rumblings of what was then called Steubenville in January 2022 while my agent was making notes on Tropicália; — originally, my second novel was gonna fill the Brasilian lacuna in the Latin American “Dictator Novel” via Dom Pedro II : — but I realized I didn’t know yet enough to pull it off. . .

I knew I wanted to write a novel about the town I grew up: STEUBENVILLE, OHIO: which to some no-nothing outsiders seems like a rusty shithole, but to me is a mesmerizing myth-cauldron worthy of Faulkner. . .

The horrific (ethically, aesthetically, bore-to-tears-ly) novel I wrote in college, — — Rain, Rain: an excerpt I turned in to the only creative writing workshop I took in undergrad, — my freshman year, — earned me this note from the teacher,

“Very shocking in all the worst ways. . . truly, truly not good. . .”

and a C- in a class absent football players were acing, — — — was set in a pseudo-Steubenville called “Harborville” for reasons I wouldn’t be able to extract from my 19 year old brain. I had only been writing seriously for one year, but I thought Rain, Rain was really f*****g good.

I would send parts to the New Yorker just about every week, — with notes oleaginous with arrogance : I thought peacocking would be a sticky boon, not realizing : if they had a nickel for every unsolicited submission from a self-proclaimed future LEGEND, they’d be able to save print media.

My goals were simple : I was gonna publish in the New Yorker, have two novels out by 21, be a Rhodes Scholar and eventually I’d be president. . . my GPA was 2.9. . .

Anyway: — — — a big thing happened when I was a sophomore in High School : in 2012, two football players at Steubenville Big Red sexually assaulted a girl at a party and left quite an extensive internet paper-trail. People I knew were at the party, but I wasn’t invited because I was a loser.

I went to the only other high school in town : Steubenville Catholic Central. The guys who did it were sophomores like me. Everyone knew something was happening because of Twitter. . . But legally, nothing came of it.

Rumors & speculation abounded. . . I forget exactly when, maybe it was Christmas, — months & months later. . . A friend texted me to go on Big Red’s website : I was met with a video-thumbnail showing a Guy Fawkes mask.

Anonymous had hacked the school’s website and was doxxing everybody they believed was involved with the case. . .

everything snowballed into a national scandal. . .

I’m not gonna talk more about the actual incident and what happened : — honestly, everything is mixed up with the book and I don’t know what’s real anymore; but : it was a formative emotional experience,

— these were guys I knew but not well, but they were my age: I witnessed everything close enough to be a JUDGER. . .

At the time, it felt normal; some people at my college had heard of the incident and said, “oh you’re from Steubenville, I know what goes on there. . .”

I never considered writing anything about it until I went to a play at Miami University advertised as “based on the Steubenville Rape Case” : — it was absolute GARBAGE! ridiculously, Steubenville wasn’t even named in the play! its relation to the incident was purely atmospheric : they didn’t even bring up the hackers!

And it did rankle : U f*****s weren’t there : U ain’t from Steubenville : what right do you have ?

But of course, I wasn’t about to write no NON-FICTION. . . The basis of my novels is imagining my way thru counterfactuals : Tropicália started with the question : What if my dad had indeed gone to prison (a looming possibility thru-out my upbringing) and I had been raised in Rio by just my mom? . . .

Steubenville started with an even thornier question :

What if I was the star quarterback for the Catholic Central Crusaders, and I became a rapist ?

STITCHING & UNSTITCHING HAS BEEN NOUGHT

MY DREAM was always to be a great quarterback. I used to tell everyone : — I wasn’t allowed to be quarterback : people in Steubenville were racist against Brasilians : they never even gave me a shot!

Not true, they did give me a shot. I had a fantastic arm, and I was fat, — like Jared Lorentzen. In 6th Grade they let me come in for one play : a deep pass. . . — I was overwhelmed, broke my thumb on an opposing player’s head throwing the ball : the ball was intercepted. I never got another chance.

The name of the star quarterback in HUMPTY DUMPTY is Darius Rodgers (my name is Harold Darius Rogers, — for those of you keeping track at home).

So, I had my content kernel . . . : but it’s easy to make a novel about something; the hard part writing a novel is finding the architecture. . .

If U can’t talk cogently about Ur novel’s architecture, it’s probably a wack project, — at least for the kind of work I care about. . .

I’ll lay my cards out on the table: my goal is to write CANONICAL LITERATURE : if that ain’t Ur reason to write, I am not interested in Ur work.

The CONTEMPORARY work attempting to be canonical has to do two things : surpass or equal the work in its tradition, and engage with the forms of its own time.

This is the architecture of HUMPTY DUMPTY : there are 14 chapters; each chapter is broken up into sections I originally wanted to make exactly 1500 words each, but now they’re like 1350-1600 words, — 56 total sections. The form of the book, — which took me seven drafts to discover, — is basically this :

What if the wily narrator of Tristram Shandy told a lurid, dramatic, entangled story like from an HBO teen drama but presented as a true-crime reconstruction?

(Mixing old b******t (Sterne) with hyper-contemporary forms.)

The chapters alternate between scenes told by the narrator and Archive sections which include three documents from the Rodgers family : interviews with Darius’s dad John, excerpts from his mother Beatriz’s private memoir, excerpts from his twin sister Anna’s diary, — and one outsider document : a manifesto written by a villainous incel named Harry Cunha (another version of my name).

Now why is there so much material in this book that gestures at REALITY? Like why the f**k am I giving these characters versions of my name?

The form of the first quarter of the 21st-century, — whether U liked it or not, — was autofiction. This is about engaging with the forms of our time.

HUMPTY DUMPTY is in NO WAY autofiction.

The book pretends to be autofiction. Not just in its internal form, but also the way it points to the author’s life outside the book. If U try to glean what is actual REAL in HUMPTY, U will be lost to the point of insanity.

I love playing with verisimilitude. The lawyers at my publishing house do not. I had several culling conferences with the lawyer : he insisted I could not use the name of my real high school in the book. That honestly devastated me.

I called Gaby crying,

“I can’t use Catholic Central in the book! I have to change it!”

“Ok, so what? Do it.”

“DON’T U UNDERSTAND THIS SPOILS MY GAMES WITH THE READER?!”

. . . then there were the likenesses : I tried to circumvent this by telling the lawyer everyone who might’ve had a slight resemblance to a real life person was DEAD. But the b*****d started looking up obituaries!

. . . eventually, after several grinding conferences in which I’d always get speechlessly upset and then chipper up, realizing lawyer-attrition was like surrealist chance, and it might make the novel better by happenstance, the lawyer finally said to me,

“So everything now is like stock, right? Not specific enough for anyone to notice?”

I shook my head yes, agreeing we had transformed my novel into generic pablum : — which obviously we didn’t, but the fact is what the publishing house wants is a novel completely denuded of risk. They can tolerate non-fiction, and auto-fiction, but what they absolutely cannot tolerate is taking inventive liberties with reality.

DON’T F**K WITH PEOPLE’S REALITY!

When indeed : that’s ALL I wanna do : and reality-uncertainty is the signature quality of our time. . .

BUT NEEDS MUCH LABORING

THE FIRST DRAFT in January 2022 was heavy under the influence of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) which I was rereading at the time; but the writing f*****g sucked so bad I had to keep wiping my own barf off the keyboard while I was working.

I hear a lot of people don’t read while they’re writing : I literally can’t understand that at all. Herman Melville had a cute little early-work-meshing boat story, then he went on a maniacal Shakespeare & Milton deep-dive: emerged 18 months later with Moby-Dick.

Writing a novel : U R a witch hunched over Ur cauldron : — everything U toss in will affect the spell and the taste. Why not throw in some newt eyes and Joyce?

U don’t want other writing to cloud Ur own voice? MAKE UR VOICE STRONGER! If U are writing in a tradition and ignoring the books in the tradition : DISASTER! : U R now competing against books U don’t even know Ur competing against!

That’s what makes literature a uniquely difficult competition : — U R competing with ALL THE WORK IN HISTORY. . .

By the end of 2023, I had a draft of Steubenville I was happy with; I rewrote the book twice, in two deranged 20 day binges, at the beginning of 2024, and on March 14 (my birthday), I sent it to my agent Clive Clamhands. I expected to sell the book by June.

He emailed me back on June 27 with a 5k word letter telling me he loved the first 148 pages, but thought the next 200 pages were awful & ridiculous. . .

This is the worst part of writing a novel : realizing what U wrote SUCKS.

Simply writing 90k words is absurdly intoxicating, but U must remember: U don’t get points for trying. If it doesn’t work, U must see it clearly and MAKE IT WORK. I had a lot of trouble in my first novel : always trying to justify s**t that was not working.

To some extent, writing a novel is making a table : the table must STAND, unwobbly, and be beautiful. Nobody wants a gorgeous fallingover table.

I rewrote the entire novel again in July, and I sent it back to Clive. . .

He hit me back at the beginning of September with a few notes; by October, we had a version of the book ready to send to my first editor, Jade Hui at Atria.

I thought for sure I was gonna sell the book. But, my first book was a total flop, and publishing houses aren’t eager to waste more money on U.

Jade passed; I think she was right to pass : the ending of the book at this point was so totally wrong U could’ve called the book WACKSVILLE.

In December 2024, I prepared to send an exclusive submission to Lindsay Sagnette: — who was Jade’s boss and oversaw the purchase of Tropicália but was now at a different publisher; she seemed eager, and I thought it was a lock. She also passed.

It’s very frustrating to have a finished book U think is amazing and to be unmoored publisher-wise. . .

At the beginning of February 2025, Clamhands sent it out to a bunch of publishers; — . . . Tropicália was rejected by like 29 publishers, so I was accustomed to the dread of being on submission, but I thought my chances were much better this time.

It turns out : they weren’t. Once more, it was rejection-city. But I got lucky, Clive sent it to Jackson Howard at FSG/MCD. Jackson had already rejected Tropicália; he wasn’t a fan of me. BUT! He said somebody in the office was : Ben Brooks.

Ben and I became friends because he wrote the best review of Tropicália I’d ever seen on his Instagram; it turned out he was Jackson’s assistant; he was trying to convince Jackson to buy it, but Jackson insisted irefully : NO!

I actually was gonna tell Clive to put Ben on the submission list, but we got a drink and he was rolling his eyes complaining all anybody was sending him were novels about Appalachia, so I stayed up several nights in a row wondering if Steubenville was a novel about Appalachia and realized, — probably. . .

I also thought at the time : U don’t want Ur friends to publish Ur books.

But I know now : that’s EXACTLY what U f*****g want! There’s nothing better than someone who likes U and knows and values Ur work publishing Ur book!

MOST LIKELY : the only way U will ever get anything in publishing, either an agent or an editor is thru people U already know. U can dream all U want about writing the perfect slush-pile novel, but it probably ain’t gonna happen.

We sold Steubenville to FSG/MCD on March 4, 2025 for 40k.

It was the ONLY offer we got on the book. But it turned out to be absolutely the best situation. . .

Unfortunately, I realized : Steubenville SUCKED !

There are some people who write extremely lapidary first drafts, but that ain’t me; I am a consummate rewriter. But the most annoying thing : — twice I’ve been out on submission with simply not-up-to-par novels; 30 publishers looking at my uncooked crap. . .

I rewrote the whole thing again, — helpfully, my East Coast Elite publisher refused to allow a title referencing a bumfuck town in Ohio, so I had to find a new one : I cut thru some stinkers : Stupidity, A Knack for Ruin; Clive’s outrageous suggestion: Winners & Losers;

but one morning, I was at the gym, and I was struck down like Paul on the road to Damascus : HUMPTY DUMPTY!

Now I had a new metaphorical structure for the rewrite; I rewrote the whole novel in June 2025. I got my copyedits back in December 2025. I was so scared to read it back, thinking I would discover it sucked and was unpublishable; but I read it and liked it and I know it’s the BEST I can do write now:

This is my WORMY APPLE I must present to the public.

HUMPTY DUMPTY SAT ON A WALL. . .

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