In the last ten years, the world has become obsessed with resurrecting old monsters, flooding our bookshelves and televisions with new-age vampire, zombie, and werewolf lore. Unfortunately, this frenzy has led to the production of a worrisome amount of sex-saturated and painfully campy fiction and now, the mere mention of a zombie romance will have erudite readers turning away. However, in the case of Isaac Marion’s debut novel, this would be a mistake. For instead of drowning in modern clichés, Warm Bodies defies the monster genre, creating a novel with a startling degree of emotional and intellectual ingenuity.

Through the eloquent narration of our main character, a zombie known only as “R,” we are transported into the post-outbreak world. Like all zombies, R has lost the memories of his former life, yet he mourns that loss. He hunts, kills, and decays like the undead around him, but beneath his rotting flesh, a vestige of humanity remains. When he consumes the brain of a young boy, this internal disparity is pushed to the surface, the sudden flash of memories inspiring R to protect his victim’s girlfriend, Julie. After smuggling her back to the heart of the zombie civilization, he and Julie form an unlikely alliance, one made exceedingly hilarious by R’s communication deficiencies and Julie’s caustic wit. But despite their innate differences, the two grow closer, and R must learn to distinguish his budding affections from the residual emotions of her dead lover, still clamoring for attention long after his brain has been digested.

As the lines between the living and dead begin to blur, Warm Bodies transports the reader from the strange society of zombies—one where old social programming is carried out meaninglessly—into the gated fortresses where the uninfected live. Narrating R’s delve into this world, voices of his past victims rise up like a Greek chorus to retell the origins of the zombie outbreak and how the remaining humans are becoming as lifeless as the creatures from which they hide. Determined to live for something greater than survival, R, Julie, and their motley crew of companions battle to regain what they have lost, setting both the zombies and humans on a collision path that will reshape the apocalypse.

Amidst the bombardment of inane zombie revivals, Marion’s novel dares to resurrect old lore, and through it, ask the hard questions about what truly makes us human. Finding the answer in the most unusual of places—love between enemies, the lyrics of the Beatles and Frank Sinatra, and the courage to break away from social conventions—Warm Bodies is a deeply touching, frightening, and humorous tale of the end of the world and the beginning of discovering why it’s worth saving.

Marion on Warm Bodies:

Most writers draw on their own life experiences, and Isaac Marion is no exception. When I asked him if he identified with his protagonist, R, Marion stated that—although he was no zombie—he felt like a combination of R and his alter ego, Perry—the young boy who’s memories live on inside him—and that the zombie’s slow transformation mirrored a similar change in his life. Alluding to that post-teen phase where people tend to lose their passion, Marion began writing Warm Bodies when he was trying to revive his own enthusiasm for life. In this way, the themes transform from nihilistic and apathetic influences in the beginning to the exact opposite by the end: “what it means to be alive and what it means of be human.”

While the characters in Marion’s novel answer these challenging questions in a variety of ways, one of the most interesting involves both R and Julie’s obsession with music. Curious about how this theme so thoroughly proliferates through Warm Bodies, I asked Marion why he chose this art form—in contrast to literature, paintings, or film. He explained that music has always been incredibly influential in his life and that for many years he played in a band and made various solo efforts. Furthermore, because “young people are notorious for their love of music,” Marion felt that this fixation was authentic for his characters. When question about his specific choice in iconic musicians—like the Beatles and Frank Sinatra—Marion said that “it just seemed to make sense that in a world without culture that they would latch onto this older generation of music. A nostalgic afterthought when the world was still fun and had culture. It’s their only way to connect with the old world.”

Balancing these monumental themes with the gruesome end to humanity was difficult for Marion, especially given how light and humorous the text remains. “It was tricky,” he explained, “I didn’t know how it was going to play out. I went from scene to scene, working my way through it, editing as I went along, adding some different elements to balance the tone.” Even when the content shifts between absurd, deeply intellectual, and absolutely hilarious, Marion finds the transitions satisfying, stating that they produce “a relief from this deep emotional place, creating a new level of humor when it comes out of something really intense.”

The experience of reading Warm Bodies follows the same pattern. The reader goes in unprepared for the philosophical and emotional depth, and when we suddenly shift from common conceptions of the zombie story to this new realm, we are completely unguarded and shocked by the content. When I pointed this out in my own reading experience, Marion said how universal that reception was, stating that countless people have told him they thought “it was going to suck” and then were surprised when it didn’t. Instead of being angry, Marion says that he understands: “If someone described this book to me, I probably wouldn’t read it. Unfortunately, the marketing of things like this has to go one way or another, so it’s been my responsibility and [the responsibility of] people who like the book to explain how good it is. I’m always on this crusade to convince them to read a couple pages because it’s not what they think.”

Marion did not originally intend on creating Warm Bodies when the idea of his protagonist, R, first came into his mind. Instead, he wrote the short story, “I am a Zombie Filled with Love,” which he published on his blog. While very different from his novel today, this Marion on Writing and Publishing: story received a flood of positive feedback, and Marion decided to expand it into a novel. However, before he even submitted the manuscript to publishing houses, his freelance editor began showing it to people in the film industry and Marion was asked if he’d be interested in selling the movie rights. It was only after Warm Bodies entered the film industry that a literary agent expressed interest in the novel and pushed it to major commercial publication. While this is certainly one of the most unconventional publishing processes we have heard of here at TBL, Marion simply smiled and shrugged at my disbelief. I had not yet realized that Marion had an unconventional writing career long before Warm Bodies hit the shelves.

Although Marion wrote his first novel when he was still a teenager and created another in his early twenties, his primary focus became short fiction. Marion explained that he began by creating HTML interactive stories before he transitioned into more traditional short stories. However, instead of pushing these for commercial publication, he immediately published them on his blog, enjoying the instant gratification of his small internet following. “Without that,” he confessed, “it would be pretty discouraging to write anything because I’d know that I can maybe try to get some dedicated friends to read it. Even if, best case scenario, a publisher snatches it up, it wouldn’t be seen by anyone for a year or so and by then I might be done and tired of it.”

Although Marion’s publishing history is somewhat irregular, his creative process is one shared by most writers. Marion states that he likes to go early to coffee shops and start writing before he has “distractions or interactions with the real world” and he can just dive in when he’s “still semiconscious.” Ideally, he likes to turn off his phone, completely immerse himself in his fictional worlds, and write until two or three in the afternoon before he re-enters society and “tries to have some friends.” But since the overwhelming success of Warm Bodies, Marion confesses that this has become more difficult, stating that he’s “surprisingly busy for someone who doesn’t have a day job or any other particular anchors.” In addition, he finds it difficult to explain to those eager to spend time with him—friends, family, and love interests alike—that, even though he doesn’t have a conventional day job, he has to be strict with his writing schedule. “I feel kind of pretentious when I call it work,” he explained, “because they all know that I’m just going to a coffee shop to stare at a computer for six hours and they’re thinking, ‘Yeah. Work.’ But it demands a certain amount of understanding and respect and needs consistency to be effective.”

Aside from learning to tell your friends “no” when they want to hang out during your “work hours,” Marion also used his own experience to advise our writers here at TBL. Commenting again on how he started publishing his work early on his blog, he pointed out how important and helpful it was to have an instant readership and strong deadlines. While he advises that writers also follow the conventional routes to publishing—cold calling and submitting—“by getting your work out there, there’s always a chance that someone that can help you will stumble upon it.”

Excerpt from Warm Bodies:

I am dead, but it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with it. I’m sorry I can’t properly introduce myself, but I don’t have a name anymore. Hardly any of us do. We lose them like car keys, forget them like anniversaries. Mine might have started with an “R,” but that’s all I have now. It’s funny because back when I was alive, I was always forgetting other people’s names. My friend “M” says the irony of being a zombie is that everything if funny, but you can’t smile, because your lips have rotted off.

None of us are particularly attractive, but death has been kinder to me than some. I’m still in the early stages of decay. Just the gray skin, the unpleasant smell, the dark circles under my eyes. I could almost pass for a Living man in need of a vacation. Before I became a zombie I must have been a businessman, a banker or broker or some young temp learning the ropes, because I’m wearing fairly nice clothes. Black slacks, gray shirt, red tie. M makes fun of me sometimes. He points at my tie and tries to laugh, a choked, gurgling rumble deep in his gut. His clothes are holey jeans and a plain white T-shirt. The shirt is looking pretty macabre by now. He should have picked a darker color.

We like to joke and speculate about our clothes, since these final fashion choice are the only indication of who we were before we became no one. Some are less obvious than mine: shorts and a sweater, skirt and blouse. So we make random guesses.

You were a waitress. You were a student. Ring any bells?

It never does.

No one I know has any specific memories. Just a vague, vestigial knowledge of a world long gone. Faint impressions of past lives that linger like phantom limbs. We recognize civilization—buildings, cars, a general overview—but we have no personal role in it. No history. We are just here. We do what we do, time passes, and no one asks questions. But like I said, it’s not so bad. We may appear mindless, but we aren’t. The rusty cogs of cogency still spin, just geared down and down till the outer motion is barely visible. We grunt and groan, we shrug and nod, and sometimes a few words slip out. It’s not that different from before.

But it does make me sad that we’ve forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else’s, because I’d like to love them, but I don’t know who they are.

Please note that this interview was originally published on our old website in 2015, before our parent nonprofit—then called Tethered by Letters (TBL)—had rebranded as Brink Literacy Project. In the interests of accuracy we have retained the original wording of the interview.

Among the many images Claire Bidwell Smith’s memoir offers, one of the most striking compares grief to a film negative, the depth of the grief standing as evidence of the love that has been lost. The Rules of Inheritance resonates with both of these themes, telling us the true story of a young woman losing both her parents to cancer and her desperate battle to get to know them—and herself—before they are torn from this world.

With a narrative that defies linear storytelling, The Rules of Inheritance introduces us to all versions of Claire: the college freshman, frightened to start anew; the broken girl, sharpened by dark tattoos and reckless adventure; the young woman, wearing the ill-fitting mask of a caretaker; and the modern-day mother, an accumulation of all the years that have been. Through each chapter we jump forward and backwards in time, slowly piecing together the mysteries of her life. However, this is not only a story of grief. When Claire is struck by the reality of mortality, she embarks on a life fueled by both the intense sadness of her loss and the wild freedom of being untethered from a normal existence. It is the latter that fills her story with excitement, creating a plot so thrilling it is worthy of the world of fiction. She travels across the world, hurling herself into dangerous adventures and love affairs: constantly jumping between new jobs, cities, and identities. And although her grief follows her everywhere she runs, it also leaves her uninhibited, allowing her to approach people spontaneously, sprinkling the narrative with intense moments of connection between strangers, bonded by secrets and truths rarely spoken, if only for a single night.

It is with great fervor that Tethered by Letters recommends The Rules of Inheritance. Studding the narrative with striking metaphors and poetic descriptions, Smith creates a soft, understated prose that seems wholly unaware of just how brilliant it is. Both beautifully crafted and thrilling to read, this debut work is a rare, unpretentious memoir that is a gift to all those lucky enough to experience it. Like the film negative that describes her grief, The Rules of Inheritance delves into the darkest parts of the human condition, and, instead of pulling us into the light, bravely exposes the beauty within our pain.

Smith on The Rules of Inheritance

Although The Rules of Inheritance has a very natural flow, the memoir was certainly not an easy work to embark upon. Smith first began it a decade ago: “I wrote the first version when I was 25 and my dad had died and it was horrible and I wasn’t at all ready. I had an agent that found my blog and I think she had this vision of marketing me as this 25-year-old literary prodigy.” Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately considering the amazing book now gracing our bookstores—the first version of the book was rejected by every publisher they tried. After this “devastating” outcome, Smith took a break, returning three years later with what she claimed was another “shitty version,” even “worse than the first.” However, these many drafts were not in vain. On the contrary, Smith feels that those first attempts helped her to “exercise all the crap” out of her writing, leaving her with a “distilled” version of the story. “When I decided to write this one,” she explained, “it was a tour de force, I wrote it in a matter of months.”

This distilling process also brought the beautiful language to the text, allowing her to employ “the power of a few words strung together” that she had fallen in love with in works like Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit night in Suck City. “In this book, more so than in any other,” she continued, “I felt I had the liberty to be more poetic. When I finally sat down to write it, I was really ready to write it and it just sort of poured out of me.” Although the many years of writing certainly helped her to understand her memoir, Smith said that the pivot was shifting to the present tense: “The other versions of this book were both in the past tense and they were horrible: very distant, dry, and disengaged. All the things I hate about memoirs.” But after reading Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open, Smith was inspired by the writing style so much that she restarted work on The Rules of Inheritance only weeks after finishing it. “The style allowed so much more. It put me back at eighteen, rather than being thirty-three looking at eighteen. It allowed me to access those moments and feelings in a way that I could not before.”

Another interesting change that occurred during her many rewrites was her incorporation of her romantic entanglements. Originally, she hadn’t realized that “all the boys and sex and relationships” were such an important part of her story. But when she realized that losing her parents profoundly influenced these aspects, she knew that—“no matter how scary it was”—she had to include them. “And when I did, everything else just started to come together. I think connecting with people, losing people, realizing what it takes to connect to those people, is really important to the story.” Although she originally feared that these more “trivial” aspects could overtake her main story, Smith’s constant desire to create a meaningful work, one that would be helpful to others grieving, kept her on course. “I had a mission with this book,” she explained, “it wasn’t just to write about me and my story: but this book, this version, was really born out of the time I spent in a hospice and working as a grief counselor…I really wanted to give something back and to create something that was helpful to these people…Every time I found myself writing about something that I felt was self-indulgent, I would think back to my goal: Is this helping someone in some way? And if it was, I just carried on. I read so many memoirs when my mother died. I felt so alone and confused, and so reading other people’s experiences made me feel so much less alone, and I just wanted to give that back to others. I felt that made me stay true to what I was writing.”

Smith on Publishing

Armed with a version she was finally happy with, Smith went on the hunt for an agent. After about a dozen rejections, she found someone who fell in love with the memoir, someone who insisted that Smith shouldn’t change any of it. After only three weeks, Penguin purchased The Rules of Inheritance based on a strong book proposal and three sample chapters. The editing process too was very fast paced, since Smith’s editor only asked for very minor revisions—a fact that “freaked [her] out” so badly she called her agent, thinking something was wrong. Smith laughed aloud as she regaled me with the story of her agent’s incredulity. “I guess it was just a testament to how long I had been writing it and distilling it,” she concluded, “and how I really allowed myself to be ready to write it.”

Smith does have one regret about the rapid writing time though. When she sold the memoir to Penguin, she had the first nine chapters completed, but they only gave her six weeks to write the last six chapters. Although she proved she was up to the task, she confessed she wished she had more time with the last third of the book: “Each chapter of the book, I really sat with. I wrote them in the exact order that they are in the book. I outlined the entire book before I wrote it so I knew exactly what was going to happen. In each chapter that I wrote, I would write a version of the draft and stew on it for about a week and then really go through it…it was amazing how it changed. Each chapter was like its own little world. I would have liked to do that with the last six. I feel like the language doesn’t sing as much as with the first nine.”

Smith on Writing

When I asked Smith what her process is like, her reply was one we hear from the majority of our Tethered Tidings’ authors: she tries to write every day, usually in the morning. However, Smith went on to explain that now that she has a child—barely a year old—her process has changed, since her spare time is considerably rarer. “I think becoming a mother helped me as a writer. Before that I was so apathetic and I would stew about when I was going to write. And then after I had her, every moment that I had to myself was so precious that I didn’t procrastinate and I just wrote and wrote and wrote.” By sneaking in writing hours at coffee shops early in the morning, during lunch, and during nap time, Smith got into a smooth rhythm, producing an average of one thousand words a day.

In addition to treating writing time with the respect and dedication her daughter helped her to discover, Smith recommends new writers to follow the simple rule of writing as much as possible. Even when she wasn’t working on her memoir, Smith consistently wrote a blog for eight years. “It’s so trite to have a blog,” she admitted, “it’s so stupid and self-indulgent, but it kept me writing, it kept me accountable and it keeps people reading.” Thinking back to her first drafts of The Rules of Inheritance, she added that she thought that “the trick is to be appreciative of your shitty work. People get so frustrated with bad writing days. You have to have those bad writing days to get to the good stuff. You’re not going to write a bunch of good stuff out of the gate, you have to write this bad stuff to get it out.”

Excerpt from The Rules of Inheritance

I couldn’t shake the sinking feeling that this was not the girl I was supposed to be.

No, the girl I was supposed to be would still be at college in Vermont. I would have some sweet and apologetic hippie boyfriend who I would spend the summer with before starting my sophomore year. We would drink coffee all the time and take walks in the woods. He’d have those stupid poetry magnets on his fridge and would write me little messages that would make me blush with both gratitude and embarrassment.

But, gripping the steering wheel as I made my way into the East Village that night, I knew that girl was lost forever.

She disappeared the night my mother died, and I was never going to see her again.

Three years have passed. Three years without a mother. Now I am irrevocably this girl: the one who has tattoos and drinks too much, the girl who rushes from her noontime writing classes in Greenwich Village to her bartending job in Union Square, the one who is sometimes afraid of her alcoholic boyfriend.

In three years my grief has grown to enormous proportions. Where in the very beginning I often felt nothing at all, grief is now a giant, sad whale that I drag along with me wherever I go.

It topples buildings and overturns cars.

It leaves long, furrowed trenches in the wake.

My grief fills rooms. It takes up space and it sucks out the air. It leaves no room for anyone else.

Grief and I are left alone a lot. We smoke cigarettes and we cry. We stare out the window at the Chrysler Building twinkling in the distance, and we trudge through the cavernous rooms of the apartment like miners aimlessly searching for a way out.

Grief holds my hand as I walk down the sidewalk, and grief doesn’t mind when I cry because it’s raining and I cannot find a taxi. Grief wraps itself around me in the morning when I wake from a dream of my mother, and grief holds me back when I lean too far over the edge of the roof at night, a drink in my hand.

Grief acts like a jealous friend, reminding me that no one else will ever love me as much as it does.

Grief whispers in my ear that no one understands me.

Grief is possessive and doesn’t let me go anywhere without it.

I drag my grief out to restaurants and bars, where we sit together sullenly in the corner, watching everyone carry on around us. I take grief shopping with me, and we troll up and down the aisles of the supermarket, both of us too empty to buy much. Grief takes showers with me, our tears mingling with the soapy water, and grief sleeps next to me, its warm embrace like a sedative keeping me under for long, unnecessary hours.

Grief is a force and I am swept up in it.

Please note that this interview was originally published on our old website in 2015, before our parent nonprofit—then called Tethered by Letters (TBL)—had rebranded as Brink Literacy Project. In the interests of accuracy, we have retained the original wording of the interview.

On the surface, Fellow Mortals, the debut novel by Dennis Mahoney, is a quiet work. Men and women go to work, return home, share dinner, do household chores. Neighbors peer through windows, watching the same rituals reflected in the surrounding houses. However, beneath this humdrum exterior, a tumultuous interplay of kindness and darkness battles for control, bringing us a shockingly honest and beautiful portrayal of American life.

From the vacant, blackened lots to the tear-soaked faces, Fellow Mortals opens with a neighborhood haunted by tragedy. Many are angry, angry that their mailman, a once-reassuring facet of their lives, is escaping scot-free for causing the fire. They cry out for retribution, for the loss of their homes, their community, the young wife who died in the flames. No one, however, yearns for justice more than the villain himself:

Henry Cooper is determined to make amends for his carelessly discarded match, even if he has to force good deeds on his neighbors. Although some are glad to exchange his kindness for forgiveness, others, like the recently widowed Sam Bailey, are not. Wanting nothing to do with the man who killed his wife, Sam secrets himself away into the woods, carving tortured sculptures into the trees. Henry is unwilling to accept this. Walking the dangerous line between atonement and self-destruction, he thrust a strange friendship on Sam, the two sharing a mutual desire to see Henry punished for his actions.

As the narrative alternates between multiple characters’ perspectives, we witness the impact these actions have on the community. From the quiet old women living in Henry’s home, to the ever more incensed husband across the street, Mahoney expertly submerges us in each perspective, creating a 360° view of the mounting tension. As each character is tested, the curtains between each home begin to pull back, revealing both hidden kindness and exceptional darkness.

It is without hesitation that Tethered by Letters recommends Dennis Mahoney’s debut novel. Like all great fiction, Fellow Mortals spotlights how, even in the most humdrum situations, a great battle for good and evil ranges on. Narrated with a beautiful, character-driven style and exceptional diversity of voice, this novel explores the bonds that hold a community together, exposing both how resilient and fragile they can become.

Mahoney on Fellow Mortals

Having such a unique premise, I was eager to ask Mahoney what inspired him to write Fellow Mortals. “I started with Henry,” he explained, “He was based on people I’ve known in life: that kind of old school optimist who didn’t really think through the right thing to do to the point where it paralyzed them; they just went for it, sometimes making mistakes along the way, but good hearted people.” This sort of character has appealed to Mahoney before. In fact, he wrote a character much like Henry in a previously unpublished novel. “I always really liked that character and thought he’d be a terrific protagonist because he was such a go-getter.” Reflecting on his early writing years, Mahoney pointed out that he didn’t always see the value of characters who could “drive a story.” Like many young writers, he used to construct characters that were impacted by the world instead of the other way around. “But when the character is actually the motivator in the story,” he stated, “it’s much more engaging.”

Once Mahoney had his main character cemented, the next obstacle was finding a disaster to challenge Henry’s good-natured optimism. Mahoney knew he wanted it to be something “very primal, visual, and elemental.” After he finally decided on the fire—an idea that hit him suddenly outside his local drug store—the story started to fall into place: “I could just see the little neighborhood after that, and then I just needed to start populating the community.”

Creating the characters who lived on Arcadia Street was a difficult task. Mahoney first began with eight houses, but quickly realized that was too many characters to balance. This is especially relevant given the narrative style. Instead of having a third-person distanced narrative, Mahoney allows his narrator to inhabit each character’s mental zone, allowing us to see Arcadia Street through several different perspectives. Although I anticipated him bemoaning the difficulty of writing the more convoluted characters, Mahoney instead stated that the most difficult characters were those who he indefinite with most:

“The one character that would not come to life for me in the beginning was Sam, who is closest to me. He’s a thirty-year-old white guy, somewhat artistic, somewhat sensitive, so I just could not get into that character. I have a much easier time writing characters that are not like me. For example, it’s easiest for me to write women. That forces me to imagine it harder, to really figure out what makes them tick…”

Aside from Sam, the other challenge for Mahoney was writing Billy’s perspective, particularly the darker sections. “It’s uncomfortable,” he explained, “to really feel the way he feels, to understand him.” To overcome this obstacle, Mahoney broke Billy’s feelings and actions down to base emotions, something he could relate to—jealousy, anger, fear, pride—and then built upon that feeling. “I know anger, I know doubt, I know ridiculous optimism, from there I can relate to the character’s situation, thinking what I would do if I’d made different choices…”

The alternating perspectives also gave Mahoney the opportunity to make the narrative an essentially tool for character development: “The moment I begin to look at a scene through a particular character’s eyes, every single thing you’re writing about is now telling the reader about the character: What does Ava look at, what does she choose to see and why?” This “immersive writing” also contributed to Mahoney’s ability to pull off a softer literary style. By allowing each description to “say something” about the characters, the domestic scenes in the novel brim with meaning.

Although this softer pacing is a major facet of Fellow Mortals, Mahoney was very timorous in its use: “There was this quiet literary affect I was beginning to drift into, and was frankly getting a little impatient with in novels I was reading.” Trying to steer away from these “boring” moments, Mahoney studied popular novels, exploring what inspired the reader to keep turning the pages, even in extremely long works or novels that aren’t written particularly well. “It’s that suspense,” he concluded, “that little itch you’re planting in a reader’s head that keeps things moving forward. That momentum allows you to get away with quite a bit. It makes that quieter writing possible.” As a result, he constructed the softer sections of the novel around some sort of tension: “I wanted the story to have actual events, for there to be conflict at every moment… almost every scene is an argument in someway.” As a result, we have beautiful moments in Fellow Mortals where the characters might just be folding laundry, but the scene is taunt with conflict: each action indicative of deep seeded issues between the two and their place in the world.

Mahoney on Writing and Publishing

Mahoney has been at the game of writing for almost twenty years. However, it was only in the last decade that he started to finalizing manuscripts and market his work. “It was only when I hit thirty,” he explained, “and realized that I hadn’t really done anything with my twenties, that I got really serious about my career.” To do this, Mahoney started a daily writing routine, setting word-count goals, and becoming very disciplined about his work. “That’s when I started finishing things, and when I started to improve.”

The first novel that he sent out to literary agents was not picked up, but it received some positive feedback. “They read the query, requested pages, and then passed, but they were on the fence enough to call me and talk about why.” This process gave him enough confidence to start another work. Again, when he completed this novel, he shopped it for representation, and this time he signed an agent. “Unfortunately,” he confessed, “we just couldn’t get the manuscript to work. My agent and I knew that it needed work, that it needed something, and we thought we could fix it, but we just couldn’t figure it out. There was just something fundamentally broken about that book, so I had to put it down.”

“That was a make or break point for me,” he explained, reflecting on how difficult yet another failed attempted at publication had become. Fortunately for us, he realized that he simply couldn’t leave writing behind, that it had become an essential part of “staying sane.” He knew, however, that he’d have to make a change if he was going to keep pursing professional writing. “The biggest thing for me,” he explained, “was getting to a point where I really loved it again.”

Thus, with a new outlook, he started writing again. After only 6 months, he had finished the first draft of Fellow Mortals, and after twelve months, he was already submitting queries for representation. This time, his hard work paid off and after the arduously long process of querying, he landed a wonderful agent and received a publishing deal for his debut novel!

Given his long and often trying career, I was eager to ask what advice Mahoney had for new writers. “You gotta love it,” he reiterated, “and when I say love it, I mean, you gotta love the boring, not-quite-working draft that you do everyday.” In addition to enjoying the craft, Mahoney advocated the importance of not waiting for the muse: “You’ve really gotta sit down and get some sort of routine, however small it is. If you only have an hour in your day, then do that hour, if you only have a lunch break, do that…You’ll always meet people who say they have a book in them, that they would love to be a writer, but gosh they’re just so busy with their kids, and their jobs, and all of this… If you really wanna be a writer, you make it work. People find a way if they want to find a way. If you’re making a lot of excuses, than that might be the surest sign that you’re not really suppose to be a writer…If you really want it, you will do it.”

Excerpt from Fellow Mortals

The grand jury had finally been impaneled early this week—thirty-two days after the fire—to decide upon the case of Henry Cooper’s criminal indictment. The fire marshal, an investigator, and the elderly sisters, Nan and Joan Finn, had each given their testimony, but in spite of his eagerness to face the jury, Henry himself had been repeatedly dissuaded from appearing.

“It can’t help,” his lawyer said. “They aren’t looking for remorse. They’re looking for the slightest little evidence of crime.”

“Doesn’t hiding look bad?” Henry asked.

“They look at elements of guilt. The fewer elements the better. I advise you not to go.”

Henry takes a shower now, staring out cold and dialing up to hot, even though he’s barely broken a sweat today, and not the kind of sweat he’d get delivering mail. The soap is cucumber scented and has a few of Ava’s hairs pressed into the soft white layer on the bottom. He lathers up and hums—Ajax…Stronger than dirt!—but immediately quits and bumps his head against the wall. The sound is echoey and hollow—one, two, three—and he stops this, too, so Ava doesn’t hear.

“Are you all right?” she calls, muffled through the door.

“I’m okay!” Henry says.

He steps out, pouring water onto the floor, and pauses with his face in the fogged-out mirror.

Wignut wags and licks Henry’s toes. He’s a plain brown mutt, fifty pounds and five years old, with a hound’s bassoony bark and a long crooked tail—the kind of glad, generic dog kids doodle when they’re four. Henry moves him off but then apologizes, summoning him back to pat his rump. He hangs the towel on the curtain rod, pees, and breaks wind. He wipes the splatter off the rim with a ball of toilet paper, lowers the seat, and forgets to flush, his mind racing ahead to brushing his teeth and talking with Ava, who’s waiting out in the bedroom, folding laundry after a full day of work.

Flashes of the fire happen all the time, triggered by the plainest, most arbitrary things: the backs of Ava’s knees, freshly brewed coffee. Memories of smoke, red and white lights out the corner of his eye. A body on fire and his sweater in the hedge. He remembers things he didn’t even see, like now, when he’s wiping off the mirror and imagines Laura Bailey shaking out his hair before she went to bed…