If someone could write a story that self-referentially teaches the reader how to read it…couldn’t someone also write a story that teaches the reader how it was written?

Let me put that thought in context.

It’s 1992. Or maybe 1991.

I’m not sure. Work with me here, people. It’s been thirty-some years and I don’t have access to my college schedule at the moment.

Anyway, it’s somewhere in my junior year at Yale, and I’m an English major taking Lit120. My favorite professor (the estimable Fred C. Robinson, now, alas, deceased) once snorted with derision, “You can take four years of classes in that Literature major and never actually read any literature.”

He’s not wrong. See, in English, we read literature, but in “that Literature major” they study theory. So, yeah, you could probably spend four years reading and discussing theories about literature and never actually get around to reading any.

Not in Lit120, though. In Lit120, we read Oedipus Rex and Hoffman’s The Sandman (not to be confused with Neil Gaiman’s or Metallica’s) and many of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

It’s Conan Doyle’s work that leads us to this moment we’re sharing right now, you and I, wheels set in motion more than three decades previous.

You see, the Sherlock Holmes mysteries are mysteries, true, but they’re more than that. The stories do not simply teach the reader how to solve a mystery — they also teach the reader how to read a mystery story in the first place. This notion lodges in my young wannabe author’s brain, and the thought at the opening of this post occurs to me.

Is it possible to tell a story in such a way that the reader — upon finishing it — understands what it was like to write that story? And is it possible that I could be the person to do it?

I’m nineteen or twenty years old, but I decide I’m going to do it. I sit down and I write over a hundred pages of a novel titled Inframan over the next couple of years and then I graduate and then I need to get a job and then…

And then…

And then…

And then it’s only thirteen years ago, 2009, and I’ve never forgotten the idea, the premise, though Inframan remains unfinished on my hard drive. I decide on a new spin on the idea, a bigger, wilder book that will take readers deep into not only the story, but also the storyteller.

It took a long time to get here, to now, but here is the book. Or, more accurately, the books. Because Unedited — which, I hope, achieves my goal of putting you squarely in my head during its creation — was so long and so weird that my publisher had the idea to spin off a shorter variant, Edited. Both books are strange in their own, related ways. And each one will take you on a new sort of reading adventure.

If you’ve been with me from the beginning of my career — since The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy & Goth Girl — then you’ll see some old friends and enemies.

If you discovered me through I Hunt Killers, well, trust me — there is darkness aplenty in these books.

And if you’ve enjoyed my forays into the worlds of the Flash and Thanos, you’ll find many comic book tropes and references within.

In short, if you’ve ever enjoyed any of my books, there’s something (a lot of somethings!) in these books for you.

I can’t wait for you to dive in.

(And here are some links for you:)

Preorder UNEDITED:
Amazon | BN.com | Indiebound

Preorder EDITED:
Amazon | Apple Books | BN.com | Indiebound | Kobo