by Mike Wehner
55,
89,
144,
233,
377,
610,
987,
1597
∞
Afterword
What should we do if she gets off?
That was the group text message that started this novel. The she was Shayna Hubers, the woman who murdered our friend, Ryan, in his Kentucky home. She shot him in the dining room while he was trying to end their relationship. Google it if you want, it’s horrific.
The responses varied but as you can imagine nobody had anything nice to say about the girl who murdered our friend. Fortunately, there was never any doubt she’d be convicted. Shayna was never granted bail and has been in custody for years—but it got me thinking. Ryan was as sweet and genuine a man as any I’ve ever known, but what if he wasn’t? What if the circumstances were different, murkier? I wondered if we would still be so eager for vengeance. If reason would conquer our tribal instinct to protect one of our own.
I’d like to make it very clear that this novel in no way corresponds to the real-life tragedy I’ve mentioned above. The only meaningful way that nightmare influenced this story is that I witnessed and felt the horrors that follow such a terrible, violent act.
It was a simple idea for a revenge story and I’d been looking something I thought was manageable—I made earlier attempts at writing but didn’t have the skill to execute the complex narratives I imagined. The problem (I’ve come to learn) is that a book never ends up being about what you intend, nor does the story happen the way you plan.
The human subconscious is fascinating; it has a way of injecting itself into all your creative endeavors and coloring your work without authorization.
This novel is a mere 80,000 words, but I wrote over 300,000 figuring out what the hell I was trying to say. Part of that was learning how to write decent long-form fiction and the other was my idiotic refusal to accept that I wasn’t in control of the tonal and contextual swerves the story was taking. I was supposed to be the captain of this ship. I’ll let you decide what this thing is really about, but it sure as hell isn’t about revenge.
Thank you to Amanda, Stephanie, Naseema, Aaron, Sara, Ken, Matt and all the other beta readers who suffered this thing in progress and helped me navigate the sea I’d longed for but never sailed.
There was a point last year when I was lost. I had a ton of words but no story. Writers have this saying, “kill your darlings.” It means delete whatever words get in the way of your story, no matter how clever or beautiful the prose. I had to kill 240,000 darlings. All the writing blogs in the world weren’t going to solve a problem like that—drastic steps had to be taken.
My solution was pretty unconventional, maybe even crazy. I decided I’d solve it the way Alex would, engineer it. I combined sequences and geometry and art to weave all the numbers in this book together into a physical storyboard-painting-thing. Every number in the book is a narrative marker of sorts and I had a lot of fun plotting them all out. It’s weird, but I’m weird. It was cathartic and reinvigorated me with energy to finish this and get it out into the world.
I am not suggesting this is some new paradigm for storytelling—I’ll never do this again. It was something absurd I invented to help me get through the difficult process of telling the story this novel desperately wanted to tell—because it had no interest in telling the story I wanted to tell.
There’s numerical synchronicity everywhere, some of it intentional but a lot of it accidental. The main character’s stories are told through overlapping Fibonacci spirals but with very different axes (this is the plural of axis but it doesn’t look right does it?). I chose this sequence for a lot of reasons but above all because it’s connected to the growth patterns of almost every living thing on this planet. In some weird way it’s part of the spell that conjured us up out of the primordial ooze. Bringing a novel into the world, even a silly one filled with cat shit and used tampons—is transformative, so in that way it’s fitting too. I know this thing was marketing as a psychological thriller but I see it as a journey out of psychopathy rather than in to it. Something tells me we won’t find a section for those in a bookstore anytime soon. So maybe Alex begins as the singularity, a finite point where the rules don’t apply, deep in a hole and spirals out. Maybe. Or maybe I needed a gimmick to compensate for a lack of storytelling skills, you tell me.
I thought about including the art I made for the narrative or posting it on my website but I think that would ruin the fun. If you take an honest crack at it and post it somewhere for me to see I’ll gladly send you a nice print of the original piece. First person to blow me away and I’ll send them the real thing. I can always make another. =P
Your support means the world to me. If you’ve enjoyed this book, please help me share it with others. Give it a shout on social media, or write a review, or tell someone about it. The world of independent book marketing is an insincere quagmire of spam and deception and pay for play—I need your help. Books are strange commodities because the author doesn’t sell you their book, other people do.
We are all going to die, but we’re not all going to live. Writing this novel fulfilled a lifelong dream. I shut down the business I spent ten years building to pursue storytelling and there’s a good chance I’ll fail. If I end up pounding away at the spreadsheets again, I won’t be bitter. I lived. I tried. And I died. But I’m going to do that anyway.
Much love and happiness to all of you, even if you write a bad review.
Mike Wehner
April 19th, 2018
http://www.mikewehner.com
About the author
Mike Wehner is a novelist, illustrator, podcaster and artist.
He makes stuff. All day. Every day. He is currently working on an illustrated book of satirical poems for adults and his next novel, but alsotake on fine art, comic and illustration commissions. Follow him on social media to see what he's up to.
Mike has an exciting new podcast, "Interesting Sh!t," lauching in May of 2018. It's a one-man, weekly show where he expounds on his non-fiction essays. It's awesome. It's free. It's fun. GO GET IT.
Mike is fair-skinned, foul-mouthed and considers himself an aficionado of sweatpants. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana with one small wife and two large dogs. According to him, "it's better than it sounds."