Q: Why not release both parts at once?

A: There's a copywriter term known as the curiosity gap. Essentially, it's the discrepancy between what someone knows and what they demand to know. The goal is to keep someone engaged without boring or discouraging them.

If you know your sex terms, its like edging.

So I'm literary edging.

That's what I tried to do with WHAT HAPPENED TO LORI. How we read and absorb information has fundamentally changed in the last twenty years, with the rise of the Internet and social media. I wanted to write a book that used traditional narrative structure, with conflict, rising action, and resolution, and full character arcs, and good vs evil, and engaging storytelling, and do it in a thoroughly modern way.

But I also wanted it to function as literary clickbait. Episodic TV has become the norm, with story arcs that aren't resolved until the season finale. We surf the net, going from site to site, our dwindling attention spans eager for new tibits of information.

Why not try this style with books?


Q: You said it's a gearshift novel. What's that?

A: BOOK 1 is a Did He Do It? love-triangle thriller with some unconventional elements, like the punctuation and the structure.

BOOK 2 is absolutely insane, and goes someplace wildly unpredictable. The story shifts gears, hence the term gearshift. A few movies that do this are Something Wild, From Dusk Till Dawn, Full Metal Jacket, and Psycho. These films begin with the viewer thinking they are headed in a certain direction, and then they turn on a dime and become something... different.


Q: What do you mean it has unconventional punctuation?

A: You'll understand it when you read it. I hope it catches on. It makes writing a whole lot easier, and much less intrusive for the reader.


Q: Are you doing that clickbait curiosity gap thing right now by not telling us what you mean?

A: A little. I'll give you a different example. Speaker attribution is intrusive. Saying "she said" after a line of dialog is supposedly invisible to the reader, but it's also a waste of the reader's time, and a waste of words on the page. Why should we have to read words to understand who is speaking?

I don't use speaker attribution in WHAT HAPPENED TO LORI, but that's not what I'm referring to here. There are ways around speaker attribution that don't involve new punctuation.

In LORI, I did something else. Something I've never seen before.


Q: And you think readers are going to like this?

A: Some will. Some won't. In fact, I expect that some people will absolutely hate this book. Hate it more than any book they've ever read. Because of the punctuation. Because of the structure. Because of the cliffhanger. Because I keep posing more and more questions and trickling out answers like crumbs to the starving.


Q: Sounds like more clickbait talk.

A: In a way, it is. I've written and sold decent thrillers since 2003. I wanted to try something more provocative. More modern. More catchy.

You can help by spreading the word. Tell your family, friends, co-workers, strangers, wandering animals, and anything with a pulse about WHAT HAPPENED TO LORI.