The book was published fourteen months after I finished writing it.
The months between the finishing and the publishing were a different kind of work, the work of other people who understood what books required that I did not, an editor at a small literary press in Seattle who had been given the manuscript by Sara Osei and called me on a Thursday saying she had read it twice overnight and wanted to talk, and then a sequence of refinements and decisions that turned the library drawer manuscript into a thing with a spine and pages and a cover that Diana had strong opinions about from London.
The cover debate lasted three weeks.
Diana won.
She was right.
The title was: The Choosing. Not my first choice, or my second. It arrived in the third editorial session as a suggestion and landed wi
