On the 8/17 issue of (the currently-hiatused) TWIRecap, I discussed Paul Tremblay’s Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, a book I thoroughly did not enjoy reading because Tremblay’s style of prose, I have learned, is aggressively Not My Thing.

That blurb started “Have you ever read a book so frustrating it made you want to write a book of your own?” and ended “Post-NaNoWriMo novel-writing November here I come.”

And now here we are.

So You Won’t Have To (working title) comes from a similarly bleak view of Big Tech as Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep but really they have nothing in common, and I’m not actually writing it just cuz that book made me so mad. I’m doing it because I haven’t finished a narrative-driven project in close to a decade.

And the last thing I wrote was a script about a content moderator… but I wasn’t able to really see it through because the realities of film (even short film) production are just too overwhelming. (This book and that script have nothing in common either; tbh that actually has a fair bit in common with DbDoES.)

But a novel doesn’t rely on teams of technical talent to realize a vision. It just is. And being reminded of that is really 2026’s one bright spot for me. I’ve been reading at least a page of a book a day for the past few years, but this year that’s gone on overdrive as my utter disillusionment with the world has pushed me from essays to novels.

A lot of reading! Maybe not a lot for, like, people who read a lot but certainly a lot for a lot of people! November will be the first month since March where I haven’t finished at least 5 books because I won’t finish any books except for hopefully the one I do finish, ya know?

Not that it will really be finished, but over the next 30 days I’m geared up to (attempt to) write 50,000 words. It’s by far the most I’ll have ever written in a single month. When I did that January of daily reviews, I’d bet I didn’t get much past 30,000… so yeah, gotta 1.7x that, which is precisely the point: I need to average 1700 words a day, which is more than twice the length of this (and almost exactly the length of the Content Moderation TWIRecap).

Of course, such a thing is literally doable because people do it every year, but not all of them are gainfully employed and anyways I’m an old man with aches and pains and tbh my greatest fear is that increased strain on my wrists and elbow will me effectively unable to type for a few days at some point…

And even if I make it through unscathed not, 50,000 words barely counts as a novel and that those are usually 70K words or more. (Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep is probably closer to 90K.)

But it’s still important to try. To commit to the exercise, I have tried to avoid writing actual words I thought would end up in the book (just a brief tone-setting introduction and a few random sentences I think sound good here and there), but I have pages of research notes and feel as ready as I’m going to.

I know for a fact that what I’m writing is unique within the literary landscape (even if Jane Shoenbrun did literally release a book about a content moderator four days ago (which I look forward to reading in 2027)), so I feel good that I can do something worth reading, but now I have to actually do that and do justice to the subject and the material.

And I’m not expecting to come out the other side of this month (and then months or years of edits) published by a real publisher with like a hardcover book that I can proudly display on my shelf.

(If The Week I Review had been super popular, I could have definitely skipped all the work. C’est la vie.)

But if I like it and would want to re-read it myself and think other people might actually get something out of it, then I will probably self-publish it.

And if it absolutely sucks? Well then you’ll have this and a post-mortem and that’ll be the end of it.

In any case, The Week I Review will obviously be on reviewing hiatus during this time: I’ll still be doing some things other than writing so I don’t lose my mind, but unless I see something some truly staggering work that I simply must inject my thoughts into the discourse about, then you won’t be hearing me talk about any of the usual TWIR stuff.

See y’all on the other side.