Just a little under two years ago, I lost a book that had, to my mind, the greatest title ever: The Same to All Detectives. I’d worked on Detectives for seven years, about half of that time being spent on research. It was a historical novel, and I can’t tell you how many hours I spent on the fifth floor of the Denver Public Library looking over microfiche of and working through original documents. For awhile I was even in touch with the great grandson of one of the historical characters in the book.

I was completely inside it. Breathing it. To give you one example, the book was set in 1894, so I found a map of Denver set in 1894, and after paying to have it made digital, I recreated every single street my characters walked on using images from the Denver Public Library’s Digital Collection so that I knew exactly what was on that street, down to the street signs, and wrote them into the book.

See that picture at the top of the page? That’s of a bar on Denver’s Larimer Street named Murphy’s Exchange that the locals nicknamed The Slaughterhouse because of all the blood spilled. Got that from the long out-of-print The Wildest of the West by Forbes Parkhill, I believe — though it could be from a couple of dozen other books, or even newspaper articles. Hell, I spent three years reading nothing but novels from the 1890s to try to get the vernacular right.

See, the way I figured, Pike was an alright practice novel, but not a real book. It was me learning if I could pull off a novel, and an exercise in tone. And Cry Father? Well, the bulk of Cry Father was written several years before it was published as a framing device for Detectives. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of that book, but I had trouble believing that was a real book either. And of course, Satan Is Real is a real book, but it ain’t my book.

So Detectives was gonna be my first real book. The first one where I took everything I’d learned and sat down and gave everything I had into the best book I could write. I was reading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 while working on it, and came on this quote about a bookish pharmacist:

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

That struck a chord with me. Those are the books I love. The messy, terrifying ones. I knew I was no kind of master, but I figured that didn’t mean I couldn’t do real combat, right? That’s what I set out to do with Detectives.

Of course, I fucked it up. Miserably. I was taking on bigger work than I was capable of. I didn’t have nearly the skills needed. I remember the day I sent it off to my agent. I posted on social media: “Good luck with that, motherfucker.” And to nobody’s surprise at all, he came back with a really nice letter that told me everything I already knew. That the characters were all over the place, the story was nonsense, and it just didn’t hang together. So I ditched it.

I’m not trying to prove what an artist I am by bragging about throwing away manuscripts. Trust me. I’d rather take my fingers off with boltcutters. It was really lousy. That was the summer of 2014, and I ain’t gonna lie, I got shitty. Real shitty. And since Cry Father was released shortly thereafter, I started to resent it for being an impostor. I was living that line from Willie Nelson: “Ninety-nine percent of the world’s lovers are not with their first choice. That’s what makes the jukebox play.” Like I said, I’m proud of Cry Father, but I couldn’t get my mind off Detectives, the one that was supposed to be my real book.

I tried to hide it, but I fucking hated talking about it. Luckily, no one seemed to notice, except for one French bookseller who chastised me because I never really talked about the book, just told bullshit stories. Which was true. I couldn’t really discuss it, nor could I talk about why. I felt too ridiculous. Suck it up, man, there’s people out there with real problems, is what I told myself. But it ate me up for more than a year.

So anyways, I just thought I’d say that to you: Don’t spend seven years of your life on something you fuck up, because it sucks. You’ll regret it.

But here’s the thing: I have a new book. And all the stuff I learned while fucking up Detectives is paying off huge. This book is miles ahead of anything I was capable of before.

It’s one that I dreamed up during conversations with Christa Faust. I’d been tinkering with it off and on while working on Detectives, and after a several months of sulking time, I started working on it for real. At first, only because I’m like a work dog: If I don’t have anything to do I’ll just tear up the furniture and shit all over my floor. But the book started growing in my imagination. And now I’m back writing hard, loving every minute, and even have a some of my old fuck-you back in my step.

What I learned is that right now the only thing that matters is that I get better. Sure, I got ahead of myself and took on more than I was ready for. But sometimes that’s important, right? I’m still a beginner, two novels in, and it’s a steep learning curve. Fucking up a project by over-reaching is a hundred times more useful to me than successfully writing the same book over and over again.

Which doesn’t mean I’m still real happy about it. But it does mean that all work is important. And that’s almost like being happy.