I want to tell you something I’ve never quite figured out how to say, until now.
For years, my writing has lived everywhere except in one tidy place. Notebooks. Folders. Sticky notes stuck to sticky notes. Calendars covered in chicken-scratch that only I can read (and honestly, some days, only a third of it). Pens and highlighters that have been lost, tossed, and, for the special ones, saved in a box I think of as my book box.
I used to think that box was just clutter, a mess I’d get around to organizing “one day.” But it isn’t clutter. It’s a record. Every scrap marks a moment, an idea grabbed me hard enough that I had to catch it before it got away.
Out of that mess came two stories: The Domino Effect and its companion, The Domino Affect. Then came Boomerang. Then Loophole, the quiet one I kept hidden for a while, typed up but never quite ready to be seen. Now I’m twelve pages into something new, raw, unedited, untitled, and for the first time, I think I understand the shape all of it has been trying to take.
For years I assumed the mess meant I was doing something wrong, that a “real” writer would have an outline, a plan that moved neatly from A to B. Mine never has. Mine moves more like a conversation that circles back to the same question from a different angle. I finally stopped fighting that, and started asking what it would look like to write with the shape instead of against it.
The shape is an infinity symbol
Round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows.
That used to frustrate me. I’d sit down to write a beginning and it would turn into a confusing mess, because I was trying to find a starting line for a story that doesn’t really have one. It loops. It circles back. Past and present keep trading places.
So here’s what I’ve decided: you don’t start at the beginning. You start in the middle.
Boomerang is that middle point. It’s the least confusing, most open doorway into everything else I’ve written, an open beginning and an open ending, built so that whatever “yesterday” you happen to start at, you can still find your way into my “today.” Read it first, and The Domino Effect and The Domino Affect become the “before.” Read it first, and Loophole becomes the “after,” the secret hiding in plain sight the whole time. Either direction works. That’s the point.
Most advice says to publish in order, give readers a clear map from book one to book two to book three. I don’t have that map, and I’ve stopped apologizing for it. What I have is a loop, and a middle point anyone can step into.
Why I’m telling you this
I want to use notes like this one, written in real time, as I’m living through the ideas, to help guide readers through the whole story, past and present. Think of them as hooks: short, honest markers that point backward toward something like Loophole (still mostly hidden, still mostly raw) and forward toward whatever comes next. Not full explanations. Not spoilers. Just enough of a nudge to say, if this caught your interest, here’s where to look next.
I don’t want to overload anyone. Not my readers, not my team. There’s a version of this where I hand over everything at once, every notebook, every sticky note, every half-formed idea from the book box, and it would bury the thing I’m trying to share. So instead, a little at a time. Enough to follow, if you want to, and easy to set down if you don’t.
Where this goes from here
I don’t fully know yet, and I’ve made peace with that. What I do know is the feeling I had when the ending of this new, untitled story clicked into place, and how that same feeling immediately cracked open a whole new beginning. That’s the loop again, doing exactly what it does. I used to find that unsettling. Now I find it reassuring.
So this is me, starting somewhere in the middle of my own process, and inviting you to do the same. No outline required. No need to have read everything first. Just a willingness to step into the loop wherever it happens to catch you.
If you’ve read this far: welcome to the middle. I’m glad you’re here.
, M.E. Austin