Our relationship.

I’ve always wondered who the first person was to say that there is “more than one way to skin a cat.” How did that topic get brought up in conversation? What unfortunate cat is getting skinned? By multiple people, it sounds like? It’s a morbid saying, but one repeated so often that the words sort of disappear and the translation reappears as it should in the frontal lobe.

“There is more than one way to do something.”

When I started working on Vigilant, I wanted it to be a comic book. I grew up with a Batman: The Animated Series poster over my bed. I bought, read, and then unfortunately lost the first printing of Ultimate Spider-Man #1. I went to a high school where I was lucky enough to be able to select Watchmen as one of my summer reading books. Comics have long been a part of my life and literary journey, if you want to call it that.

So when I decided to start writing, I researched how to write a comic script, got initial character sketches and sample pages from illustrators, and was well on the way to investing a lot of money and time into something that would put exactly the image I wanted in the reader’s brain.

But the more I wrote and thought about Vigilant, the more I realized that the themes of truth and ambiguity that are pervasive in vigilantism would be absent from my attempt to capture the concept in a literary form.

And since art reflects life… there was more than one way to skin a cat.

Comics are a one directional medium. The author and illustrator tell you exactly you need to see in your mind. This allows them to have incredible, beautiful moments, epic fight scenes, and special effects only available in billion dollar movie budgets.

Novels require a dialogue between the author and the reader. In Vigilant, I described only what I believe you need to see to be able to move the story along. It’s not my job to selfishly tell you how to imagine Taylor Gardner or Sam DeWitt in your mind. It’s not my job to add dialogue or character actions where they aren’t necessary to the story.

It’s my job to give you the framework required. You’re the one who has to flesh it out.

In my senior year at Rhodes, my senior thesis class focused on comparing the works of two writers separated by a generation, race, background, and heritage: William Faulkner and Toni Morrison.

During her Nobel prize acceptance speech, Morrison gracefully weaved her way in and out of a story that summarized her view of the purpose of living, language, and literature. In crude summation, she said that she believed literature is joint effort between the author and the reader.

The final moments of her acceptance speech were, “‘I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done – together.’”

I’m no Toni Morrison, but this is something I truly believe. The moment you start reading the first word on the page, you and I will begin an intimate relationship. We create something together. Something unique that only you can see and experience. I hope I’ve provided a framework you’ll enjoy building on.

Vigilant comes out on June 7th, 2022. I can’t wait for our relationship to start.