The Roach God

I have never written a novel before.

That probably isn’t the most reassuring sentence to put at the beginning of one.

But it is the honest one.

The Roach God is my first long-form novel, and I wanted to leave that fact here before the story begins.

Not as an apology.

Not as a warning.

Just as a record of where this story came from.

When I started writing it, I didn’t know exactly how far it would go. I didn’t know how many chapters it would take. I didn’t know which characters would stay, which ideas would disappear, or which small details would eventually become important hundreds of chapters later.

I only had a starting point.

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A man.

A cockroach.

And a question.

What happens when someone is given the worst possible starting hand and decides to keep playing anyway?

So I wrote.

Then I watched.

I found things that worked.

I found things that didn’t.

Sometimes I wrote a chapter because I knew exactly what needed to happen.

Sometimes I wrote one because I wanted to find out what would happen.

Sometimes I made a mistake and had to learn from it.

Sometimes a character surprised me.

Sometimes a story thread disappeared for a long time before I understood why I had left it there in the first place.

And sometimes I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I kept going anyway.

That is what this novel is.

An experiment.

Not an experiment on the characters.

An experiment on myself.

How long could I keep a story alive?

How much could I learn by writing it?

Could I build something large without losing the small things that made it worth reading?

Could I make the ending mean more because of what happened hundreds of chapters before it?

I don’t know if I knew the answers when I started.

Maybe I wasn’t supposed to.

A first novel doesn’t need to be perfect.

It needs to exist.

It needs to teach its author something that nothing else could have taught them.

So this is where the experiment begins.

I hope you’ll stay long enough to see what I learn.

And if I get something wrong along the way...

Well.

That’s part of the experiment too.

— The Author