How Much Does Size (and Effort) Matter?

Wherein I write a little about how Tacoma is the best thing I’ve written, but also a part of me can't help but devalue it for its brevity and distrust how easy and fun it was to write.

Last week, I watched Bad News Bears (1976) and got caught up on Widow’s Bay (fave and best show on TV rn!); I did a pop-up style submission call for HAD which was open for a little over an hour and got 926 submissions, which I am still in the middle of reading, hoping to finish by tomorrow (??); I read Slaughterhouse-Five; I went on a beautiful, fun 20-mile bike ride this morning; and I saw Witch Club Satan at El Club, maybe my fave small venue in Detroit, and the show totally knocked me out and which I’ll probably write more about next week. All in all, a really great week of seeing and reading and doing stuff that left me feeling just generally inspired and excited about art and the world?

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In a couple of days, I’m hitting the road to do a very quick little midwest reading “tour” with my buddy Dave Housley. If you’re anywhere near Morgantown, WV, Pittsburgh, PA, or Columbus, OH, I’d really love to meet and see you!

• JUNE 10 — MORGANTOWN, WV

  Monkey Wrench Books

  with Renee Nicholson and Jake Maynard

• JUNE 11 — PITTSBURGH, PA

  Stay Gold Books

  in conversation with Jake Maynard

• JUNE 12 — COLUMBUS, OH

  Two Dollar Radio Headquarters

  with Michael Nye

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I wrote this back in January, as Tacoma was getting ready to be published, hoping to maybe get it published somewhere as one of those “essays that get published to promote a new release!” That didn’t happen, then I forgot about it… and now I’m sharing it here. I thought about editing the beginning, to make a little more sense, given the timing, but whatever, I’m just gonna leave it as-is. It’s an artifact of its time!

How Much Does Size Matter?

My next book, Tacoma, is out soon. Hell, by the time you’re reading this, it might already be out. I hope I enjoyed its release (I’ll be doing a reading at my local bookstore the day it comes out), and that it has been finding some readers, and I hope they’ve been enjoying it.

But right now, in this lead up to the book’s release, I’ve been on the receiving end of a good number of well wishes. “Congrats!” friends text, and reply to social media posts, and say in person when it comes up. “That’s so exciting!” they compliment.

And it is exciting! I’m proud of the book. I think it might be the best thing I’ve written yet. It is definitely the goofiest; it has an energy I think is excitingly different from anything I’ve written before; it is almost certainly the most fun. I’m excited about all that. I’m incredibly proud of the book! It feels like I “pulled off” something I couldn’t have written in the 20+ years before this.

And yet.

My response to almost every congratulations is to downplay. “It’s really short,” I demure, like that makes it count less. “It’s a really small press,” I say, even though the press is one of my current favorites, big or small. “I wrote it really fast,” I sometimes add and sometimes don’t, but almost always at least think, like how long it took is indicative of quality.

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I was in a few high school plays, my senior year. “He got an acting scholarship!” I can hear my dad adding, even just typing that, the way he always does whenever it comes up. “It was a tiny scholarship trust from my drama teacher,” I always added. “$500. Barely covered books my first semester,” highlighting a more ongoing and everpresent tendency to downplay than I’d even realized before writing this very memory and scenario.

Probably my strongest, most lasting memory from my brief stint as a theater kid is being “backstage” (the hallway behind the high school auditorium stage) and a parent complimenting one of us. I no longer remember if it involved me or if I was only an observer. If it was one of my parents complimenting one of my classmates, or one of their parents complimenting me, or someone else’s parent complimenting one of my classmates and I was just nearby. If the compliment was for a specific performance or the play as a whole. It doesn’t matter. A parent — maybe-mine/maybe-someone-else’s — complimented one of us students — maybe-me/maybe-not — who responded by pointing out a couple of forgotten and flubbed lines and an early or late entrance or two. “Well, I didn’t notice,” the parent reassured. “I thought it was great!”

Later, our teacher/director gathered us all together, and in addition to praising the performance and reminding us about something or other for the next, relayed the above story and told us not to do that. “Don’t deflect,” she said. “They didn’t notice the mistakes that you’re so worried about, and pointing them out just feels like you’re telling them they are wrong to be praising it. They are trying to compliment you, don’t take that away from them. Just say thank you.”

I’ve thought about that a lot in the thirty years since. I’m not great at always living by the advice — as evidenced by the impetus for this very essay — but I try.

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Tacoma is 20k words long. Which technically makes it a novella. And I often refer to it as such. But other times I call it a novel, and other times still, just: “a book.”

I love novellas! They are an underappreciated form; I often wish more were published and sold and celebrated.

Labels and genre distinctions are mostly made up and don’t really matter, but still. When I call it a novella, it makes it feel a little less than a novel. It makes it feel a lesser achievement than my own novel, Year of the Buffalo. Which is stupid. I know.

I don’t really believe it is lesser, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes feel it. People and feelings are often stupid.

Two books that I thought about often while working on Tacoma are Mike Nagel’s Duplex and Kevin Maloney’s Cult of Loretta. I love the writing and the voice in each, I love pretty much everything about them. And they’re something 14k and 27k words each, respectively. I’ve never once thought any less about either because of how small they are. I don’t rank them any less compared to other favorite books that are longer. If anything, their brevity is a very part of what I so love about them. I’ve read each multiple times, usually in just a sitting, sometimes two. That compact experience is one of my favorite reading experiences! My love for Duplex is a giant part of why I wanted to work with its publisher, Autofocus Books (who I have now published three books with: Tacoma; a short essay collection, A Kind of In-Between; and a pseudo craft book, which I edited, How to Write a Novel: An Anthology of 20 Craft Essays About Writing, None of Which Ever Mention Writing).

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Tacoma is not only short, by word- and page-count, but I also wrote it incredibly fast.

My previous novel, Year of Buffalo, is 85k words, and also took… forever. Depending on what you want to count — the novel manuscript I wrote before it, which I gave up on, but then ending up scavenging pieces from? the two or three years it was shelved and I’d moved on to other projects, before it got resurrected by a press interested in it? any number of other fits and starts, dead ends, circling back, etc. etc.? — I worked on it for anywhere from three to twelve years. It felt like a boxing match, and an ultramarathon, and climbing a mountain, all at once.

By contrast, I wrote Tacoma during the two summer months I was in Tacoma which the book is a fictionalized version of, and finished it within two months of returning home. First word to final draft was three months and one week.

I did a couple rounds of revision but, all told, mostly relatively small stuff. The first draft felt almost weirdly, awkwardly strong and complete. I sent it to Michael Wheaton at Autofocus Books, and seven weeks later he replied that he loved it and wanted to publish it. I received my author copies in mid-January, a mere 20 months from first word to printed book.

Which is all very exciting! Oh, if only writing happened so fast and easy! And, maybe even more, if publishing did!

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On my drive across the country, from my home in Michigan to the Tacoma of that summer, I read my current novel-in-progress, THE LAST LOCK-IN, aloud to one of my childhood best friends who made the drive with me. I was curious what it would feel and sound like to read it aloud, and curious what he might think of it. It also still needed a final chapter or two, and I was hoping reading it aloud would get me back into the narrative after a busy semester had mostly kept me away from it.

The manuscript was, at that point, about 65k words. Saved Word doc files tell me I started it in May 2020, though I think I was drafting incredibly rough versions of chapters longhand a year, maybe two before that.

Reading aloud did indeed get me back into the narrative, and I finished the manuscript before writing any of the short shorts that would become Tacoma.

Back in Michigan, I finished Tacoma, then focused on THE LAST LOCK-IN revisions for the remainder of the year, and got it into a shape I was really proud of. Then I spent 2025 sending out queries (and, really, even more time and energy complaining about, getting frustrated at, and then depressed over sending out queries).

Four years — maybe five or six dating back to those early scribblings — for the draft… another year on revisions… six months, coming up on a year, maturing into who-even-knows-how-long-it-will-be sending it out and wondering if it will ever even get published… By the time it gets published, if it ever gets published, it will have all been no less than eight years, minimum.

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Here I am, a couple of weeks after getting my copies of the book, a couple weeks to go until it is officially out.

I am incredibly excited for it to be out, excited for people to read it. I am incredibly proud of it. As proud as I am of every other book I’ve written, even if sometimes I have to explicitly remind myself of that.

It happened so fast! And was so fun! And kinda, dare I even say, east? And so a part of me can’t help but distrust that speed and ease. I know it isn’t true, but a part of me can’t help but equate size with greatness, effort with quality.

I remind myself that some of my favorite books are short. I remind myself that even if it came out fast and easy, it did so because all the time and energy I spent in all the years leading up to it. I remind myself to be excited. And proud. And grateful.

Thank you.

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Thanks for reading.

—Aaron

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