Ready, Okay!

So, hey, I wrote a book.

This will not come as a surprise to those of you who got the URL of this site off the book jacket.

If that sounds like you—that is, if you finished the book, saw the mention of the web site, and decided to swing by for a looksee—this page isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already know. But if you feel like telling me what you thought of the book, I’d love to hear from you.

The second edition isn’t available in hardcover, so it doesn’t have a book jacket. But everything else still holds. If you’ve already read the new edition of Ready, Okay!, there is nothing in the world I want more than to hear from you. I mean, that’s the whole point of spending years agonizing over every sentence for hundreds of pages, trying to usher a story from the land of daydreams out into the real world where other people can read it—to find out whether that story speaks to anyone. So if it spoke to you in any way… speak back!

But if you haven’t read the new edition of Ready, Okay! and want to learn more, read on…

I’d thought ebooks had taken over the world, so I was surprised by how many people told me they hated reading off screens and wanted to know when they could get a physical copy. If that’s you, the wait is over! You can now buy it in paperback. It’s an extra ten bucks, but the way burrito prices are going these days, that’s still pretty comparable.

If you’d prefer, you can also buy it from me directly using your Paypal account, though that takes a little longer. Email me and we’ll make the arrangements.

If there is somewhere else you would like to see this book made available, then by all means, let me know! For instance, I put it up on Kobo a while back in response to a reader request.

When Ready, Okay! first appeared in bookstores, I told people that it was the best work I had ever done, and at the time, it was. I had gained some attention for writing an interactive story called Photopia, but as far as I was concerned, that was just a little experiment I’d banged out in six weeks. Ready, Okay! was a project I’d spent almost half my life on, populated by characters who owned vast acreages in my mental landscape, who had put down roots even as real people came and went. It stood to reason that the story they came together to create would be deeper, more substantial, and a lot closer to my heart than anything else I’d put out up to that point. And people seemed to like it—I was actually pretty shocked at the percentage of people who read it who said that it was one of their favorite books.

But it was also worse than most everything I’ve worked on since then. Narcolepsy is funnier. Evil Creatures does a better job of establishing a varied ensemble cast. Endless, Nameless communicates its themes better. And the Photopia screenplay and novel‐in‐progress are superior on every axis. So when Kindles and the like became enough of a thing that people started asking me on a regular basis when Ready, Okay! would be available as an ebook, I didn’t want to just put out the original text as an EPUB file—it seemed pretty clear to me that I’d need to do a thorough editing pass if I wanted to bring the book up to my current standard. At this point I don’t remember exactly when I realized that “thorough editing pass” wasn’t going to cut it, but the second edition of Ready, Okay! is in fact a total rewrite. I drew up a new outline and started each chapter from a blank screen. There were a handful of occasions when I looked at the original text and decided that it was fine as it was, but even then, my rule was that I had to type it out all over again—no copying-and-pasting. The process was sort of like when the delegates went to Philadelphia thinking that they were going to do a light revision of the Articles of Confederation and ended up with the Constitution instead.

So now that I’ve talked about how much and why this new edition differs from the hardcover version, how does it differ? The short answer is that the hardcover was written by an amateur and the ebook was written by a professional. I wrote the hardcover almost entirely by intuition—it was a story that the narrative lobe of my brain had generated pretty much of its own accord, and I just wrote down what it came up with. But then I got a gig working as a screenwriter, and when you’re working in a junior capacity on a collaborative project like a movie, you don’t get to shrug that you wrote a scene a certain way because that’s what popped into your head and so that must be how the story goes. You actually have to explain why you think your approach is the most effective way to achieve the narrative goals you were assigned to achieve. And even after I went back to working on my own stuff, I continued to take that approach: i.e., setting narrative goals and figuring out the best way to achieve them, rather than crossing my fingers and hoping that what popped into my head happened to be better than the original. The result is, I think, a dramatically improved novel, particularly in these three areas:

Put it all together and I can once again say that Ready, Okay! is the best work I’ve ever done. (For the time being. Once I have time to do something in my free time other than lesson planning, it’ll be back to the Photopia book!)

Allen (age 6) and Peggy (age 7) go on a counterespionage run

Once we sneaked out together in the middle of the night—or at least 7:30, which in the winter is close enough. Peggy was waiting for me on her front porch with a flashlight and a legal pad. Like me, she was dressed entirely in black.

“Do your parents know what you’re doing?” I asked.

“I told them I was playing with you,” she said.

“Okay, that sounds pretty believable,” I said. “Now here’s the plan. The KGB is from Russia, so if we find any cars with Russian license plates, we’ll know there are KGB agents living around here.” Peggy nodded solemnly. The first suspect was a pickup truck parked across the street. I shined my flashlight on the license plate.

“California,” I said. “Write that down.”

Peggy wrote it down. She also wrote down the plate numbers of a dozen other cars we found on neighboring streets, all of which bore California plates. I was beginning to get discouraged when Peggy grabbed my sleeve. “Look,” she said, pointing. A car in a nearby driveway clearly did not have California license plates. We turned off our flashlights for full invisibility as we crept up the driveway.

“Oregon,” we whispered together.

“That’s between here and Russia,” I whispered.

“Maybe it’s not a KGB agent but, you know, an assistant maybe,” she whispered back.

“A sympathizer,” I murmured.

We scouted out almost the entire development before we finally got caught. To my surprise it wasn’t Mr. or Mrs. K. who found us, but my dad. “There you are,” he said. “What are you two up to?”

I tried to come up with a plausible pretext but decided that what we were doing was too obvious to fool anyone. “Looking for communists,” I admitted.

“This is what I get for moving to Orange County,” Dad chuckled. “It’s time to come in. You can walk your friend back to her house but then you need to get to bed.”

When Peggy and I got back to her front porch we went over the license plate numbers she’d written down. “Keep that list,” I said. “Then next time if we see any of the same cars we won’t have to write them down.”

“Okay,” she said. “I can put them in order, too. On index cards!”

“Good idea,” I said. “All right, see you tomorrow.”

“Wait,” she said. She looked at me for a second without saying anything. Then she kissed me on the cheek.

Now, I actually had been kissed before, by girls on the playground at recess. But this was different. Those girls had been playing a game and were hoping that I would fall down and roll around on the ground screaming “Eww!” and suchlike. Peggy, presumably, was not. We had played together every day for months now, and suddenly it looked like she wanted our friendship to have kissing in it. This seemed to me to be an extremely good idea. So I leaned forward to kiss her. “Don’t,” she said. She slipped inside and closed the door.

Allen and Echo go to orientation at Titan High School

Once I had figured out how to get from biology to Spanish without ending up in the cafeteria or the girls’ bathroom, I met back up with Echo at the base of the cylindrical tower that stood at the center of campus. It was tall enough to be seen from all over the school, and had clock faces pointing in each of the cardinal directions, which would have been very helpful if the clocks ever agreed. Echo was staring up at the top of the tower, where a custodian was fiddling with the control box trying to get the clocks synchronized; it worked, but nevertheless, by the time school started the following Tuesday, the east face was on Hawaii-Aleutian Daylight Time and the south face was running backwards. “Ready to go?” I asked. Echo shrugged. We went home.

At the beginning of orientation we’d each been given a thick manila envelope, which turned out to be stuffed full of informative flyers and handbills in a variety of colors, from a fluorescent chartreuse one containing the cafeteria schedule (hamburger-shaped emulsified corn syrup on Mondays, taco-shaped emulsified corn syrup on Tuesdays, etc.) to a purple one advertising the yearbook (this year’s slogan: “Your In For The Ride Of You’re Life”). Then came the public service announcements. First up: a picture of a cone photocopied out of a geometry textbook, topped with a circle and garnished with stick arms and legs and a crudely drawn face, accompanied by the caption, “Mister Ice Cream Cone says: ‘You can’t be as cool as ice cream if you do drugs!’” Next, a pink sheet with a boldface message: “TRY PCP!”

“I’m getting mixed messages here,” I said to Echo.

I read onward:

TRY PCP!

Titan High School’s Peer Counseling Program (PCP) offers free academic tutoring, conflict mediation, and confidential discussion of personal problems. Peer counseling sessions can be scheduled in lieu of detention time for minor infractions of the student conduct code. If you have been issued a citation for such an infraction and wish to exercise this option, please consult Mrs. Handey in the front office.

“Maybe I should look into this,” I mused.

“Were you planning on getting a lot of detentions?” Echo asked under her breath.

“No one can detain me,” I said. “I meant, I could be a tutor! So could you. Maybe we should both try out for this. It could be a good way to meet people.”

“The last thing I want to meet is people,” Echo muttered.

Allen agrees to visit September’s house

So it was that a week later I found myself in a giant yellow paint mixer on wheels, bound for the farthest corner of the Titan attendance area. Sitting next to me in every direction were guys in skateboarding T-shirts throwing raisins at each other, most of which ended up pelting me in the head. Only after the bus had reached the shopping center where all the oil pumps used to be did enough people get out for September to be able to move within shouting distance. “Sorry,” she said. “I knew the last bus was always pretty crowded but I didn’t know that finding two seats together would be impossible.”

“Ain’t my fault,” the driver grumbled.

“I don’t think she was suggesting it was,” I said. The driver sullenly chewed on his toothpick.

“Can I ask you something that’s not about peer counseling?” September asked.

“I think you just did,” I said.

September looked alarmed for a split second, then smiled. “Oh yeah, I guess so,” she said. “I was just wondering . . . what do you want to do for a living when you grow up?”

“Don’t drive a school bus,” the driver muttered.

September looked at me expectantly. “He took my answer,” I said.

She laughed. “No, really,” she said.

“I don’t really know,” I said. “I have some goals for high school, like getting this certification, and getting into a good college obviously. But beyond that—I mean, I guess we haven’t really talked about this much, but in my experience you don’t always know what your life is going to look like tomorrow, let alone years down the line.”

“Yeah,” September said, though from her tone I could tell she meant “that sounds like the sort of thing that is considered wise” rather than “I know what you mean.”

“How about you?” I asked. “It kind of sounds like you have a big plan.”

“It’s not really a plan,” she said. “It’s more like a dream. I want to be a writer . . . ”

“What would you write?” I asked.

“Oh, all kinds of things,” she said. “For a while now I’ve been doing these stories about the kids in my family—do you like kids?”

“Sure,” I said. “Especially simmered in a light cream sauce.”

“Allen!” September said. “Seriously, though—do you?”

“I dunno,” I said. “It’s kind of a broad question. It’s like, ‘So, how do you feel about humans?’”

“Do you want to have kids?” September asked.

“Right here? On the bus?” I asked. “Isn’t there some kind of law against that?”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“That’s something else I haven’t really thought about,” I said. “I can’t imagine having as many as my parents, though.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” September said. “I definitely want to have a more manageable number than my parents had! Maybe seven.”

“What?” I said. “Seven is more manageable? How many of you are there?”

“Twelve,” she said.

“Twelve?!” I said.

“This is our stop,” she said.

We got out in front of September’s development. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “You’re . . . not the ninth one, are you?”

“No, we’re not in order,” September said. “Anyway, I’m used to having a whole gang around, so it’s kind of hard to imagine not having a whole gang of my own. And really . . . I don’t think any number is too high if you find the right guy to be the dad.”

“Well, in my case I hope I’ve already found him,” I said.

September stared at me, then it clicked. “Oh, ha ha,” she said. “I guess so.” We turned the corner. Sprinting toward us was a preschooler with a shiny blond bowl haircut flapping as he ran—until his legs gave out from under him and he tumbled into a heap. Undaunted, he picked himself up and kept running until September scooped him up. “Hey, Jan,” she said. “What’s up?”

“At school today, we were blowing bubbles, I mean, we had bubble stuff—” He stopped to catch his breath and September put him back down. “Kevin was popping all the bubbles, and the teacher, she said not to, but he was popping them anyway, and we blowed more but he just popped the new ones we just blowed, and then the teacher called everyone in and he turned and felled in the mud!” Jan paused for a moment and then collapsed into helpless laughter.

“Guess you had to be there,” September said.

“But I was there!” Jan protested.

Hank and Benito argue over photos for the school newspaper

Hank Anderson was the Chronicle’s photo editor, though Benito had been trying to replace him the entire time I’d been on the paper. Chalk it up to creative differences. Benito rarely used her veto power on stories, but she vetoed more of Hank’s photos than she approved. For instance, just a couple of weeks earlier we’d been laying out the upcoming issue, and Hank sat down at the computer to scan the photos for the sports page. Benito shuffled over and looked over his shoulder. “Oh no you don’t,” she barked.

“Is there a problem?” Hank asked.

“Is there a problem?” Benito repeated. “Look at this!”

She pointed at one of the photos. “Yeah, I’m particularly pleased with that one,” Hank said.

“Pleased?” Benito said. “This was supposed to be a picture of the football game.”

“And it is,” Hank said. “The assignment didn’t say which element of the game to emphasize . . . ”

“That should be obvious,” Benito said. “Someone catching a pass, making an exciting run . . . not the backup quarterback picking his nose.”

“But this subject has greater symbolic weight,” Hank said. “It’s emblematic not only of the game in question but of American sport culture in general. I call it, ‘Digging In on Third Down.’”

“Look,” Benito said. “You’re not here to make statements about ‘symbolic weight,’ okay? You’re just here to take the pictures. Got it?”

“You’re alienating me from the fruits of my labor,” Hank protested.

“Deal with it,” Benito said.

“Fuckin’ bourgeoisie,” Hank muttered.

Daisy longs for a state of nature

“Jerem’s a creep,” Daisy said. “I don’t like him. You know why?”

It was a few days later and I’d wandered downstairs to snag some ice cream before bed, only to find Daisy Warner in the kitchen eating some leftover macaroni and cheese. By which I mean shoveling it into her mouth with her bare hands. Her fingernails were filthy and flecked with black nail polish. When I opened the freezer she elbowed me out of the way and started digging through it. “The problem with Jerem is he’s not in touch with the earth at all,” she said, grabbing a couple of corn dogs from Bobbo’s stash and throwing them in the microwave. “He’s completely dependent on all his machines. In a state of nature he’d be totally lost.” She set the microwave to two minutes and started it up. “Now Molly I like,” Daisy went on. “She’s all skyclad and pagan. I told her about the Earth Goddess and she was into it. She doesn’t need machines any more than I do.”

“You’re using one now,” I pointed out.

“But I don’t need it,” Daisy countered. “Like, if this was a state of nature, I could just heat up my corn dogs with fire.”