I wake Saturday morning to find a UPS box by the back door to the side of the bikes. It must have arrived sometime Friday. This is where the landlords leave my mail when it is delivered to them.

I’m not expecting a package but judging by size and weight I have a suspicion about what it might be. Squinting at the label, spotting ISBN numbers, confirms it.

I wrote here in late summer about the bad turn my dealings with Arcade Publishing took. I’ve done a pretty good job of not fixating on the way a thing I had high hopes for going all to shit. There are plenty of other things for me to get obsessed with besides this one particular failure. But a box on a doorstep will snap one’s attention right back to what was far from mind.

When I effectively ceased communications with the editor in New York, I told him the only thing I expected out of his company going forward was the back half of my advance. I suppose somewhere in the back of my skull I knew they’d send the books anyway. Now they’re here. I can’t throw the box in the trash. I have to open it.

I flip through one, then the other. There’s nothing glaringly wrong. They didn’t put the author’s name and book title on every page like they did in the horrible excerpt they’d shared in August. The books look approximately the way I intended them to. I won’t pick over them too carefully because that just begs for disappointment and anger.

It’s a relief that they’re acceptable. I still have no intention of working with this publisher again but I won’t pretend these books don’t exist like I’d planned.

If you’d like a copy of Suicide’s Grave or Marvel Universe, just follow the breadcrumb trail. Both will be officially published November 4th.