Up Through the Cracks, Like Grass Under Concrete

Here is the original opening for the first draft of my first novel, Everything Fails, which is to say, the very literal beginning of all this mess:

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This is not the far-flung future I was promised. This is the same shit, different day future that is actually the present still moving along. This is the world of busy people, working very hard to be busier so that in the end, when they’re burned out and dead, they’ve nothing left to do that they didn’t do. It’s also the world of lost people who do nothing and have no aspiration to do anything other than aspire to things that they won’t do. And in the end, when they’re cold and stiff they’ve got a big pile of things they want to do still. In the end, it’s a world that doesn’t matter.

In the end, everything fails.

I cut it from the final draft, the one that’s in print. I don’t know if I should have done that.

Maybe I’ll put it back in an anniversary edition? Maybe not. But it’s here now, a part of the whole once more.