From Blog to Breakdown to Book

The journey to realizing my first book deal

The Book

Over the next decade, humanity will embark on a make-or-break transition from the Industrial Revolution to the Restorative Revolution. The health of our societies and our ecosystems will depend on the resurgence of citizens who are intimately connected to, and actively care for their local environments. In a time of fire, floods, storms, and rising seas, in a time of fear and uncertainty and the desire to flee the places that need us, how do we find the hope and determination to live as if we were staying?

In the wake of our quickly dissolving modern story, As If We Were Staying is an invitation to tell ourselves a new story. For all those who feel lost or stuck, this book seeks to awaken a sense of urgency to leave behind extractive ways of living and a sense of joyful possibility in building a more hopeful future. Part scientific-explainer, part memoir—it traces my journey from biotech capitalism to regenerative farming. This journey and my scientific background mix to create a unique perspective from which I deconstruct and reconstruct the stories that guide us, using my personal narrative as a scaffold to explore core social and ecological themes of the regenerative future. 

One need not start a farm to construct a life based on restorative values; that was just one way to embody the restorative story. Creating our farm did, however, change us in beautiful and unexpected ways that are emblematic of the transition we are all bound to go through. Through this process, our goal became to invite as many people as we could to see the regenerative future as not only possible but irresistible. I hope this book helps others see themselves as crucial members of this era-defining transition.

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The Journey Through Blogs and Breakdowns

I’ve been pretty quiet about this whole process, so I wanted to give a personal update for those who have been on this journey with me for years. New people are welcome too :)

I started writing a book in college. I wouldn’t let you read any of it. Looking at it now, I see an unrefined sludge of fury, full of energy but too early in the distillation process for use or consumption. It contained all the confusion of a boy who hadn’t yet realized he was queer—struggling to make sense of the unspoken, mislabeling objects in the dark. The sort of stuff you should unpack with a therapist or share with friends who can commiserate with you, but nothing quite ready. It was unfinished compost—chunky, septic. It hadn’t broken down enough to spread in the garden.

I left that book behind as grad school consumed my life, but I still wrote. I published my musings on Medium, at first about sexuality and then stoic philosophy, then some creative nonfiction and even a horror story. In my spare time, I contracted as a science writer, elucidating discoveries and events in the field of synthetic biology. But all forms of my writing came to a halt when I graduated and moved to the Bay Area to start a big-boy job at a biotech company. I published nothing for three years. That emptiness pulled on me like a vacuum, and when the 2018 IPCC report came out declaring we had 12 years to stop climate change, I stopped resisting. I wanted to write again. I needed to.

I quit my job on April 1st, 2019 with no job prospects and only the intention to use my scientific background to write and educate about climate. My coworkers thought I was crazy; our startup had just been bought by Gilead and I had just been promoted, but I couldn’t stay. Whatever spark that had guided me to that job had withered in the changing atmosphere.

The following years would reveal that my coworkers were mostly right. It was a foolish risk to take, to throw away a PhD on the belief that I could build it all back up again. As Rachel Cusk would describe in her book Outline, I was “still young enough to believe that this principle of growth was exponential; that life was only expansive, and broke the successive vessels in which you tried to contain it in its need to expand more.”

Over the many times I’ve felt undone by the effort to break through the vessel within which my life had been contained, I finally came to the conclusion that my only misguidance was believing it would be easy. The difficulty was the lesson to share. We aren’t going to solve the climate crisis in our spare time. We will not be successful in making it our side project or afterthought. It has to become the thread with which we weave our lives. To endure the type of struggle it takes to create new worlds, it has to be worth everything.

But that difficulty hadn’t found me yet. It was still 2019, COVID had neither slowed everything down nor shaken the world up, I wasn't yet 30 and everything felt possible. The first step in breaking the vessel in which I had been contained was to read and consume everything. Drawdown, Doughnut Economics, Growing a Revolution, The Uninhabitable Earth, Braiding Sweetgrass, This Changes Everything, on and on, podcasts, videos, essays. I immersed myself in climate science and communication until I was ready to set my first writing intention. I got accepted to an artist-in-residency in Italy where I wrote my first climate essay named after a Robin Wall Kimmerer quote “We Are Dreaming of a Time When the Land Might Give Thanks for the People”. The essay swirled around elements that would coalesce into the kernels of a perspective I nurtured into maturity over the years, hoping to have them bloom in time for my book. 

In late 2019, things were looking up when I took a job with a climate writer I admired. I, perhaps foolishly, thought that this massive transition might be painless, but when the job mixed in the air with the uncertainty and confusion of the COVID Panini, things came undone. To brush it with broad strokes, by the time we moved to the farm in the summer of 2020 I was depressed and disheartened. My self-esteem had been completely undermined by someone I took as a mentor, and the relentless drain of my bank account mirrored how I felt inside. I was unemployed, locked down, and slowly coming to the realization that breaking the successive vessels was not the guarantee I believed it to be.

Nevertheless, some unreachable stubbornness in me pressed on. I became fixated on a story of a 1930s carousel ride called Futurama that had largely been forgotten despite its surreal and central role as the fountainhead of our modern, car-choked world. Getting this story right became a buoy I clung to at sea in a thick fog. It took me six months, but inch by inch my striving culminated in one of my most beloved and thoroughly researched essays: A Grand Theft: Auto Industry Stole Our Streets And Our Future. That essay became a hilarious and viral educational video produced by my friend Rollie Williams of Climate Town: How the Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream, and gave me a taste for how one’s work can live and breathe beyond what begins to feel like the catacombs of a blog.

The positive response to this article was the oxygen my smoldering determination needed. For a while, that essay became unhealthily important to me because it was all I really had. Online, it became a defining characteristic of my personality. I was the anti-car, pro-train guy, and friends would send me every related meme of the genre. I knew I had to create more especially in this alluring moment of hope, not just to avoid being typecast, but to keep my own engine churning. Fortunately, around this time I came across a piece of advice to young artists from Ira Glass. 

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase; they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish one piece. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You just gotta fight your way through.”

No one’s above a little cliché pep talk at the right time. “Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish one piece,” became my mantra. I started writing weekly essays on Patreon, sacrificing some level of quality for consistency, but it worked. I started taking once insurmountable hurdles—the simple confidence to put words to page—in stride. With less time to think, there was less time to doubt.

For forty weeks, I wrote one Patreon essay a week before taking a job at the climate nonprofit One Earth, which forced me to re-prioritize my time. I no longer felt comfortable accepting money for a newsletter I couldn’t keep up with regularly. However, those essays laid the groundwork for many of my Substack articles and ultimately, parts of my book. Patreon Week 23, “When you stare into the Hyperobject, the Hyperobject stares back” evolved into “End the Horror, Let the Crisis Change You.” Patreon Week 2 “Modern Society is Unsophisticated, It's Time for a Renaissance” became “An Ecological Civilization is the Renaissance We’ve Been Waiting For”, and so on. 

Around this time I won a very niche Solarpunk writing contest put on by The Extinction Rebellion. The short story, Where Giants Will Stand, was picked up by a group of climate-conscious actors in Europe and turned into a digital play, and was published in print in the first issue of a climate optimistic magazine, Symphonies of Imagination. I thought this might be my break, despite fiction not being my focus, but it didn’t get beyond a small group of people already interested in climate. I kept courting advice and studying people I admired. I reached out to Elvia Wilk, an incredible author and climate essayist. Having come from a non-literary background, I asked her how to navigate the daunting world of publishing. I wanted to know how someone outside major publishing hubs like New York or LA could ever break through.

Her advice was the same as my dear friend and author Jedidiah Jenkins; write write write. Write until someone notices. 

So I wrote until something completely unexpected happened: someone noticed. My surprise proved to me I never really believed this advice even as I followed it. The email reached me on the beach in Mexico, “Literary Agent Inquiry” the subject read. The ocean emptied, the sound of the waves receded a thousand miles away as my head flushed and reeled as I read the first lines: 

“I am a literary agent in New York City…” [how had she found me on this secluded beach] “I recently discovered your newsletter, As If We Were Staying, on Substack. I was impressed with your unique perspective on environmentalism and your work with Solar Punk Farms... I am reaching out to inquire about possible literary representation.”

I couldn’t believe it worked. And so quickly. 

I had taken a week off work to send myself on a self-administered writers retreat to Todos Santos, a town I had landed on for qualities I sought: relatively close, warm (for November), walkable, and no one I knew around to distract me. Since starting my new job, and juggling the duties of running Solar Punk Farms, writing had been left waiting like a friend at the airport. We were meant to go places, but I always had something delaying the trip. A particular stranded essay weighed on me most. It felt like the culmination of everything I had worked for, the final distillation of my two careers: cancer research and climate. It stalled in gestation, waiting for me to give it the time it needed. I booked a full week in Mexico, and as it turned out I just needed two concentrated days of writing. I published it on my third day, “If capitalism is a cancer, what are we?” (Patreon Week 35, “Imagine you're inside a tumor...”). Less than twenty four hours later I received the email from Beth Vesel, a literary agent in New York City. 

It’s revealing to admit how much that email meant to me. I had taken a big risk leaving my job, bigger than I first understood. As that realization dawned on me, I began to constantly litigate the merits of that risk, forever sliding up and down the volume of my regret. I felt that I was getting too old to receive the grace of “having potential,” where you can be encouraged, not by what you’ve done, but by what you might do. When I turned the corner into my 30s I felt that the bill for that potential was coming due, less time for might, a larger pile of didn’t. I worried that I had already passed the road to a promised world of mights.

You shouldn’t think like this, and that’s work for me and my therapist! But it wasn’t only because I grew up in a system that told me my worth was my productivity, but because I had been treading water for four years, and I needed to rest on something tangible. Besides, I only bring it up to help you imagine why—if you were strolling down a Baja beach in November—you might have seen me silently striping my towel with tears of relief and hope.

Beth’s email had struck me like lightning. I returned home invigorated to write the book that had grown in me like a nursery plant—root-bound in its confines and eager to be transplanted. After a few Zoom calls, she set me loose to write the book proposal, breaking down the process into discrete tasks for me to tackle one at a time. I woke up each morning at 6AM to sneak in what writing I could before work. First, I worked on the only writing sample included in a nonfiction book proposal: the introduction. Then the overview, then chapter outlines. I flew through these tasks, gleefully knocking them down like dominos. We were getting close, I could feel the momentum building into an unstoppable flow. 

Her last email to me was on Valentine’s day. She sent me two sample proposals to look at and assigned me the last pieces of my proposal: the author bio, comparable titles, and marketing plan. A week later, before I had time to send her my completed proposal, her assistant Lauren emailed me. 

“There is no easy way to share this terrible news. Beth sadly passed away of a heart attack this past weekend.

Beth cared for you and wholeheartedly believed in your work; I know she was excited to be a part of sharing your writing with the world.”

I sucked at an ocean of feelings one strawful at a time. My primary, overwhelming sense was of sadness. Sad for Beth and everyone in her life, sad I never got to meet Beth in person, sad the person who just rocketed into importance in my life suddenly disappeared in a flash. Sad the person I wanted to one day thank for believing in me, finding me, noticing me, would not be around to thank. Beth was magic, she appeared in my life in an unbelievable manner, I had been convinced of the fairy tale, and then reality set in with the cinematic continuity of a bomb going off in the middle of a Disney movie. 

Only after did the confusion, disbelief and worry set in. Beth Vesel was a one-woman literary agency. At the precise moment I had finalized my book proposal, I had splashed back into the pool of obscurity agents opaquely pluck from. 

The rest of the process can be described as a scramble, more like what I expected from the book proposal process. I cold-emailed agents whose work I admired and reached out to friends in the literary world. By chance, a friend visiting our farm introduced me to author Judith Schwartz. She had known Beth tangentially, and agreed to set me up with her agent Laura Gross. Laura was busy and couldn’t take me on until the fall, so I began to work with one of the agents I had cold-emailed. Just before signing with her, my husband told me I should reach back out to Laura, since we had clicked so well. By luck, she said my project had just come up in conversation and that, after all, she could make space for me. 

I refined my book proposal with Laura for two months before she signed me in April. Then we refined more and then more, and then finally sent the proposal to publishers. After some introductory calls, HarperOne gave me a verbal yes in late June. It was wild plum season, I got the news while harvesting by the roadside. I simmered in anticipation all summer, and the contract finally materialized in early September. I signed with HarperCollins ten months after Beth’s email. 

The hard part, it seems, is over. Now I just have to write it.

The face of someone who just signed their first book deal

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Thank you, thank you, thank you to the friends, family and readers who supported me through this wild endeavor. We did it. Your encouragement kept me going!