It's Friday.

I really loved your video about writing yesterday, and for some reason it brought me back to my first ever book signing on March 5th 2005 at Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville, Illinois, just a couple of days after looking for Alaska was first published.

Coincidentally, a video sharing website called YouTube had watched a couple weeks earlier, but I had not yet heard of it, right, so I done promotion the best way I knew how I'd sent out an email to the few subscribers of my mailing list.

I told everyone I knew that I was gonna be doing this event, and I remember as we were driving to Naperville, Sarah and I discussed what would be a successful event, and we decided 12 people.

If 12 people came to this thing and bought books, it would be a success.

In the end, three people showed up, one of whom was my boss, it Booklist magazine, who very generously pretended to be a stranger.

The bookstore had set up like 40 chairs and a podium, so I ended up reading to this tiny crowd, and I chose a passage from looking for Alaska that included the sentence.

The only thing worse than having a party No one attends is having a party attended only by two, vastly deeply on interesting people.

So basically, I managed to insult the few people who did attend the event.

Afterwards, we were driving back to Chicago and Sarah turned to me and said, I'm not gonna lie.

That was bad.

And for the 1st 3 years of my writing career, it was almost always bad.

Like I stopped reading that passage of looking for Alaska, obviously.

But I continued to have signings attended by between zero and five people, even after looking for Alaska won the Prince Award.

It wasn't until 2008 that the crowd started to get Double Digit E, and by then I had learned that books don't exist to make authors famous or successful.

Books exist for the people who read them, and my only real job after finishing writing a book was to be grateful to anyone who read one of my stories generously enough to find it meaningful.

So I've been thinking about this for two reasons.

First, because the TV show adaptation of Looking for Alaska just came out, and it is really wonderful.

In fact, at least according to Rottentomatoes, it is the freshest adaptation of my work and watching.

It sent me back into several versions of the past simultaneously, including the past in which I was writing the first draft of looking for Alaska while recovering from what I guess now would be considered a mental health crisis.

I was living alone in a small, furnished apartment in Chicago and writing every night, trying to figure out how you can live with guilt that can't be excused and how catastrophic it can be when you romanticize or essential eyes the people you claim to love.

And to me, those were not like rhetorical questions, but kind of matters of life and death, because I needed to find a way to what theologians call radical hope, the idea that hope is available to all people at all times, including even the dead.

I'm still quite dependent on radical hope, actually.

But then the other reason I've been thinking about this past tank is because you have just finished a sequel to your brilliant first novel and absolutely remarkable thing.

I can't remember the last time I was this excited to read a book?

It might have been.

Definitely.

How was?

Because, Hank, you write the kind of stories I love to read stories that are about human individuals, but also about the big ideas those individuals must live with and wrestle with to make it through this veil of tears.

And while you were, of course, very lucky to have a built in audience for your writing from the start, that also meant that you didn't have years of practicing talking about your writing before people started with sitting.

You've handled that pressure amazingly, and you haven't let it stop you from writing another book, which I can report from Experience is a hell of an accomplishment.

So congratulations.

I'm accustomed to looking up to you as a philanthropist and as a youtuber and as my boss at complexly.

But it is a real joy now to be able to look up to you as a novelist as well.

Hank, I'll see you on Monday.

By the way here in Indianapolis, the weather is just frightful.

Thank goodness I have this wonderful pizza, Miss Sweatshirt and this pizza Miss scarf to keep me warm in those Cold Autumn days.

All of this is available only during pizza Mus.